April 1993

Community Based Police Interview

Walter I. Zeichner ‘
Present for the interview were Tim Aho-
nen,’ Greg Knight, Sonny Provetto, and
Dave Scibek. conducted 3/4/93

Tim: I think it’s good that we’re talking,
we need communication. I always thought
of gay people as the others. That’s the
way I grew up. I grew up in Mas-
sachusetts. When I was in college I had a
professor that I respected a lot. I went all
the way through college and at the very
end I found out this person was gay, and it
really opened my eyes to the fact that it
isr1’t this caricature that I’d seen all my
life either on TV or in movies, on the
news. That made a big difference. Sonny
and I were both there the night of the real-
ly terrible beating at Pearl’s. That was a
big shock. As much as people talk about
prejudice, and there was blood every-
where, nobody stopped for a minute and
said “I wonder if I’m gonna get AIDS
from this.” It was more like, “this is ter-
rible.” I was just stunned. You don’t think
about that [AIDS] in an emergency, and I
think that shows that the prejudice is
learned, it’s not instinctive or anything
else.

OITM: What do you think the problems
have been in the past, both from the point
of view of the department and in terms of
your perceptions of the gay community?

Greg: As I said when we first met we’re
both dealing with a stigma. The gay com-
munity has things assigned to it, titles,
like “you’re queer, you’re a fag” and the
stereotypical stuff that goes with it. Police
officers get the same thing. I get called a
Nazi or a fascist. When I get out of the car
automatically it’s adversarial. Nobody
wants to talk to me because I represent au-
thority. I’m there because there’s a prob-
lem. What I think we need to do is to re-
alrze that that exists for both groups, for
the law enforcement and for the Gay and
Lesbian Community. I think that once

both communities realize that’s there and
they’re aware when they’re feeling it and
you get to know people in both com-
munities, there’s no need to feel that way,
and there’s no need for that stigma to ex-
ist at all.

OITM: What in terms of training for po-
lice do you think is needed?

Tim: Sometimes it’s just experience.
Some of it comes with age, it brings in
different points of view. In my home
town you never saw black people, you
never saw Asian people, you never say
anything other than the WASP issue. We
used to go on field trips to Boston and
we’d see black kids and it was very
frightening. The only context where we
saw black people was on television in a
riot or a crime or something, so of course
we all thought they were going to riot and
get us. It’s ridiculous. Contact itself is go-
ing to break that down. That’s the best
way to do it, if you can listen to what our
concerns and fears are and tell us about
yours.

Dave: A lot of it is the officers attitude as
well. I’d like to think that most of us have
an open attitude and a professional de-
tachment when we investigate crimes.
Vermont is fortunate enough that we have
very specific laws about gay bashing and
hate crimes and things like that. We’re
aware of those. We’ve already been
trained in those, so that for training we’re
looking at some kind of personal develop-
ment, so the officers attitude would be
changed in some way if it needed to be to
accommodate the specific needs of the
gay and lesbian Community. More sen-
sitivity, less of a professionally detached
demeanor, something like that.

OITM: One thing that I think is true is
that we often assume people are going to
be prejudiced against us because that’s so

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much of our experience, so when one of
you shows up we’re going to assume that
you’re going to have certain prejudices
against us. It may or may not be true. In
some cases it probably is and some cases
it isn’t. It seems like the communication is
important.

Dave: I agree. When I step out of my car
or jump off my bike or walk up to some-
one...I wait, I appear as normal as I can in
my little Nazi uniform, and I see how peo-
ple are going to react to me. Sometimes
it’s perfectly normal. People are comfort-
able with the idea of an officer being
present, and other times it’s, as Greg said,
adversarial. People are frightened. I
walked into the Sara Holbrook Center one
evening, because I know the staff there
and I pay frequent visits. I see if the kids
are around and I interact with them. This
woman was teaching an Adult Education
class upstairs. I walked up and she was
visibly frightened. She said “That uniform
scares me.” I just thanked her for an-
swering my question, because there was
no one else there, but she was shaken by
my mere presence, which made me un-
comfortable because I didn’t want her to
feel that way.

Sonny: I think initially our first response
should be some education dealing with
terminology. First impression is every-
thing. We spoke about this at our last
meeting. Educate us on how to com-
municate, how to address the person prop-
erly. People of color for instance, do you
call them black, do you call them people
of color, what do you call people from the
gay and lesbian Community? I don’t
know. I think if we set those parameters
that this is acceptable language to use
with people to break down the barrier,
you send a message that “this person
knows who I am” so we can get com-
munication going. The second thing I

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