Last year, the Los Angeles Police Department made headlines when it announced it was creating a housing unit at the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown exclusively for transgender arrestees — believed to be the first in the country — to ensure their personal safety.

The department also earned praise from civil rights groups last year for developing a series of patrol protocols to be “respectful, professional and courteous” to transgender people, including guidelines such as addressing them by their preferred name and using gender pronouns in line with how they identify and express themselves.

Now, the LAPD is about to receive a $240,000 federal grant to work with the human rights organization Just Detention International to help the police agency come into compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act and to help other agencies around the country do the same.

While no one is immune to rape or sexual assault, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has a history of being targeted and victimized in custody settings, law enforcement officials and advocates say.

“Like the transgender module, we look forward to being a model for PREA and helping other jurisdictions implement that act that’s required of them without making it too difficult,” LAPD Capt. David Lindsay, a commanding officer in the jail division, told attendees at a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Community Forum hosted by Police Chief Charlie Beck on Tuesday.

PREA was passed by Congress in 2003 to address the high number of rapes and sexual assaults in the country’s detention centers and just last year, the Department of Justice released standards for complying with the law.

Lindsay says there have been two allegations of sexual assault overall in LAPD detention facilities in the past 34 months. One was prosecuted and the other, through video surveillance, was determined to never have occurred, he said.

While Just Detention International has seen many prisons take the initiative in implementing these landmark safety standards, they haven’t seen many police departments do so, said JDI spokesman Jesse Lerner-Kinglake. As part of the grant, the nonprofit organization will be doing a “complete assessment” of LAPD’s policies and guidelines on sexual abuse prevention, detection and response, he said.

“LAPD is really putting themselves at the forefront of inmate safety,” Lerner-Kinglake said. “This is huge.”

Ironically, the standards announced last year prohibit de facto or automatic segregation of transgender detainees, but the LAPD already had its transgender pod in place when the compliance standards were issued last year, Lindsay said.

“It’s a conundrum,” he said. “We have something here that’s positive and is working well but yet prohibited by federal law.”

LAPD’s policy has not been challenged, but Lindsay acknowledged it could be in the future. However, he said he’s working on potential solutions, which he declined to specify, that would allow LAPD to maintain the unit while complying with the law.

The Department of Justice’s PREA standards require agencies to consider, among other factors, a transgender or intersex prisoner’s own views with regards to his or her own safety, as well as whether or not someone identifies as transgender or intersex, said JDI Program Director Christine Kregg. While de facto segregation of transgender detainees does violate the 2012 standards, she said, a case-by-case determination of where to safely house a transgender woman could result in the transgender detainees being placed together, as they are now.

LGBT advocates praised the work LAPD has done so far but acknowledged, as did LAPD officials, that much remains to be done. At Tuesday’s forum, a Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center staff member said out of the seven most recent cases that the organization has gotten involved with relating to transgender women, each one was identified with male pronouns in police records with no reference to their preferred name or how they identify their gender. LAPD Officer Alessandra Moura, a spokesperson for the office of the chief, said that one’s gender identity often isn’t disclosed when an investigative report is made but is later when detectives follow up with an interview. But LAPD Assistant Chief Sandy Jo MacArthur said the department is lacking a policy perspective on how people should be identified for filing purposes and how they should be identified in the narrative portion of the department’s reports.