There is a lack of comprehensive, actionable data on LGBTQ-police relations.

The same forces that conspire to foment negative attitudes and perceptions of police and reluctance to engage with law enforcement in other disadvantaged communities appear to be at work within the LGBTQ community. For instance, LGBTQ people are victimized at higher rates than non-LGBTQ people, have higher rates of contact with law enforcement than non-LGBTQ people, and are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of the general population. While there is a growing body of first-person accounts, advocacy reports and proclamations, and political statements that address these phenomena, there has been little systematic social science research into the interaction between LGBTQ people and law enforcement and the attitudes and beliefs that inform those interactions.

NORC is conducting a groundbreaking study of LGBTQ engagement with law enforcement.

Funded by the National Institute of Justice, NORC, in partnership with the University of California, Irvine, designed a mixed-methods study to understand the LGBTQ community’s experience with, perceptions of, and attitudes toward police and law enforcement. In phase one, the research team drew on NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel to field the first ever nationally representative probability-based survey of LGBTQ adults’ engagement with and attitudes toward law enforcement. Phase two consisted of in-depth interviews with a subset of survey respondents to further unpack and understand the survey results and to provide a roadmap for improving relations between the LGBTQ community and police.