The following story was reported on March 7 by Samantha Riedel of the online news site Them.
A Pennsylvania state trooper has been placed on “restricted duty” after he threatened to use his taser on one of Philadelphia’s top LGBTQ+ officials during a traffic stop last weekend. The Philadelphia district attorney’s office is investigating the incident, NBC news reported.
Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 2, the trooper, who has not yet been named, stopped Celena Morrison, the executive director of Philadelphia’s Office of LGBT Affairs, as she was driving on I-76, according to local reports. When Morrison’s husband, Darius McLean, pulled up in his own car behind the traffic stop, the situation rapidly spiraled out of control, as seen in Morrison’s cell phone footage which quickly circulated on social media in the aftermath of the incident. https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/celena-morrison-arrest-state-trooper-restricted-duty-philadelphia-20240304.html
…Both Morrison and McLean are Black , and Morrison is a transgender woman. While Morrison has held her position in the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs since 2020, McLean works in the private sector as the chief operating officer of William Way Community Center, which lost a $1 million federal earmark this week following a disinformation campaign from Chaya Raichick, who runs the anti-LGBTQ+ Libs of Tik Tok social media campaign. In a statement on Monday, William Way representatives confirmed that both Morrison and McLean [who were both jailed for 12 hours after the stop], and thanked members of the community for their help and support.
[The William Way spokesperson went on to say] “We believe that actions by State Police from the Belmont Barracks this weekend can be seen as yet another example in the long institutional history of over-policing and disproportional outcomes against Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ people, particularly Black trans people.”
Read the whole Them story here:
