As Pride The Hague 2024 approaches, we want to shed light on ongoing discussions De Opstand and fellow collectives have had with the organizing pride team.
This year, cops are official partners of the pride week, and although we have extensively voiced our disappointment and worries about this, our concerns have not been meaningfully listened to.
We hope this open letter brings transparency to the issue, and we, once again, urge the organizing team to take our concerns seriously and reflect on their choices.
A different Pride is possible, and we will keep dreaming of it.
Pride Open Letter
We do not want police at pride
After extensive discussions with COC Haaglanden, regarding the presence of cops at Pride, we still don’t feel heard and our community needs are not respected.
Our position is clear, we do not want police at our pride. Police presence at queer demonstrations have only stood to further instigate violence against us, rather than protect us from it. This has been the case both historically and within the recent past. To our greatest disappointment, the police force will be present at pride walk and at the opening party at Pride The Hague 2024.
Recently, in canal pride Leiden, we have witnessed violence against our community during pride. History keeps repeating itself. We do not want that to happen here at Pride The Hague.
The police and the system of border controls are well documented to be institutionally racist and perpetuate hatred toward queer people of color and queer migrants. Queer and trans people of color and migrants in our community do not feel safe around the police.
It’s possible to not have police force at pride: New York, London have done it!
There is international precedent for ending police presence at Pride: following the spread of the second wave of Black Lives Matter actions in summer 2020, New York City’s Pride, Vancouver Pride, and Toronto Pride ended police presence at the 2021 parade. The same is also true for Trans Pride in London. We urge Pride Den Haag to follow similar principled steps.
We have high hopes for what a Pride march and activities for queer liberation would include. We hope that Pride The Hague’s organizers will move closer to what a shared vision of pride and queer liberation would look like.
This open later is co-signed by QLU (Queer Leiden University) https://www.instagram.com/p/C64R6slIrYt