Distinguished Service Award for Karen Pettapiece

Presented by GLAA President Bob Summersgill

GLAA 30th Anniversary Reception
Jurys Washington Hotel
Thursday, April 19, 2001

GLAA has been working on improving police relations and protections since our very earliest days. We continue in effort, which remains a large part of GLAA activities. For more than a decade GLAA has been joined by Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV) which has focused on the direct services to our community as well as the critically important training of police on dealing with the gay community.

Since 1997, Karen Pettapiece has single-handedly conducted GLOV's police training.

Her background includes being a campus police officer at Georgetown University for 4 years. In that capacity she came to know and work with many of the officers in the 2nd District. Prior to that she was in the army for 6 years, which means she enlisted when she was 12 years old.

Karen is so dedicated to the training that as budgets have tightened, she has volunteered to conduct the trainings for free. We keep pointing out that it is much easier to keep programs in the budget than to try and get an item back in after it has been taken out. [So stop that and take the money!]

In the last several weeks we have learned that some police officers have been sending racist, sexist and homophobic messages to each other on their internal email system.

The police emails reveal either that she hasn't been effective and we shouldn't give her an award, [pause] or as we have been telling the police for years, that the training Karen provides needs to be dramatically expanded and intensified.

Chief Ramsey now understands this and is working on expanding the training. To his credit Chief Ramsey initiated the investigation at our urging, met with and apologized to the community and has not offered a defense of the indefensible. So far he has done everything he should be doing and we are confident in his ability to fully investigate and reprimand the offenders. Of course we will keep an eye on that process.

Fortunately we have Karen to take us through the training issues and can depend on her to advise us on all the training issues and help the police and fire departments restructure their training programs.

In 1997 Karen also joined the Board of our sister organization, Free State Justice which has just won a ten-year effort to add sexual orientation to the Maryland human rights law. This almost catches Maryland up to where GLAA took DC in 1973.

Karen works for a prominent DC law firm, lives in Baltimore, serves on the board of GLOV and the US Attorney's Bias Crimes Task Force, and in her spare time is a second year law student at the University of Baltimore.

Please join me in honoring Karen Pettapiece for all of her hard work and dedication.