UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Plaintiff v.

THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS Defendant * * * * * * * * CIVIL ACTION NUMBER: 12-1924 SECTION: E

I, Wesley Ware, upon my own personal knowledge, hereby depose and declare: 1. My name is Wesley Ware. I am the Director of BreakOUT!, an organization that fights the criminalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth in New Orleans, LA. We are a membership-based group of LGBTQ young people ages 13-24 who are directly impacted by the criminal justice system. 2. Six youth members and I founded BreakOUT! when I received the Soros U.S. Justice Fellowship in 2011. Our main campaign currently is the We Deserve Better campaign, which is focused on reducing discriminatory policing within the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), particularly of young African American transgender women. 3. Prior to founding BreakOUT!, I worked as an advocate, investigator, and eventually the LGBTQ Youth Project Director at the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), visiting youth in secure facilities across the state of Louisiana from 2007 until 2011. During this time, I focused on the needs and experiences of LGBTQ young people in Louisianas state secure care facilities, as well as local detention centers. I also coordinated the investigation for the class action lawsuit against the City of New Orleans for conditions at the Youth Study Center, the local juvenile detention facility. I later worked with the same facility to help them develop a model LGBTQ policy for their youth and staff. I published a report on the experiences of LGBTQ youth in state custody in Louisiana called Locked Up & Out and currently sit on the Advisory Board of the Equity Project, a national initiative to reform juvenile courts to provide fairness to LGBTQ clients. In September 2011, I testified in front of the Prison Rape Elimination Acts Prison and Jail Rape Review Panel with the Department of Justice. 4. Through my work with LGBTQ youth involved in the juvenile justice system and the adult criminal justice system in Louisiana, I have heard first-hand the accounts of negative experiences with law enforcement and have organized young people with direct experience with NOPD to run campaigns to reform its discriminatory practices.

5. National data has shown that LGBTQ youth are overrepresented among homeless1 and other marginalized youth2, as well as among youth in the juvenile and criminal justice system.3 National data has also consistently shown that LGBTQ youth are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement, more likely to be arrested, and report being frequently profiled and treated unfairly by the police and other officials.4 Transgender women of color are more at risk for physical violence in their lives; and at the same time, transgender people are also more likely to experience barriers to reporting to law enforcement, not report to law enforcement altogether, and more likely to experience police violence.5 6. In New Orleans, this has been true for generations, with transgender people, specifically transgender women, reporting being stopped for no reason, being assumed by police officers to be criminal for walking down the street, being accused of falsely identifying themselves when presenting I.D.s inconsistent with their gender expression, being arrested after calling the police for help, being called names and verbally harassed, being approached for sexual favors by members of the NOPD, being sexually assaulted by the NOPD, or having their legal rights abused or undermined in other ways. In fact, in preliminary results from a survey conducted by our members in the summer of 2011,we found that 15 out of 15 of young African American transgender women polled had been approached by an NOPD officer for sex. Just this past May, one of our members was stopped one block from her house as she was walking to a convenience store by an officer who claimed to be the Chief of Tulane Avenue, searched her illegally, and accused her of prostitution. While many in the NOPD have been receptive to hearing our recommendations or concerns, I have also had representatives from the Department tell me that transgender women simply should not walk down certain streets in New Orleans, regardless of whether or not they live nearby. To this, we say, Walking while transgender is not a crime. 7. From 2010 until the conclusion of the United States Department of Justices (DOJ) investigation of the NOPD, BreakOUT! organized hearings with other community organizations, including Women With a Vision, for community members to share some of these personal stories of discriminatory and illegal treatment by NOPD officers. Our members met with DOJ investigators and attorneys several times over the course of the investigation, both concerning the police department as well as conditions inside Orleans Parish Prison. The stories our communities relayed contributed to DOJs finding that NOPD practices lead to discriminatory treatment of LGBTQ individuals, in particular African-American transgender women.

