Farrah for Finance - Black lives matter

In A Shocking Turn Of Events, Farrah Believes Black Lives Matter

We faced some surprising opposition, including my being “dragged through the mud” in the paper & on social media by our very own State Representative. I use quotes there because, well… it wasn’t really mud I got dragged through. Let me explain…

Our State Representative Greg Howard, a Republican and cop here in Stonington, did not like that progressives were running for office in Stonington. He and his colleagues dug back through 3+ years of my personal Instagram & Facebook to screenshot Black Lives Matter posts from the summer of 2020, as well as just… random selfies. He and others went to the local paper claiming that I shouldn’t be allowed to run for office because “I hate cops.”

He tried to go after Meg and me together by attacking Stonington Pride, saying that our Pride Month posts talking about the history of Stonewall were trying to incite violence against police. That referencing Stonewall is anti-cop, and being anti-cop should disqualify us (or at least me) from being allowed to run for public office.

All of this was after our first debate/forum (for Boards of Finance & Education), which was organized and moderated by the chair of the Republican Town Committee. The very first question to open the entire forum, directed to the BoF candidates, was “do you support defunding the police.” All the candidates, Republican and Democrat, said some variation of “absolutely not, and no sane person would.” I’m not about to lie. I said something along the lines of “I would absolutely look at all budgets equally. If that means reducing police funding, that’s fine. If it means increasing it, that’s also fine. They currently receive much larger increases than other departments, blow through their budget, and then return to the board in the summer requesting more. So I think that looking at their budget is an important job of a Board of Finance member. Just like every department’s budget.”

Our State Rep Cop stood 4 feet behind Meg and me for the duration of the forum in full patrol uniform. During this time he was posting misinformation to his followers on Facebook, telling them that “a candidate for BoF said they support defunding the police!” His comments included rational statements like “we should drag her out of town by her hair.” Misgendering threats against my physical safety, and so on. He went on to his regular radio spot and continued this narrative. When his followers doxxed me in his comments, instead of shutting it down (protecting and serving, you know?), he leveraged those comments to promote a Republican Town Committee fundraiser.

I hadn’t been particularly interested in engaging in his nonsense. I really just wanted better sidewalks. But I think it’s really important to talk about facts and reality. Like the fact that more than half (58%) of trans people report having experienced mistreatment by police - that abuse ranging from something as simple as being verbally harassed or purposefully misgendered, to physically or sexually assaulted, or worse. For the record, the average reported rate of police harassment for white, cis Americans is around 10%.

I think it’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time that this State Rep has bullied, harassed, and (allegedly) threatened his constituents, political rivals, and people who bug him. In fact, it’s bad enough that the chairs of the Democratic Town Committees of THREE TOWNS had to write a joint statement condemning him. Check it out.

If you’re interested in some of the articles that were written, you can check them out here, on the BOF press page.

If you want to know more about policing and the trans community, I highly recommend this resource, “Failing to Protect and Serve: Police Department Policies Towards Transgender People.” It’s an audit by the National Center for Transgender Equality of the 25 largest police departments in the country, and a model to help improve things

February 2025 update: A year and a half later, Representative Greg Howard asked to meet me for coffee. He wanted to smooth things over. We discussed this incident, amongst others. After going around and around for a while, me being clear I will NEVER stop calling out systemic issues in policing or anything else when we see this level of abuse without accountability, him denying a lot, and me calling out the facts, he did apologize for spreading false information, as according to him that was not what he heard or intended to do.

How you explain the fact that there was a video recording of the incident and newspaper articles calling out the fact that “no candidate said defund the police”, I don’t know. But I appreciate it regardless. He also said that he will not bring up my “stances of the police” should I choose to run for Board of Finance again… you know, unless I say something really crazy like “abolish the Stonington Police.” Fair enough, I guess.