Wilton Manors residents Jake Valentine and his partner were checking into a Seattle hotel this summer, a brief stop before heading on an Alaskan cruise, when they quickly realized they weren’t welcome there.
Valentine and his partner left the hotel and while in Seattle’s downtown area, spotted a business with a rainbow sign that said, “Safe Place,” he said. They stayed there instead.
The hotel was part of the Safe Place Program, created by the Seattle Police Department in 2015, intended for victims of crime who don’t feel comfortable going to the police directly to instead seek refuge at one of the participating businesses, whose staff and management are trained to help them and can contact police on their behalf.
Valentine said he told Wilton Manors city and police officials this June about his experience in Seattle. Now, Wilton Manors Police have partnered with local businesses to start the same program locally.
“It was very enlightening, again, because I completely forgot about our gay privilege that we have here, so to speak,” Valentine said. “And you don’t really think about it. We’re strangers in that town, and, you know, we looked around and a lot of places had it.”
About two dozen Wilton Manors businesses are now participating in the initiative, which launched Sunday. They range from bars and restaurants to nonprofits to retail stores and art spaces, and many have long been staples with the LGBTQ+ community. Click here for a full list of participating businesses.
Det. Haley Halverson, a police department spokesperson, said the participating businesses are marked with a rainbow-flag decal in their windows or near their door.
Nearly 300 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., Canada and Europe participate in the initiative, according to Seattle Police’s website and training materials on the program. It was designed, in part, to address issues of underreporting or non-reporting of hate and bias crimes and to improve communication between police and minority communities.
The initiative comes at a time where threats against the LGBTQ+ are rising. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s federal threat monitoring has found threats against LGBTQ+ individuals and spaces are surging and are increasingly associated with hate groups and extremists, according to the agency’s website on LGBTQ+ community resources.
There were 356 extremist and non-extremist documented incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ hate nationwide between June 2022 and April 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s year-in-review report on anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism released in June.
The incidents happened in every month in that period, with the largest spike in them during June, which is Pride Month. Drag shows and performers were largely the targets, accounting for over 100 of the total incidents, according to the ADL’s report. Florida was among the states that documented the highest number of incidents with a total of 27.
There has been one anti-LGBTQ+ incident in Wilton Manors 2023 and another six hate between 2017 and 2022, according to the police department’s data, with four of them against the LGBTQ+ community, one against the Jewish community and one against the Black community. The number of reported biased crimes increased by 31% across the country in 2021.
A city traffic sign was vandalized with an anti-LGBTQ+ message in 2022. Gay men were targeted online and extorted for money in 2021, the police department’s 2022 hate crime report said. In 2018, people pulled alongside a victim in a car, shouted anti-gay words and threw an egg at him. In other incidents, anti-Jewish, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black messages were written on public and private property.
Wilton Manors is well-known locally as an LGBTQ+-friendly city. Even still, Valentine said, there are places LGBTQ+ people may not feel safe.
“You never know where a safe space is,” he said.
Halverson said the program is not for hate or bias crimes only.
“Really it’s for any person, any crime … So it’s kind of just a way to bridge the gap between the victim and the police,” she said.
Pride Factory is one of the participating businesses. Vice President Lori Deak said the rainbow decal will be an easily recognizable sign to people who may be in need, and “sometimes coming to someone who is part of your own community” is easier than going to police.
“Our staff is trained to know how to respond,” she said. “We can give them water, talk with them, call the police for them, whatever help they need.”
Commissioner Chris Caputo said the businesses are also equipped to connect people with community resources outside of the police department. The main message of the program is empathy for any potential victims, he said.
“It’s not something we had heard of,” he said. “I’m really excited were bringing to this area. I hope it spreads like wildfire to our nearby municipalities.”
Founder of the nonprofit Julian’s Fountain of Youth Julian Cavazos said he learned of the program through Caputo. Living in Wilton Manors, a bastion of LGBTQ+ life, can be like “(living) in a bubble,” he said.
“We’re very fortunate in Wilton Manors in that we live in a very LGBTQ-friendly area,” Cavazos said. “It’s not like that just three hours north. We’re very fortunate.”
The Pride Center at Equality Park is another participant, and CEO Robert Boo is also a member of the county’s task force for hate crimes. Hate crimes nationwide are significantly under-reported, the LGTBQ+ community feels under attack and his colleagues at other LGBTQ+ community centers in other cities and states don’t have positive relationships with their police departments, Boo said. The Safe Place Program can be a way to remove “that stigma or that fear.”
“I just think it’s also a sad testament to the current environment that we’re having to identify safe spaces for people, where they can be their true and authentic self,” Boo said.
Al Martinez, vice president of Needlestitch, a custom clothes and alterations business, said the business has been in their location for over three decades, and he considers small businesses to be “in the front lines” of the community. He hopes when customers see their decal, they remember later on they can go there for help.
“When we provide a safe place like the name of program, we’re engaging in a positive matter, with the possibility of helping somebody in the time of need,” he said. “It comes down to that.”