Criminal - P.D.I.D.

Episode Date: October 9, 2015

Patti Hammond Shaw is a transgender woman. She's legally female on her birth certificate and driver's license, and has been since 1993. But when she was arrested in 2009, male officers strip-searched her in front of male detainees, and held her overnight in a men's cellblock. Patti Hammond Shaw hired a lawyer and fought back. Her case was instrumental in changing how the police process and detain transgender individuals in Washington, D.C. This story was reported by Lauren Ober. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

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and I had fixed me some Long Island iced tea, watching Oprah, and he was sitting in the chair across from me. And next thing I know, he gets up and comes and sits beside me. And I said, hmm, something ain't right with this. Something is about to happen. In December of 2009, Patty Shaw was watching TV with her cousin's friend, a man who said his name was Anthony. Anthony was much younger than Patty.

She was in her mid-40s, and he was in his early 20s. She didn't know him that well, but her cousin had vouched for him, suggesting that Anthony rent the spare bedroom in Patty's apartment. So far, he'd only spent one night there. I wanted him to look at me like a mother figure or like an aunt. No, that didn't happen. He looked at me, like, kept looking at me a certain way, but I didn't want to believe that he was liking me like that. Patty says Anthony put his hand on her leg. And I said, I know he's not touching me.

Oprah was saying something that was important, and I turned around slowly and gave him a look, like, don't do that. Patty had collected a lot of decorative plaster statues. They were all around her apartment. One of them was in the shape of a lion. He took the lion that was sitting on that column and hit me across my head right here. You see this little dent? He hit me, bust me in my head. It immediately swole up to the size of an apple. She picked up another one of her statues and threw it at Anthony.

They started to fight, and Patty says she ran into the street and flagged down a police car. And I said, officer, officer, I'm being assaulted in my house. Now, at this point, I had blood dripping. My tooth was knocked out. My eye was swollen. And when the policeman came, he said, who's the president of the United States? I said, you're asking me who's the president of the United States. I've just been busting my head with a statue.

My eye is black. My tooth has gone out of my mouth. And you're asking me who is the president of the United States. And he said to me, well, answer the question. And I said, Barack Obama. And then he said, well, I'm going to have to put you under arrest. I said, under arrest? For what?

The officer told Patty that she was being arrested because they believed that she was the one who assaulted Anthony. They also said Anthony was underage, which turned out not to be true. And so he said, put your hands behind your back. I said, no, I'm not. He said, yes, you are, and don't resist. I said, okay, okay, not a problem. I said, let me get my keys and let me set my alarm and lock my doors. And he said, no, we'll take care of all that.

So they take me outside, put me in one police car, and he said, we have to take you to the hospital because this doesn't look good. Your face looks terrible. And I said, okay, not a problem. They took her to a hospital in Southeast D.C. and handcuffed her to the bed. Patty had been to that hospital before. She was already in their computer system. I was registered under Patty Hammond Shaw, and they gave me an armband that said Patty Hammond Shaw. But when the officers fingerprinted her, a different name came up,

and things got a lot more complicated. After leaving the hospital, I'm transported to, I think it was 6th District. 6th District gives me an armband saying my birth name, sex male. And I said, that's not who I am. I said, look at this. This is who I am. And they said, no, with your fingerprints and everything, it came back to this is who you are. And so we have to go on the fingerprints and we're going to have to put you in the cell with a man. I said, no, you're not going to put me in the cell with a man. For today's story, guest contributor Lauren Obert spent time with Patty and her lawyer and takes us behind the scenes

of what happens when the police decide your gender for you. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Are you recording? I am. Oh. You should have said, we're starting. We're starting. The red light means we're on. We're on. Okay. I visited Patty at her apartment in southwest D.C.

