“I felt totally voiceless,” Ms. Diamond, who is 37 and now divorced, said recently through tears. “Like I wasn’t even human. Like my safety didn’t even matter.”

When the patrol guide reforms were issued, advocates for transgender people lauded the changes as groundbreaking, if overdue. Officers now were required, among other provisions, to refer to people by their preferred names and gender pronouns, to allow people to be searched by an officer of their requested gender, and to refrain from “discourteous or disrespectful remarks” regarding sexual orientation or gender identity.

But in interviews with more than 20 transgender and gender nonconforming New Yorkers who have been arrested or had other contact with the police, as well as activists and lawyers representing them, they charge that three years since the regulations were adopted, police officers regularly flout them. Even as transgender visibility surges in the news media and in popular culture, and government agencies develop more sensitive policies, many transgender people continue to report that they are mocked in the most degrading terms by officers, searched roughly and inappropriately and placed in holding cells that do not correspond with their gender identity, all violations of the reforms enacted to address those very indignities.

“We’re hearing the same sorts of things today that we heard five years ago,” said Sharon Stapel, the executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “Trans people are still targeted and harassed by the police for being trans.”

Some activists and elected officials are calling on the Police Department’s inspector general to audit the department’s adherence to the reforms. At a meeting in late July with Commissioner William J. Bratton, members of the commissioner’s L.G.B.T. Advisory Panel, made up of leaders in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, also asked for an audit. Mr. Bratton showed reluctance, according to people present at the meeting, but eventually referred the group to the department’s quality assurance division.