“Only through routine, systematic, evidence-based data collection can we learn the lessons we need in order to save LGBTQ lives."

Medical examiners don’t generally note if homicide victims were gay or transgender. As a result, LGBTQ advocates can go months to years without knowing about hate crimes impacting the community. Or worse, they never learn about them at all.

A new resolution in Los Angeles County seeks to tackle some of that disparity in reporting.

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors adopted a motion Tuesday, September 3, that requires its medical examiners to investigate violent deaths of LGBTQ people. Those include suicides, hate crimes, and homicides. Examiners are mandated to collect sexual orientation and gender identity data of the victims.

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The requirement is believed to be the first of its kind in the country. L.A. County, which includes Los Angeles, has the highest population of any county in the nation with 10 million residents.

“In the absence of this data, it is impossible to detect the presence of disparities in mortality rates of the LGBTQ community,” the resolution, drafted by supervisors Kathryn Barger and Sheila Kuehl, states. “By tracking this data, it will allow us to better understand these disparities and develop policies that seek to address them at the county level.”

The Trevor Project, an organization that works to combat LGBTQ youth suicides, praised the new measure as essential to providing new data to help advocates prevent future deaths.

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“Only through routine, systematic, evidence-based data collection can we learn the lessons we need in order to save LGBTQ lives,” noted Sam Brinton, head of advocacy and government affairs for The Trevor Project, in a statement.

The organization reports that volunteers for its crisis hotline received some 11,500 crisis contacts in California this year alone. That’s less than 6% of LGBTQ youth who considered suicide in the state, the organization adds. Nationally, an estimated 39% of queer youth considered suicide over the last year.

L.A. County also witnessed an extraordinarily violent transgender homicide when Viccky Gutierrez, a young Latina, was stabbed and burned to death in a home in the Pico Union neighborhood. Investigators made an arrest in that case last January. Nationally, however, transgender homicides are rarely solved. In Chicago, seven transgender people have been killed in just four years; only one person has been arrested in connection with one of those murders.