Laquan McDonald - "Acting Erratic" while black (#CultOfCompliance)

I've been out of town so haven't been commenting directly on the Laquan McDonald killing. Two major points.

First, I believe that the elected officials of Chicago tried to cover this up and delay justice for political gain.

The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later. That video, in her own words, was “everything that it has been described to be by the news accounts. It is graphic. It is violent. It is chilling.”

But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.

Then up for re-election, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was looking ahead to a contested election on Feb. 24, 2015, which would ultimately result in a runoff election on April 7. In Ferguson, Mo., a grand jury was hearing testimony on the police shooting of Michael Brown. The video of Eric Garner being choked to death during an arrest in New York had gone viral. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum across the country.

The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.

Second, as regular readers know, I frequently write about the ways that being disabled acts as a risk multiplier when it comes to interactions with police. It's one of many risk factors - including race, class, gender, and more - that multiply as oppressive forces intersect.

McDonald was not, to my knowledge, disabled. He was, though, acting in an unpredictable way. Here's the text we see again and again from the police report:

According to the police, the young man was walking down a street on the Southwest side of Chicago, carrying a 4-inch knife and behaving erratically. The officer reportedly told McDonald to drop the knife, but the teen did not comply. Van Dyke purportedly shot McDonald for fear of his life, claiming the teen lunged at him.

We've seen this before. Failure to comply resulting a quick escalation to use of lethal force, particularly when confronting black men. It's the same pattern.

Disability Journalism Award - 2015 Winner is ProPublica on School Restraint

Arizona State University hosts the National Center for Disability Journalism, an excellent group doing important work. The NCDJ offers the only annual journalism award for Disability issues - the   Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability - and have announced the 2015 winners.

A ProPublica story that uncovered the shocking ways children with intellectual disabilities are physically disciplined in schools across the country has won top honors in the 2015 Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability...

ProPublica reporter Heather Vogell’s first-place story, “Violent and Legal: The Shocking Ways School Kids are Being Pinned Down, Isolated Against Their Will,” profiled Carson Luke, a young boy with autism, who sustained broken bones after educators grabbed him and tried to force him into a “scream room.” The story underscored the common practice of educators secluding and physically restraining uncooperative school children, sometimes with straps, handcuffs, bungee cords or even duct tape, documenting hundreds of thousands of cases a year.

The ProPublica story is, in my opinion, the most important piece of disability journalism of the year. It's the kind of detailed, data-driven, investigative work that we so need, and it's important that it be recognized by awards like this. I read it when it came out and will obviously be referring to its findings in my book, as it's a terrible invocation of the cult of compliance.

I'm also very pleased with the Honorable Mention - on the legacy of Eugenics in North Carolina. This history isn't known well enough and isn't really in the past. Stories of forced sterilizations in prisons and other contexts keep emerging.

I am less thrilled with the second place winner on "Saving Evan." It's typical mom-vs-autism stuff. Moreover, the format - as you scroll pictures scroll up into your view and then away again - is extremely hard on my not-entirely-neurotypical visual processing centers of my brain. Maybe someone with better eye-brain connections can read it more closely and let me know what you think.

(Note: Of course I apply for this award. I don't expect to get it. Properly, they have always given it to full-time journalists rather than people doing commentary like me. I'd vote for full-time journalists too!).

Sit Down Like I Asked You Too: 8 Year Old with ADHD Handcuffed

In Kentucky, from the NYT:

The A.C.L.U. released what it called a “disturbing video” showing the boy, who it said weighs about 52 pounds, crying as the resource officer handcuffed his arms at the biceps behind his back. In the video, the officer tells the boy, “You don’t get to swing at me like that.”
The boy has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; the girl has the disorder and other “special needs,” according to the lawsuit. It says both children are protected by the Americans With Disabilities Act, and alleges that the school resource officer, who it says shackled the boy once and the girl twice in 2014, violated both the disabilities act and the children’s constitutional rights.

