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Kim Bogucki on “The IF Project” documentary and queer women in prison

To inmates, there’s an unbroken connection between police and prison. But to the public, they’re separate worlds. It’s either Mariska Hargitay‘s fiery detective on Law and Order: SVU or the hot inmates and sick prison guards of Orange is the New Black. Separate shows, separate people.

In Seattle, Police Detective Kim Bogucki has been bridging the gap with The IF Project, a writing and community outreach program she runs at a women’s prison. A new documentary of the same name from director Kathlyn Horan, set to air on Logo tonight and play at the Justice on Trial Film Festival in Los Angeles this weekend, chronicles the ways that Kim helps inmates heal and pass preventative wisdom on to the next generation. It’s a stirring portrait of strengths-of both the brave women inmates pushing for a better life and the steadfast Bogucki who walks beside them.

AfterEllen.com: The police force is mostly men. Was that something you thought about when you chose to be a cop?

Kim Bogucki: I grew up playing sports-I played basketball and soccer at Seattle University-and I always hung around guys, so it wasn’t a huge leap for me. I didn’t even notice there were more men than women on the police force, to be honest with you. It was just something I wanted to do. I actually had the police and fire applications come in the same week-I put in for both-and the police were the first ones that called, so that’s how I chose it.

I got into police work as well because I wanted to help people and I wanted to help kids. When I was in high school, we spent a week on the street with street kids, just getting to know them a little bit. It was very fascinating to me that there was a whole part of the world that I didn’t understand because of how and where I grew up. I didn’t grow up around downtown Seattle; I didn’t grow up in an affluent neighborhood either. There were these kids my age who were having to live on the street, and I wanted to figure out how to be a part of changing that. It really affected me.

AE: Is there something specific about being a female cop, being a queer cop, that brings something new to the way you do your job?

KB: Absolutely. I think women tend to communicate more with our mouths and less with our fists… I don’t want people to think guy police officers are going around beating everyone down, because that’s just not the case, but I think we tend to know how to communicate better than men do, and so we can deescalate a little bit better and a little bit quicker. Lots of times, even if we’re dealing with a male that may be combative, there’s the mother that they look up to that, hopefully, they don’t want to have to be aggressive with. So hopefully they’ve been taught not to hit women.

Being queer and one of the LGBTQ liaison officer for the Seattle Police Department-I’ve been doing that for 20 years-it’s been very interesting to see how police departments have become more inclusionary to all parts of that alphabet. And being a part of making that important change so that our department and departments around the country represent the communities that they serve. I think Seattle’s been ahead of the game on that for a long time. And we as a police department met with the community twenty years ago to deal with issues that were emerging in the community, and we still do today.

Kim BoguckiPhoto by Andrew Toth/FilmMagic

AE: How long have you been out on the force? Have you seen a change in policies and attitudes?

KB: I wasn’t out out right away. I was out in the community, but the first couple of years in the department for me it was critical for me to earn my reputation of being a good cop, and I felt like that might be something people would look at me a little bit different. And the funny part was, they all knew anyway. It was the “duh” factor. When I first got on, my sexual orientation wasn’t something that I wanted to focus on. I wanted to focus on being a good safe police officer, and that was more critical than maybe being who I was in my skin in my personal life.

Today, you walk into parties at people’s houses and people are bringing their husbands or their wives-same-sex relationships-and it’s amazing. They’re getting married, and your squad is showing up. So I really think that there’s been a change of inclusion, which it’s really great to see the progression of that. Not to say that there aren’t some people who still have issue because of their upbringing or their religious affiliation. But I think that the more that we are just who we are and not necessarily have to be out out out, but just who we are and just naturally bringing our partners to whatever-I think that it’s a little bit easier for people who have had issue or don’t think they know anybody who’s gay to actually go, “Wow, that’s just cool. They’re just like me, not some weird perversion that some people like to tell.”

AE: What got you started with The IF Project program? Why inmates?

KB: That’s a good question. I’ve been on [the Seattle police force] about 28 years, and I’d say about 15 years ago, I started working with the young homeless population and…we did not understand this population that we were serving every day… So trying to figure out how to bridge that gap and educate each other on, “I’m not going anywhere, and you’re not going anywhere, so how can we peacefully coexist? And how can we let you know about the laws we’re constantly enforcing so that you can make the choice whether you want to break them or not, and I can actually understand why you’re out on the street.”

So that’s me taking a look at relationships that we had in the community or that we didn’t have in the community. We started taking a look at a lot of the gang activity… So we took West Side Story and built a whole program around it that ended up going international, using a very old, well-known piece of art and actually starting to have dialogue about it. It was the first time police and Broadway theater and youth had ever partnered like that and used a different tool to have a necessary conversation about those topics.

The turning point for me was I got a call from Girl Scouts Beyond Bars… It’s an awesome program. They actually have troop meetings inside the prison… which for me was incredible because you’re keeping that family unification going, and that child gets taken by the Girl Scouts into the prison to have that meeting. So when I got a call from them, after West Side Story, saying, “Hey, we’ve got a group of kids that would probably really benefit from something like the West Side Story project like you’re doing. Would you come to one of our troop meetings?” I said, “Absolutely, but I want to go meet the moms.” And that’s when I went into WCCW [Washington Corrections Center for Women] for the first time to meet with the mothers that were inmates.

