Boulder Police Chief Stephen Redfearn never thought he could work in law enforcement and be open about his sexuality. This summer, he proudly wore both identities on his uniform.
“We did ours, this year in June, our first Pride badge,” Redfearn said. “And it was super well-received in the community.”
The silver and gold Pride badge has several insignias including the colors of the rainbow set behind a mountain with 'Boulder Police' written around it. Over half of his staff of about 180 people bought it, he said.
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Redfearn has worked in law enforcement for about 25 years. As a cadet he spent thousands of hours riding with officers and heard every slur imaginable.
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“I thought I would never be able to be myself,” he said. “I was going to be a cop, but I thought I would have my work life and my personal life and, you know, never the two shall meet.”
He was outed early in his career when he ran into several colleagues while on a date at a restaurant. The sky didn’t fall, and it turned out fine. Redfearn became the first openly gay officer with the Aurora PD, paving the way for other LGBTQ+ officers.
“I've got to pinch myself because we have made a lot of progress in a short amount of time,” he said, emphasizing that while Colorado has come a long way, there’s still a lot of work to be done. “Not everybody has the same experience of being able to be who they are. And, until that happens I will continue to keep being hopefully visible and encouraging others to do so.”
In 2021, Redfearn joined the Boulder Police Department as a deputy chief and was promoted to chief this September.
When he began working with the Boulder PD, the department’s LGBTQ liaison had just left. They replaced that person with three more liaison officers - a patrol office, a detective and someone with the special investigations team.
“We're trying to get past the traditional issues that the LGBTQ plus and other communities have had where they don't trust police. They don't feel comfortable if they're a victim, that they're going to be taken seriously,” he said.
This liaison program started several years earlier thanks to a chance encounter between a Boulder PD officer and Mardi Moore, executive director of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Equality.
“The fear for the LGBTQ community calling law enforcement is baked into who we are. And the work is really trying to change that because we all deserve justice and we all deserve safety,” Moore said.
This fear stems back to June 28, 1969 and the Stonewall Uprising in New York City, said Moore. Local police raided a gay club called the Stonewall Inn, which led to days of protests and violent clashes between bar patrons, neighborhood residents and officers. The uprising galvanized the gay rights movement in the U.S and around the world. A year later - on the first anniversary - the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Fast forward to 2016 and the mass shooting at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and more than 50 wounded. Moore was in Boulder at the time.
“I didn't have a relationship with the police department prior to the massacre at Pulse,” she said. “That day when we pulled a gathering together of community leaders and community members, a police officer showed up to close down the streets because there were so many of us.”
That police officer was a gay man named Kevin Marples. He and Moore forged a bond that day. Queer people would historically call Moore if they were a victim of a crime instead of calling the police, Marples said.
“But they didn't want to report (it), they didn't trust law enforcement. And Mardi had no one to sort of hand that off to,” he said.
After the presidential inauguration in 2017, 24 hate incidents or crimes were reported to Rocky Mountain Equality. In the beginning, Moore would connect people to Marples and sit in on conversations. Eventually she reached out to Boulder PD’s deputy chief at the time to set up a more formal partnership. The Safety in Pride Project was born and Marples, who was now a detective, became the department’s first LGBTQ liaison.
Word about the project spread and more law enforcement agencies signed on along the Front Range. The LGBTQ+ liaisons would meet as a group to discuss cases and talk through problems together. In 2022, Safety in Pride received a federal grant which helped it expand.
There are now quarterly meetings, a structured curriculum and online training. Safety in Pride also has a website with resources and information on how to contact an LGBTQ+ liaison. The program has 36 liaisons from 14 law enforcement agencies.
“Together we create this training and then you go back to individual agencies and present this training,” Marples said.
The project gives law enforcement a baseline understanding about gender, pronouns and other useful information so they can better serve LGBTQ+ victims or suspects.
“A big topic we've discussed is, how do you document someone who comes in and says, my name is Susan Smith, she, her pronouns and has a driver's license that says David Smith?” he said.
The legal and report writing systems weren’t set up to handle this discrepancy, according to Marples, but that has changed with a simple fix. An officer will take this victim’s statement and include a sentence that the victim will be referred to as Susan Smith and use she/her pronouns for the remainder of the report.
“That one sentence connects the driver's license that's in the report and the formal documentation with the written report, so that when the victim or someone is reading that they feel heard,” he said.
This change helps everyone who interacts with Susan throughout the judicial process like the detectives, victim advocates and district attorneys.
“When Susan calls in and is talking about her case,” he said. “You can just sort of come from a position of education and knowledge.”
Marples left law enforcement in March of 2022 to start a project management firm and now manages the Safety in Pride project. The goal is to train at least 300 law enforcement personnel. For instance, the project is conducting a training session with Longmont Public Safety that includes police officers, the fire department, dispatch and social workers.
Safety in Pride serves a dual role as agencies hire more LGBTQ+ folks.
“It's not only providing this training to officers and staff on how to interact outside your building, but right internally, how do you have these conversations?,” he said. “Internally, you have a work environment that's welcoming so you can more closely represent the communities you're policing. So I think that's also a super important part of this.”
Boulder PD detective Zihang Xu is one of the liaisons and regularly attends the training sessions run by Rocky Mountain Equality where he connects with other detectives. Xu also goes to monthly meetings at the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office.
“We talk about cases and how we can improve and let this community know that if you are a victim of crime, you need to report it and we do care about you,” Xu said. “We bring those cases to the DA's office and see how we can help with those victims.”
Xu, who is gay, designed the department’s Pride badge with the other two liaisons. He volunteered to be a liaison because growing up in China, he said, he saw how LGBTQ+ people were treated compared to the United States. While Xu thinks the U.S. is more open-minded, he is aware of how, historically, police departments didn’t treat queer community members as they should have been treated.
“I feel the responsibility and I feel if I can help, with the victims, who are LGBTQ community members, I think that's great.”