Mother Jones adds:

Two videos accompanying the lawsuit show a November 2014 incident in which Sumner tells an 8-year-old Latino student, identified as S.R. in the lawsuit, to "Sit down like I asked you to" while handcuffing him as the child cries and expresses that he's in pain. Earlier that year, Sumner allegedly detained L.G., a 9-year-old African American student, in the back of his cruiser, after she disrupted the classroom and was requested to be escorted to an in-school suspension room. The lawsuit also details two subsequent incidents in which Sumner handcuffed L.G., one of which resulted in L.G. going to a hospital for psychiatric assessment and treatment.

I wrote on the #cultofcompliance in our schools here, for Al Jazeera:

For those like Kayleb who live at the intersection of race and disability, these manifestations of what I call the cult of compliance can destroy lives. It threatens anyone who might fall outside the dominant norms. The cultural forces that punish diversity aren’t new. In the past, however, such perceived deviance might have met with bullying from peers or various forms of exclusion by teachers and other staffers. Today, jail beckons.

There are two major factors at work. First, the rise of zero-tolerance policies strips school officials of the ability to exercise common sense, leading security expert Bruce Schneier to call them “zero-discretion” policies. Such policies have long been criticizedas being unfair to marginalized groups of all sorts. Second, SROs have increasingly been deployed on school grounds over the last few decades, a process that keeps intensifying after high-profile school shootings such as Columbine (1999) and Sandy Hook (2012). Meanwhile, SROs are experiencing mission creep. While de-escalation is usually the optimal response to challenging behavior situations, many teachers and administrators instead respond by calling in an SRO to apply restraints and arrest the student, thereby starting the process of criminalization. That’s how the school-to-prison pipeline begins.

#CultofCompliance - Police Attack Man Having a Stroke

I missed this story of a police officer tasing a man who was having a stroke. This is from May. The officer has resigned.

Sandra Bland and Disability

When Brian Encina slammed Sandra Bland's head into the ground, this happened:

Encinia: Get on the ground!
Bland: For a traffic signal!
Encinia: You are yanking around, when you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.
Bland: Don’t it make you feel real good don’t it? A female for a traffic ticket. Don’t it make you feel good Officer Encinia? You're a real man now. You just slammed me, knocked my head into the ground. I got epilepsy, you motherfucker.
Encinia: Good. Good.
Bland: Good? Good?
Female officer: You should have thought about it before you started resisting.

Here is Sandra Bland's booking form. The New York Times says:

The intake forms also said that Ms. Bland was taking an antiseizure medication, Keppra, for epilepsy. The drug comes with a warning label approved by the Food and Drug Administration that includes a long list of possible side effects, including depression, aggressive behavior and thoughts of suicide. It was unclear whether she had access to the drug while in jail.

A friend of mine notes that three days without one's anti-seizure medication might well affect one's mental state.

Here's a really important note from the editor at "This Bridge Called Our Health" (A Trans-Inclusive, Intersectional, Sex-Positive Health & Healing Blog by & for Women and Femmes of Color of all Genders.):

I think some of the discourse emerging from these ‪#‎IfIDieInPoliceCustody ‬&‪ #‎WhatHappenedToSandraBland‬ conversations are dangerously limited. Folks are saying “Sandra Bland was mentally sound” and “Black women like her would never commit suicide”, etc. Not only are we upholding precarious and dehumanizing ‘strong black woman’ archetypes that neglect to hold Black women in the fullness and breadth that we embody, but our failure to operate within a mental health & disability justice framework by making the assertion that Sandra Bland was ‘mentallly sound’ in order to prove that she did not commit suicide is a dangerous narrative that both devalues black people who navigate mental health difficulties and trauma and also erases their/our narratives from the conversation.