That’s when my whole life pretty much changed. I walked into that room and I had to do a gut check on all this “community policing” I had been doing and how I had put people who had been incarcerated in my mind in a very prejudicial, biased box. And they actually just looked like human beings; like people I would hang out with. So that was kind of the tipping point for me. And that’s when the [IF] question got asked that day. It wasn’t planned; it was just part of the conversation. Then one of the inmates, Renata, who’s featured in the doc, she had to get over her hatred and prejudice of the police and started asking the women to answer to the question. And then a couple months later when I went back in, she handed me a stack of the answers and the project was born.

AE: What is different about this project? About working with female inmates?

KB: Right out of the gate, this is police working with inmates, instead of law enforcement adding to incarceration. And when you talk on a national level about this disconnect we have between police and community, this is a program where we’re actually building those relationships inside the prison and when they also get out. It’s more of a holistic approach to doing policing.

For me going into the women’s prison, I did not understand criminogenically the difference between what leads a man to prison and what leads a woman to prison. For women, it’s unhealthy relationships and a chemical dependency issue… Not only that, but women’s incarceration rates are up 700% since 1985, and when I’m out on the street dealing with these kids potentially on their way to prison, they only are getting potentially raised by their mothers… So if we really want to change a youth’s path, we need to help the mom get out and be ok and/or get them on the front end before they end up having to go in, so we aren’t continually raising the next generation of people that will potentially wind up in the system.

Women tend to want to communicate and write and be open more than men do. When they actually started realizing and got over the shame and embarrassment and humiliation, which they still carry with them-trust me-of what happened and what led them there, they had that little light of how to actually take that negative and turn it into a positive and hopefully help somebody in a prevention way not end up following in their footsteps, it started to build their self-esteem, and they started to shed some of the stuff they had been carrying around for awhile and we could actually see them start to take different roles on, like go to school or get into programming or lead a group, or even look better, get healthier, lose some weight while they were locked up, because we had the opportunity to give them a voice, and by giving them a voice, they felt like they mattered, and then we could get that voice out there to start making that change and start this movement. And Kathlyn beautifully grabs that in the documentary.

AE: We all have images from Orange is the New Black, but what is your take on the realities for queer women in prison?

KB: I think that there tends to be same-sex relationships in prison and women tend to be nurturing, but make no mistake, there is “domestic violence issues” that happen inside prison as well.

Who actually ends up identifying inside and then maybe when they get out identifying on the outside-I think there’s a little bit of change in that. We jokingly say, “Gay for the stay, straight at the gate,” but I think it’s an interesting time for some of them to understand what relationships or falling in love looks like when they’re inside. And women tend to be more nurturing and more caring, so sometimes women end up in what I would call gay relationships, but they may not choose to identify as that for the rest of their lives.

And I don’t want to ever pass judgment on who somebody tends to want to be in a relationship with. I have friends that were lesbian for 25 years and are now happily married to a man. I don’t want to judge that. With labels sometimes, we get caught up in, “I thought you were this way; now you’re that way.” Does it matter if I love the person, and it’s healthy? I don’t ever want to get in the middle of that judgment.

AE: What’s next for you and The IF Project?

KB: We just got a Second Chance Act grant to open up a women’s reintegration/reentry center in Seattle, and so that’s going to be big focus in the next couple years… which is very exciting for me to figure out how to do significant inreach in the prison and programming in the prison. And we’re writing some of that programming with the inmates, so that it’s their input that’s actually allowing us to come in and help them, and then having as much support on the outside as we do on the inside, so a little bit more of a cradle when they get out.

Getting the documentary out, and getting as many eyeballs in front of it as we can-to start having conversations on more of a national level. Because in this ending mass incarceration movement, women are still a very silent voice in it, and again, they are the ones raising our children and they are the ones getting arrested at a higher rate. So I want to make sure that we are having as much conversation around how to help them, even though their numbers are lower… I don’t want them to get lost in the process, like reentry and reintegration programs that they’re broad-brushed and not gender-specific. So we’ll do a lot of work around gender responsive corrections.

On a national level, we do have that divide between community and police. And I think programs like this is where we can sit down and learn more about each other, and I think that there’s a lot of honest, genuine, real conversations that we need to be having with communities that have issues with the police. For me, when I can walk in with a formerly justice involved person that we actually know each other and have a relationship with and we can have conversation about how to start bridging some of these gaps that we have in the community-I think that’s a really powerful way to do it. Like everyone’s evenly at the table. How are we going to work on ending some of this violence? How are we going to work on ending youth ending up locked up for little things? Can we work on some diversion things? What do we need to do collectively? And how can we use the voice of people who have been there to help us make the change?

Community engagement, having police think out of the box-that’s what I’m interested in doing. Putting a human face back on not just people who are incarcerated, but [all] people. I think the one thing I really want to do is, I really like to challenge people to find the common threads in the places that you never thought you would have with somebody.

The IF Project documentary airs tonight on Logo. Visit theifprojectmovie for more on the film and The IF Project’s official site for information on the organization.

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