This segment originally aired Jan. 5, 2016 on VICE News Tonight on HBO.Despite recent gains in visibility, more trans people were killed in 2016 than in any other year on record. And a longstanding lack of trust in the police means many crimes in the LGBT community go unreported. Officer Tori Newburn, the first openly trans cop on Seattle’s police force, is trying to change that.
“People wouldn’t know I’m transgender unless I told them, so that’s a luxury and that’s a privilege,” Newburn told VICE News Tonight correspondent Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani in Seattle. He waited a year before telling his coworkers that he is transgender. “I just wanted to kind of be treated like anybody else.”