It's tidy and well-appointed, with a balcony that offers some pretty great views of the city. Patty's two dogs, Crashio and Toya, did not appreciate having a visitor, so Patty banished them to the bedroom. I started our chat by asking Patty to describe herself. I'm 5'7", I'm thick, I'm very attractive, full lips, had my eyebrows pulled to make my eyes slanted. I have permanent makeup. I have large breasts, large behind, small waist, like Betty Boo. Like Jill Scott and Chaka Khan, a combo of those two. A very strong woman, very independent, very cautious of who I allow in my circle. Patty figured out her gender identity pretty early on in life.

Growing up as a child, I had already knew that I was transgender, well, wanted to be transgender. My mom used to only buy me doll babies. She would never buy me like a G.I. Joe or a truck because I wouldn't play with it. I would break it up and throw it in the trash. So she know to buy me feminine things like jump rope, etc. And I had one doll baby and I sucked a Pesky 5 until I was four. Patty says her mother kind of liked that her male child had some feminine characteristics. It was endearing. Her father, who was mostly out of the picture, did not. On the rare occasions when he would come around, he'd tell Patty's mother that she was raising a sissy.

As she got older, Patty began to take steps to change her appearance. When you started having surgery, did you have a vision of a person that you wanted to be? I did. I always admired Chaka Khan. I always admired Phyllis Hyman because Phyllis Hyman was a tall woman, but she was very confident with her size. And I said, okay, they're a full figure, but they're very confident and very sexy. I said, okay, I can do it. And I've been happy with my decision ever since. Patty had gender reassignment surgery on December 14th, 1993, and went through the process of legally changing her gender. She had her birth certificate amended, as well as the name and sex on her driver's

license. In the eyes of the law, she was female. And yet, when the D.C. police ran her fingerprints, she came up as male. She was already in their system because, in 1984, Patty was arrested for sodomy, which was illegal in D.C. until 1993. The D.C. police gave her a police department identification number, also known as P.D.I.D., and according to that number, her gender was male, the gender she was assigned at birth. So it didn't matter what she said or what her driver's license said. The police didn't believe her. What often happens is that when that violence is reported to the police, the police see transgender individuals as being untrustworthy. Patty's lawyer, Jeffrey Light.

There's some interesting societal factors that go into that. One of them is thinking that transgender people are somehow misrepresenting themselves. They're really a man, but they're saying a woman, and so they're untrustworthy. Other times, the issue is that somebody says their name when they're asked by the police, but their ID gives a different name,

and law enforcement might think that the person is lying about their name or trying to hide something when, in fact, the person's just giving the name that they're called. This is what happened to Patty. She kept trying to explain that they were making a mistake and that she should not be detained with men, but no one listened. In lockup, she was strip searched in front of male detainees. It was about 10 of us lined up against the wall, and they made me take off my clothes. They made me be the first one, and the rest of the guys

was in another part of the cell. And then they, searching between my legs, told me, open my legs, lift up my balls and my penis. I said, I don't have them. He said, that's what y'all all say. Turn around, put your hand up against the wall. They searched under my breasts. He felt between my legs, but if you felt between my legs, then.C.'s central cell block to await arraignment. There, she says things got worse. I'm just constantly being assaulted by the guys asking to see my vagina and asking to see my breasts. And they're standing up at the bars and saying, if I didn't show them, when we get in the bullpen, they was going to beat my head to the white meat. After that, Patty was moved to a pretrial holding area run by the U.S. Marshals. And again, she was forced to be in the men's cell block.

But here, it wasn't just the other detainees who were causing problems. When you first come through, the U.S. Marshals, they're making jokes and making fun. And they just belittle you. They make fun of you like you're a joke. No, I'm a human being and I have rights. Finally, her case was called. She was charged with assaulting Anthony, the younger guy from the apartment. But Anthony didn't show up for court. The prosecutors couldn't find him, so the case against her was dismissed. But Patty knew that the way she'd been treated was wrong, and she hired a lawyer to prove it. And I said, now you will believe me, because now at this point, my voice is going to get louder, and I'm getting ready to make some noise.

