Openly gay cop Jonathan Bleiweiss was
named Oakland Park Employee of
the Year at a March 4 ceremony at City Hall, reports gay
weekly South Florida Blade.
Bleiweiss, a deputy for the Broward
County Sheriff's Office, is the first openly gay deputy from the
county to receive the honor. Oakland Park is located in south
Florida.
The capture of two robbers and a serial
arsonist are just two of the over 100 arrests made by the
twenty-eight-year-old in 2008.
The top cop said he enjoys tremendous
support on the force and credits his success to the supportive
environment of the department.
“I think it [the award] shows how far
we've come in the world when a police worker, an openly gay officer,
could achieve an award like this,” Bleiweiss told the paper. “I
don't think that five or six years ago it would have necessarily been
possible.”
His beat includes a large gay
population, and Bleiweiss says some gay people continue to think of
the department as discriminatory.
“Gay people actually say to me that
I'm homophobic, and that I'm going to discriminate against them
because they are gay,” he said. “They feel that they are being
treated differently when actually they're being treated like everyone
else.”