Stevens, the author, continues:

The carefully calculated last moments of Sandra Bland’s life of getting pulled over for a minor traffic violation on her way to work, being brutalized by law enforcement officers, and subsequently seized and held in captivity for being a Black woman is what killed Sandra Bland. THE STATE DID THIS TO HER. Whether she committed suicide or not THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE.

Race occupies the center of this narrative. But intersectionality demands we think about gender too, and that's happening. And then we discuss class. And perhaps region (Texas racism vs Chicago racism). And so on. Disability needs to be part of this discussion.

At the moment that Bland identified as epileptic, FWIW, the ADA kicks in. It doesn't mean she can't be arrested, but it does mean she has the right to reasonable accommodations. When she spoke about her mental health at intake, again, the ADA kicks in. She can be incarcerated, but not without reasonable accommodations.

Don't erase her self-disclosed identity as a disabled person. And adding her status as a disabled person to the discussion doesn't erase her identity as a black woman.

And none of that excuses the state.

Neurodiversity, Colonialism, and the Cult of Compliance

Neurodiversity is a powerful concept, taking the ideas of intellectual and psychiatric disability and wrestling them into the diversity narratives. In the diversity narratives, we don't try to cure or fix, but to accept, understand, accommodate, assist, and hopefully eventually move to a place where we recognize same-ness in our differences. Bringing disability into the diversity conversation is good for disability rights movement, but it's better for the diversity movement, as disability is a universal aspect of the human condition. As my friend K. says - disability isn't a niche group; it's us.

Which brings me to this essay by Sean Donohue on neurodiversity (and pagan thought).

My senses take in torrents of information that sometimes overwhelm my capacity to process them, making me miss things that would seem obvious to most, but at other times (and sometimes simultaneously) make me aware of subtle presences in the world that elude others’ attention. My brain process processes information in non-linear ways that make it easy for me to perceive patterns and connections in the world but difficult to complete a step-by-step process like paying the electrical bill. I have a complex relationship with language — sometimes loquacious and poetic, other times completely non-verbal. When I speak in metaphor, people tend to take me literally, and when I speak literally people often assume that I am speaking metaphorically, because my baseline assumptions about the world differ from those of the vast majority of people around me, and they always have.

What this essay then does is explore the ways that colonialism attacks neurodiversity, what's threatening about autistic thought to the colonial mindset, and how to work against it. I think the writing is excellent and it's a very different approach to what I've been calling the cult of compliance.

Compliance is an important word in autistic discourse, because of a huge, and controversial, therapeutic emphasis on compliance training (finding ways to force autistic people into certain kinds of typical behavior). More on that another day. For now, it's focus on colonialism (I think you could write similarly about neoliberalism).

It follows that the remaking of the world requires a remaking of language — something the colonizers understood. Capitalism depends on commodification, the process of turning parts of the world into objects which can be traded in the marketplace. But you can’t commodify a forest or a mountain if people call it by a name which recognizes it as alive. Patriarchy depends on the enforcement of gender roles. But you can’t enforce patriarchal gender roles within a culture that has no words that denote gender, such as the Tlingit, unless you rob people of their language.
So the process of colonization requires either a process of forced conversion and inculturation — the liberal alternative — or a process of eradication. In both Ireland and North America, British capitalism, engaged in both. But forced inculturation was more cost efficient than mass slaughter and also left the colonizers with a labor force to extract value from stolen land.

 Worth reading, I think.

The Shooting of Jeremy Hutton and Law Enforcement Narratives

In 2010, Jeremy Hutton, a 17 year-old-boy with Down syndrome, was shot by a police officer who claimed Hutton was driving right at him. That claim held up in the post-incident review.

Here's a video showing that's untrue (original source), the officer was safely to the side.

A video of police shooting a car driven by a boy with Down Syndrome. The video contradicts police narratives that the boy was deliberately driving straight at the deputy.
Posted by David M. Perry on Wednesday, April 29, 2015

We cannot trust police narratives, even if 99% of them are true, because the other 1% involves life and death. Moreover, all video must be made accessible to all parties in a case.

