by Ashley Stahl
When New York assemblymember Zohran Mamdani apologized this month for calling the NYPD “anti-queer,” it revealed far more about our country’s relationship to policing than it did about him. The fact that an elected official felt compelled to apologize to police for stating an obvious truth: that law enforcement has always been dangerous to queer people, shows how deeply our culture resists acknowledging systemic harm. His original comment was correct then, and it remains correct now: law enforcement in America is and has always been unsafe for queer communities.
This is especially true in isolated regions like Western Colorado, where danger is amplified by isolation, limited oversight, and cultural hostility that empower police to act with impunity.
Policing has never been neutral for queer people. From its earliest formations, law enforcement served as the arm of social control enforcing cisgender and heterosexual norms. Across the twentieth century, police raided bars, entrapped queer men, arrested people for cross-dressing, and published names of those charged in newspapers, destroying lives in the process. In Colorado, the so-called “psychopathic offender” law of the 1950s allowed the state to institutionalize anyone accused of a “sex crime,” a category that included same-sex intimacy. Denver police ran decoy operations to entrap gay men and targeted trans women for existing in public. The Gay Coalition of Denver eventually forced the city to repeal these ordinances in 1973, but the damage was done: queerness itself had been marked as criminal.
That legacy did not vanish with the repeal of laws or the legalization of same-sex marriage. Policing’s fundamental purpose: to enforce social order through control, continues to put queer people at risk. National studies show queer and trans individuals are stopped by police at vastly higher rates than their straight peers and experience disproportionate harassment, searches, and violence in custody. Transgender people, particularly Black and brown trans women, are routinely misgendered, humiliated, and assaulted by officers. When queer people experience violence and turn to law enforcement for help, they are often met with disbelief, ridicule, or further abuse. This is not the failure of a few “bad apples.” It is the predictable outcome of a system built to discipline those who live outside its norms.
For queer people in small towns and mountain communities, these dangers are not abstract, they define our daily life. Rural law enforcement operates with minimal oversight and is deeply embedded within conservative local culture. Officers are neighbors, relatives, or classmates of the very people who harass us. Calling the police in these settings is not just risky: it often exposes us to outing, retaliation, or further victimization. In many rural Colorado counties, sheriffs run their departments like personal fiefdoms. Deputies attend the same churches where sermons condemn queer existence. When we report threats, stalking, or assault, law enforcement will dismiss, mock, or endanger us far more often than they will help.
That dynamic played out starkly at Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, a queer and trans collective once located in Custer County, Colorado. After enduring months of armed harassment and online threats from local extremists, the ranch members quickly learned what queer and trans people in rural America have always known: the police are not there to protect them. The Custer County Sheriff’s Office dismissed their concerns, claiming to find “no evidence” of the threats and even suggesting that deputies felt “unwelcome” at the ranch. That was not a misunderstanding, it was abandonment. The sheriff himself had previously spoken at a rally associated with the far-right militia group, the Oath Keepers, a symbol of the same ideology fueling the harassment. It was clear which side law enforcement stood on, and it wasn’t the one facing death threats.
So the residents did what they had to do. They trained in self-defense, built security protocols, and armed themselves because the local police had already chosen indifference and hostility over protection. Their story is not exceptional. It’s simply one of the few times the violence, and the police complicity behind it, made national headlines.
When Mamdani called the NYPD “anti-queer,” he named a truth that extends far beyond New York City. It applies to every police department in this country, from the largest metropolitan force to the smallest mountain-town office. The structure of policing guarantees that queer people will remain unsafe. The system depends on enforcing conformity, obedience, and hierarchy, things queerness inherently resists. The police will continue to harm queer people because that is what policing does: it maintains social boundaries through intimidation and control.
In rural areas, that control manifests through silence and fear. Queer people learn to handle problems privately, to stay invisible, to minimize risk by avoiding confrontation. Those of us who are out live under constant surveillance, our safety dependent on the goodwill of officers whose personal beliefs may range from indifference to open hostility. When we experience violence, we face a double threat: the original harm and the near certainty that seeking help from law enforcement will deepen it.
So yes, law enforcement is anti-queer. It always has been. The apology Mamdani offered does not erase that reality; it only highlights how dangerous it is to speak the truth about policing in America. Queer people know this truth intimately because we have lived it, generation after generation. The only real safety we have ever known has come from each other: through networks of care, mutual aid, and community accountability.
In the Western Slope and across Colorado’s mountain towns, our safety depends on one another, not the systems that have failed and targeted us. We cannot keep turning to the same systems that have worked to control, criminalize, and erase us. It’s time to build something new, something that is ours. We must strengthen queer- and trans-led response networks, document and expose police abuse, and demand real accountability from the systems that claim to serve us. We need to keep us safe, because no one else ever has.
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