Texas Police Chiefs' Attitudes Toward Gay and Lesbian Police Officers

• DOI: 10.1177/1098611107302655
• Author: Phillip M. Lyons,Randall L. Garner,Michael J. DeValve
• Published date: 01 March 2008
• Date: 01 March 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

102

Authors’ Note: A draft of this article was presented at the biennial conference of the American

Psychology-Law Society, New Orleans,LA, March 2000. Correspondence concerning this article should

be addressed to Michael DeValve, Department of Criminal Justice, Fayetteville State University, 1200

Murchison Road, Fayetteville, NC 28301; e-mail: mdevalve@uncfsu.edu

Police Quarterly

Volume 11 Number 1

March 2008 102-117

© 2008 Sage Publications

10.1177/1098611107302655

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Texas Police Chiefs’Attitudes

Toward Gay and Lesbian

Police Officers

Phillip M. Lyons, Jr.

Sam Houston State University

Michael J. DeValve

Fayetteville State University

Randall L. Garner

Sam Houston State University

Local police agencies throughout the State of Texas have moved increasingly toward

more community-oriented approaches to policing. This philosophy embraces the ideas

that (a) the police should reach out to communities they typically have excluded and (b)

the police should include members of those communities among their ranks. Lesbians

and gay men are an appropriate target of such outreach efforts. Although federal law

enforcement agencies have banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in

hiring law enforcement personnel, state and local agencies have been slow to follow suit.

In the city of Houston, for example, the issue has been hotly contested in all branches of

local government. This article reports the results of a survey of 95% of all police chiefs

in the State of Texas. The survey was designed to assess police chiefs’ attitudes toward

hiring lesbian and gay police officers.

Keywords: police chiefs; homosexuality; diversity; path analysis; contact hypothesis

Evolution of Police Practices

Local police agencies throughout the United States have been moving increasingly

over the course of the past few decades toward a more community-oriented philoso-

phy in what has come to be known as the “community era” of policing (Miller &

Hess, 1998). This community policing philosophy embraces the notion that efforts

should be made to reach out to certain communities that traditionally have been

underserved, ignored, or even mistreated by police (Skogan, 1996).

Another tenet of this approach to policing is that the police should be more rep-

resentative of the communities they serve (Peak & Glensor, 1996). Historically, the

Lyons et al. / Texas Police Chiefs’Attitudes 103

relations between the police and lesbians and gay men have been especially strained

(see, e.g., Younglove, Kerr, & Vitello, 2002). The event most symbolic of this strain

was the rioting by lesbians and gay men at the Stonewall Inn in the summer of 1969

in New York City’s Greenwich Village—rioting prompted by police harassment

(Duberman, 1993). In light of this historical event, it is perhaps unsurprising that the

New York City Police Department took the lead in recruiting gay men and lesbians

to join its ranks (Blair, 1999). At least some similar efforts have occurred in Texas

(“Dallas PD to Open Doors,” 1993) and in other major metropolitan areas (Belkin &

McNichol, 2002).

Although the poor relations between the police and lesbians and gay men have

been especially pronounced in the past, it cannot be gainsaid that such tensions are

more than mere historical relics. In 1987, for example, Tennessee police charged and

the district attorney prosecuted two men for sodomy in order to “make an example”

of them to discourage other lesbians and gay men from living there (Brantner, 1992,

p. 515, note 172). Still more recently, in 1997, a North Carolina sheriff illegally

wiretapped a gay football coach’s telephone in order to blackmail him into resigning

from his job (People for the American Way Foundation, 1998). Nevertheless,

Younglove et al. (2002) report evidence that in at least one midsize central California

community, the police appear able to respond appropriately to domestic violence

complaints involving same-sex partners. Although police harassment and misconduct

relative to homosexually oriented people has abated, it has not disappeared altogether.

Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men

Attitudes toward lesbians and gay men seem to be both complex and in a state of

flux. Illustrative of the complexity of attitudes, Herek (1988) found multiple corre-

lates with heterosexuals’ attitudes in three studies he reported, including church

attendance, religious ideology, family ideology, sex, and contact with gay men and

lesbians, but that only sex had a relatively consistent relationship with attitudes

regarding gay men and lesbians. Thus sex, contact, religious and family ideologies,

the perception of agreement among friends, inter alia, all are important, but none is

isomorphic with variation in attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. Others (e.g.,

Herek, 2002; Negy & Eisenman, 2005) have also found race to be an important, but

inconsistent, correlate with negative attitudes.

The state of change of attitudes is clear from one California poll in which about

34% of likely voters said the government was doing “too little” to protect lesbians

and gay men, about 30% said the government was doing “the right amount,” and

another 30% said the government was doing “too much” (Coile, 1999). Assessing

popular sentiment, though, is difficult. As Strand (1998) observed:

In the politics of homosexuality and sexual orientation, opinions in the mass public

appear to involve much more than just antigay stigma. General political values,especially