Good cop, gay cop

In 1998, Xavier Yager was walking in Boystown near Newport and Halsted Streets when a car full of men shouted “faggot” out the window. He shouted something back, then heard the car brake and watched in horror as three of the five men inside jumped out holding baseball bats. Luckily, a nearby cop was able to catch and arrest the men before they could hurt Yager. But a week later, when Yager got a copy of his police report, he saw the officer didn’t note that Yager was the apparent target of a gay hate crime. He went to the 23rd District police station in Boystown and asked the officer to correct the report.

“[The officer] copped a lot of attitude with me,” Yager says. “His comment to me was, ‘It says what it needs to say.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but because I’m gay, [I’m protected] under the law because it was a hate-induced crime, and there’s a greater penalty for that.’ ” The officer refused to change the report, but that same week, Yager found someone who took his case seriously: officer Laurie Cooper, who at the time was the liaison to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The men were eventually charged with a felony hate crime but were never convicted because Yager could not positively identify which of the five was driving and which ones held the bats.

The officers at the 23rd District station (which is also called “Town Hall” for the historic building in which it resides at 3600 N Halsted St) are aware that members of the LGBT community often feel disenfranchised, and they’re trying to remedy that. While the jurisdiction is larger than the predominantly gay Halsted area (it includes parts of Uptown, Lakeview and Lincoln Park), 23rd District Police Cmdr. Kathleen Boehmer has made serving the LGBT community a top priority.

Central to that commitment is officer Jose Rios, who’s held the 23rd District’s LGBT-liaison position for the past eight years. “I deal with concerns from the community, whether it be from this district or throughout the city,” Rios says, explaining this is the only district in Chicago with such a liaison, so he’s often asked to assist victims of LGBT hate crimes in other neighborhoods. “I can go as far south as the city goes. If somebody is not comfortable speaking to a regular police officer, they can contact our office and they can deal with me who, as an ‘out’ officer, they feel more comfortable speaking to.”

Rios has been openly gay his entire ten years on the force and is aware that he doesn’t fit the stereotype of a macho Chicago cop. But, he says, “We’re changing that perception [of a macho officer]. The fact that there are so many out officers now—not as many as I would like, I would say—but there are a lot of us that are out on the job, and it makes it easier [to be a gay cop].” After years of outreach, Rios says nowadays he’s often recognized on the street. “I was with my partner and we were at the Dunes, a gay resort in Michigan. Somebody came up and said, ‘Aren’t you the gay police officer from Chicago?’ ”

But responsibility for the LGBT community doesn’t rest solely on Rios’s shoulders. His fellow officers joined him last summer in welcoming a new neighbor to the area: the Center on Halsted (3656 N Halsted St, 773-472-6469), a 65,000-square-foot facility developed for the LGBT community that provides services ranging from therapy and HIV testing to recreational facilities such as basketball courts and cultural programming (LGBT theater company About Face Theatre stages shows there).

The Center’s executive director, Modesto “Tico” Valle, says visitors have doubled since it opened a year ago. “I had a sense that we would be busy, but not to this tune,” he says. “Fifteen hundred and sometimes 2,000 people a day is pretty remarkable. I don’t know what other kinds of institutions are seeing that volume.”