What's interesting is that, on paper, regulations had already been put into place that should have allowed Patty to be held in a cell with other women, regardless of what the computer said. DC regulations were fairly clear that individuals who are transgender should be treated as their gender identity and expression. But at the same time, other regulations said that men and women are to be kept out of sight and sound of each other in order to avoid potential safety issues, harassment, that sort of thing. So the D.C. government and the U.S. Marshals Service took the position that they didn't know that Patty Shaw was a female, and therefore they were entitled to put her wherever they thought was appropriate. Do they look at IDs? I mean, her ID says that she is female. Her driver's license says she's female. She has a female name.

She presents as female. And, although this is irrelevant, she has had gender reassignment surgery. So, how did they not know she was female. One of the really interesting things we learned during this case is how the DC police and the US marshal were determining somebody's gender. And as it turns out, the first time an individual was arrested in DC, it was recorded in this PID system what their name and gender was. And then it would never be changed. So even if an individual changed their birth certificate, changed their driver's license, did everything possible to legally change their name and gender,

the PID system would never be updated. We reached out to D.C. police many times to talk about this case, but never got a response. One of the hardest things to understand about this story is that if Patty had not been in the system at all, there shouldn't have been a problem. She would have been detained with other women. But because she was in the system as male from when she was fingerprinted back in 1984, she was put with men. It was like nothing that had happened over the last 25 years mattered. Her legal gender didn't matter. Her physical body didn't matter. The computer said male, so the officers put her with men. Or at least that's the reason they gave. Patty sued both the D.C. police and the U.S. Marshals in federal court on the grounds that they violated her constitutional rights, including her right to reasonable search and seizure and her

right to due process. In other words, being searched by male officers and locked up with men was a threat to her safety and violated her rights not as a trans woman, but as a woman. Patty's lawyer argued the case from that point. There hadn't been a lot of litigation under the Fourth and Fifth Amendment of the rights of transgender individuals. What we ended up doing in this case is applying the line of cases that look at the rights of women, how they're to be treated under the Constitution. And so, cases that say it is clearly unconstitutional for a man to strip search a woman in the absence of emergency circumstances, we argued and the court agreed that that line of cases should apply. The court further agreed with us that there's no reason to differentiate a transgender woman from any other kind of woman. And as Patty frequently said during the case,

I mean, is this how you'd want your mom or your sister to be treated if they were arrested? The judge ruled in Patty's favor and wrote in her opinion that Patty's constitutional rights had been violated. Police appealed, but before the case went back to trial, they settled out of court. Patty received an undisclosed sum of money. The monetary compensation wasn't the only victory. Her case impacted how trans people should be treated by law enforcement. One of the parts of the settlement with DC was that they would have a new procedure for placement and search of transgender individuals who are in the central cell block underneath the courthouse. And so somebody who is arrested and placed in central

cell block will hopefully not have the experiences that Patty had because the policies have changed. The other change might seem like a minor detail, but it actually addressed the crux of Patty's troubles, the PDID computer system. Thanks to Patty, it can now be changed to reflect a person's legal gender. It was like finally my voice is being heard. And I'm glad that I was able to be the one to help change the law.

But it should have never came down to this. I don't care if I'm locked up 50 million times. Still respect me. Okay, I'm a female. I'm a woman. These days, Patty keeps herself to herself. She doesn't go out much except to walk her two elderly dogs. And she's heading back to school to get her commercial driver's license. She wants to be a city bus driver.

I feel like I'd be a good metro bus driver because they don't take any shit. And you're a lady who just takes shit. No, I don't. I stand up for my rights. Lauren Ober. Thank you. episode of Criminal. You can find them at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. We're coming to the West Coast to do a little tour in a few weeks. You can find out more information at thisiscriminal.com. We'll be in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and we'll start here in Durham, North Carolina. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. if you're a small business owner, then protecting the information of yourself, your company, and your workers is vital. In comes Huntress. Huntress is where fully managed

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