Most recently documented by Williams Institute, Serving Our Youth: Findings From A National Survey Of Service Providers Working With LGBT Youth Who Are Homeless Or At Risk of Becoming Homeless, 2012. Other sources for reference available at: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/lgbtq.html. 2 Sources for reference available at Center for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/youth.htm. 3 Center for American Progress, The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth: An Overview of the Experiences of LGBT Youth in the Juvenile Justice System, 2012. 4 Himmelstein and Brckner, Criminal-Justice and School Sanctions Against Nonheterosexual Youth: A National Longitudinal Study Pediatrics, 2010 and Amnesty International, Stonewalled: Still Demanding Respect. Police Abuses Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual And Transgender People In The USA Amnesty international, 2006. 5 National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, Hate Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and HIVAffected Communities in the United States in 2011: A Report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 2012.

8. Problems with the NOPD have been so rampant that BreakOUT! has hosted several Know Your Rights workshops with the Independent Police Monitor, produced a video called We Deserve Better that we delivered to the NOPD for use in their officer trainings, and developed a Street Safety Guide, focused primarily on preserving rights with the police. We also developed community identification cards for our members with their rights on the back for easy reference during a police encounter and are now working on writing our own LGBTQ policy to propose to the NOPD for implementation. 9. Given the pattern or practice of violating the constitutional rights of LGBTQ youth by NOPD officers, as well as the long-standing and intractable nature of this conduct, we believe that a Consent Decree which includes court oversight is necessary to achieve sustainable reform of NOPD. 10. NOPDs unfair treatment of LGBTQ youth, as well as the perception that NOPD officers are biased against them, has led many to distrust the NOPD, thereby impeding effective and safe policing. We believe a robust consent decree that is closely monitored and strictly enforced is a prerequisite to building LGBTQ youths trust in NOPD. 11. Along with many other community organizations in New Orleans, we were encouraged by the DOJs investigation, the communitys participation in it, and DOJs reported findings afterward, but were disappointed that negotiations over the consent decree were not a similarly open and transparent process. 12. However, BreakOUT! members and other community representatives met with the DOJ and NOPD several times to submit sample policies and recommendations that we hoped would be reflected in the consent decree and in NOPDs revised policies. Many of those recommendations were included in the Proposed Consent Decree (Decree) currently before the Court, and we believe it is essential that they be implemented without delay. Those recommendations are reflected in the LGBTQ provisions in the Decree, particularly those that prohibit the use of sexual orientation or gender identity as reasonable suspicion for a stop or arrest; the requirements that NOPD adopt policies to ensure that transgender people are referred to by their preferred name and appropriate gender pronoun; that transgender people will not be subjected to overly invasive searches due to their gender identity or to solely to determine their anatomy or genitalia; and that same-gender searches are to be done in accordance with gender identity. We believe that it is critical that these provisions in the Decree be entered and become an enforceable court order in order to vindicate the rights of our members and other LGBTQ youth in New Orleans. 13. We know from the stories told to us by so many of our young people, from those who have lost family members to the NOPD, and from community representatives that have been working to reform the NOPD for decades that there is a clear need for full oversight of the NOPD and a thorough Decree with extensive provisions to outline the path to reform. In fact, the Decree could be strengthened in several areas. 14. For example, in order to address the deficiencies noted by DOJ in its findings, the quality and quantity of training on LGBTQ issues required by the Decree should be

higher, particularly as it is situated within the same entity that has been conducting the training, inadequately, for several years. We also believe that the training should reflect input from national experts, along with local community members with direct experience with NOPD. We also believe that the Decree would be stronger if it required that the Office of the Independent Police Monitor be given a greater role in implementation and enforcement of the Decree, particularly as it is the entity that will remain in New Orleans long after the DOJ has gone. We also are concerned that the Decrees requirement that cameras be placed on patrol vehicles only, as opposed to on the officers themselves, will not provide adequate accountability, especially if those cameras do not include an audio recording of encounters between LGBTQ youth and NOPD officers outside of the car and out of camera sight. This is a particular concern for officers who patrol on foot in areas such as the French Quarter, as well. 15. We have had only a limited amount of time to review the Decree, and, as noted above, have concerns that some of its provisions may not go far enough to correct all of the myriad problems with NOPD. However, we believe the Decree is necessary to reform the NOPD, especially those provisions pertaining to NOPD interactions with LGBTQ individuals in New Orleans. It is imperative that nothing short of this Decree is implemented to ensure the safety and well-being of LGBTQ youth and young adults of color in this City and to protect the rights of all New Orleanians who live in fear of those who are supposed to protect us. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

DATED SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

________________ WESLEY WARE