4.30PM: Glbti police staff and their supporters will be marching in the Auckland Pride parade on exactly the same basis as they did last year, a member of the Auckland Pride Festival board has just confirmed. Gay police and their supporters march in last year's Auckland Pride Parade. Speculation on what would happen regarding the police has gathered momentum after GayNZ.com revealed this morning that Auckland Pride has placed stringent restrictions on the parade presence of Department of Corrections staff, including that they must not wear Corrections uniforms and must not represent the Department. That decision came after Pride late last year adopted Human Rights criteria as part of guidelines for who can and cannot participate in the parade. That in turn had been prompted by a trans rights group which broke into the last parade, to protest the treatment of trans people at the hands of the justice system including Corrections and police. However, despite No Pride In Prisons saying it believes the Police are no better than Corrections in its handling of trans prisoners within its system, the Pride board believes the two cases are different. “We have had no reason to believe that police policy is discriminatory in the same way that we have seen specific examples, of not just behaviour and action but also policy, within the Department of Corrections,” board member Kirsten Sibbit says. GayNZ.com understands from a source close to but separate from the Pride Festival board that as part of its review of two, or three, parade entry applications, the board members spent considerable time reviewing weighty documents detailing the entire human rights and glbti-relevant policies of organisations including Corrections and Police.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 27th January 2016 - 4:00pm