Ambivalent Investments: Lessons from LGBTIQ Efforts to Reform Policing

Despite their longstanding role in upholding heteronormativity, police forces are becoming increasingly concerned to publicly demonstrate their support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) rights. Far from an inevitable progression, this partial and uneven shift is the product of sustained LGBTIQ activism and advocacy with and against the police – much of it ‘behind the scenes’. This paper draws on a selection of interviews with LGBTIQ activists in Australia who have focused on changing police practice. Collectively, their activism spans from the 1980s to the present day. It explores three issues that continue to impede LGBTIQ efforts to challenge the status quo of policing: the culture within police organisations; a policing agenda of crime control; and inequalities within and amongst LGBTIQ communities.

The article argues that queer investments in policing are more nuanced, qualified and ambivalent than they initially seem. LGBTIQ activists working with police to reduce the harms of police practices appear to feel less that policing is definitively better and more that it could be worse. I thus use the term ‘cynical pragmatism’ to capture an affective orientation that informs LGBTIQ police reform work.