The Contours of Police Reform within LGBTQ2+ Communities in Toronto

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 1 — Policing, Misconduct, and Reform

Abstract

Understanding how interactions between police and marginalized communities develop is the subject of debate across multiple disciplines. Competing propositions about how over-policed and under-protected communities (Boehme, Cann & Isom 2022; Krenshaw 2015; Lewish & Usmani 2022) interact with police include arguments of police reform (Bayley 2008; Goldsmith 2005; Simonson 2021), mistrust because of legal cynicism (Campeau, Levi & Fogleson 2021; Carr, Napolitano & Keating 2007; Sampson & Bartusch 1998), abolitionist goals (Davis 2003; Maynard 2017; Phelps, Ward & Frazier 2021), and arguments that some experience degrees of ambivalence among the above perspectives (Bell 2016; Russell 2017). These theoretical frameworks offer competing predictions for how at-risk groups envision criminal justice reform. Drawing on 53 in-depth interviews with both activists and police working in organizations on 2SLGBTQ+ issues, one year of participant observation of LGBT police events, and archival data in Toronto, this paper asks: how do reformist, abolitionist, and ambivalent orientations towards policing operate in the work that 2SLGBTQ+ groups do to serve their communities? First, this paper provides a chronology of how police reform happened in Toronto because of 2SLGBTQ+ responses to bathhouse raids since the late 1970s. These events prompted the development of 2SLGBTQ+ police liaison committees that were once public-facing but became increasingly private. Secondly, this paper provides empirical data on how police have attempted to serve 2SLGBTQ+ groups despite both demands for police accountability and mistrust prompted by their removal from Pride parades in 2017 (Holmes 2021). Lastly, this paper traces how abolitionist sentiment towards policing emerges from 2SLGBTQ+ social movement actors critical of the policing of protests. Together, this research provides new theorizing on how disparate approaches to criminal justice reform happen in three ways within a population with a history of intersectional infighting (Ghaziani 2008) involving policing (Giwa et al. 2021; Jenness & Vogler 2025).

Author

• Andy Holmes, University of Toronto