Sex, Gender & Sexual Orientation Discrimination in Ithaca Police Department

In late February, 2017 Officer Sarah Crews, an employee of the Ithaca City Police Department (IPD) filed a lawsuit against the City of Ithaca and outgoing Chief of Police John Barber alleging years of discrimination based on her sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. Officer Crews is a gender non-conforming lesbian. Workplace harassment against her at the police department started soon after her hire in 2007, she says, with insulting posters about her in the men’s locker room. Since then, she describes enduring ongoing jabs at work. Everyone who is lesbian, gay or bisexual, or does not obey gender expectations (LGBT+) learns to expect this kind of harassment, and Officer Crews is no exception; mostly she has “toughed it out,” making complaints through internal channels in only some cases.

Despite the City of Ithaca’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment Policy and
City Ordinance that absolutely forbid discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation (also prohibited by local and New York State law), Crews claims that her superiors have ignored complaints, given offenders a mere slap on the wrist, or blamed her for their behavior.

Crews says she would probably have just lived with that if the department hadn’t continually refused to address her concerns about its policies on the search and transport of people detained by the police. These outdated policies state that a physical search of a detainee (from pat-downs to strip searches) must be performed by an officer of the same gender whenever possible along with other similar rules.

The idea behind the policy is that every police officer and every person the police will ever detain is heterosexual and gender-conforming, and that the way to prevent sexual crimes by officers is to make it so that only people of the same “gender” touch or see detainees’ bodies. Preventing sex crimes by law enforcement is very much in the public interest, and protecting employees and the departments they work for against false accusations is in everyone’s best interest. Ithaca’s policy fails to do either. Officer Crews pointed this out many times, especially since regularly making her search females opened her up to accusations of misconduct. Crews says she was, in fact, threatened with such by women in her custody.

IPD could easily have acted to protect Officer Crews’ rights. While police forces in general are still behind modern standards of civil rights for LGBT+ workers, other cities – such as Albany, NY – have implemented protections that allow gender non-conforming detainees to identify a sex/gender preference for which officers may search them. Such standards can easily be adapted to protect employee rights too. Instead, in response to her complaints, Crews alleges that IPD retaliated against her with unfavorable assignments, disciplinary action, and subjecting her to a disproportionate number of compromising situations with female detainees compared to her peers.

Before Officer Crews filed her federal lawsuit, she first lodged an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint that concluded with EEOC providing her with notice of her right to sue. In its legal response to the EEOC complaint, the City of Ithaca focused very strongly on her sexual orientation (that she is lesbian) and dismissed her gender-nonconformity so that it could claim that the complaint was baseless because federal law does not name “sexual orientation” as protected from discrimination in the Civil Rights Act. This is a position unbecoming of the City of Ithaca in particular. Well ahead of other civil rights advancements for LGBT+ people, in 1991 Tompkins County passed local law banning sexual orientation discrimination, which it has since expanded with further protections for gender identity and gender expression, ahead of New York State’s laws and the ordinances of Ithaca itself. The City of Ithaca has long touted itself as a responsible community that embraces diverse identities, belied by its legal team’s cynical attempts to exploit technicality in Crews’ case.

Even looking at the specific technicalities – that the Civil Rights Act does not in fact use the words “sexual orientation” in Title VII – the City’s argument is behind the times. The federal courts have engaged in a long evaluation of the specific meaning of “discrimination based on… sex” as applied to the real world through different cases. They have consistently recognized that “sex” includes “gender” and gender-nonconformity. Just this year, while Officer Crews’ case was ongoing, the United States 2nd Circuit court ruled March 27 that a gender-nonconforming gay man has grounds for a gender stereotyping discrimination claim under Title VII, in which the chief judge and one other issued a concurrence that argued that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. On April 4, the United States 7th Circuit ruled straight out that Title VII encompasses sexual orientation. Again, the Tompkins County Workers’ Center believes that the City of Ithaca should not need to be compelled by the federal courts to provide a discrimination and harassment-free workplace – it should do so as an act of leadership. Hiding behind claims that the US government doesn’t recognize sexual orientation discrimination is becoming an ever-less-likely way for employers to get out of doing the right thing.

The Tompkins County Workers’ Center has been working with Officer Crews since early 2016. As part of this work, TCWC sought guidance from the Tompkins County Office of Human Rights (TCOHR) on the complex intersection of issues related to LGBT+ rights in law enforcement, search and transport. TCOHR conducted extensive research and developed a Policy Toolkit on “Protecting LGBTI Individuals in Custody and in the Workplace for Law Enforcement and Corrections Agencies.” The City of Ithaca Police Department has no policies and procedures in place to address any of the practices addressed in this report.

We call on the City of Ithaca to create and enforce policies that respect LGBT+ rights for its employees in law enforcement and the members of the public they serve. There is no reason to stall beneficial policy reform on a court case. Its’ police policies are overdue for revision, and the City can show leadership now because it is the right thing to do and good for the community.