More to come on this case.

Cult of Compliance - Fully Restrained Woman Tased to Death

This is pretty much as bad as it gets. It's like a scene from a dystopian novel, as bio-hazard suit clad officers take a schizophrenic woman, one who they have already handcuffed, and tase her to death, killing her as she screams in horror.

Except that it happened.

A mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times, incident reports obtained by The Washington Post show.
Natasha McKenna initially cooperated with deputies, placed her hands through her cell door food slot and agreed to be handcuffed, the reports show. But McKenna, whose deteriorating mental state had caused Fairfax to seek help for her, then began trying to fight her way out of the cuffs, repeatedly screaming, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!” the reports show.
Then, six members of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks, arrived and placed a wildly struggling 130-pound McKenna into full restraints, their reports state. But when McKenna wouldn’t bend her knees so she could be placed into a wheeled restraint chair, a lieutenant delivered four 50,000-volt shocks from the Taser, enabling the other deputies to strap her into the chair, the reports show.

And here's the defense:

Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid declined to comment on the case but defended the use of a stun gun on a restrained prisoner, saying it was “a means that is often useful to ensure the safety of a person” rather than using physical force to gain compliance. She said stun guns were used “occasionally” on prisoners who are already restrained.

I know there are cases in which this is true. However, I'd like to know how often these officers try de-escalation and patience before tasing restrained prisoners into compliance. My guess - almost never.

And experts agree.

Numerous experts said the use of a stun gun on a fully restrained prisoner was an unreasonable use of force, particularly in a jail setting where a person is unlikely to flee. They also said Tasers are not recommended for use on the mentally ill, that even the Taser manufacturer warns against using them on people in a state of “excited delirium,” and that using a stun gun more than three times is thought to be above the threshold for use on a single person.

The piece continues to describe a very troubling series of events that, undoubtedly, presented the officers with many difficult choices. They made the wrong ones.

And here's the meta story - we need a mental heath system that does not place people like McKenna in prisons.

Cult of Compliance: The Death of Anthony Hill

"The [naked] man who appeared mentally ill ran at the officer and ignored demands to stop before the officer shot him twice."

Hill and his parents. Used by permission
of the picture's owner.

Yesterday, in DeKalb, GA, a police officer responded to a call about a naked, unarmed, man at an

apartment complex. He was clearly in a mental health crisis. He ran at the officer and the officer killed him.

His name was Anthony Hill. Here's more detail about his life and death. He was an Air Force veteran, a musician, and a recent critic of police violence. He also had bipolar disorder.

Readers of this blog know the story all too well, but there are points worth emphasizing. Each death operates within the general trend of the cult of compliance and the war on the unpredictable, but each death is a tragedy in its own specific details.

Hall was naked, so there's no question whether or not he was armed. Instead, we have an officer, in admittedly a split-second situation, ordering a naked man to stop, then firing when he didn't. This is another case in which, as I wrote about for Kajieme Powell and other deaths, the police officer is demanding that the disabled person choose between not being disabled or getting shot.

There are three key takeaways that I'd like to offer this morning. 

1. Failure to obey commands while in mental health crisis is not, by itself, a capital crime.

2. Failure to obey commands for anyone is not, by itself, a capital crime.

3. When assessing this incident, we need to ask why the officer ended up in this position both tactically and strategically.

For one and two, we have to ask officers to make split-second evaluations of risk. Hall didn't have a weapon, but was he big? Was he charging or running away? Was he screaming? At what point does any risk of bodily harm justify the use of deadly force? These are questions I can't answer in the specific case, but I do believe that police generally are too quick to use lethal force. In many ways, this is a learned response to policing a heavily armed society, but Hall was naked, so it's not like he was reaching for his belt. 

Still, we don't fix this problem just by giving individual officers better training. Cedric Alexander, director of the county public safety department, said this:

DeKalb officers receive some training in dealing with the mentally ill while in the academy before they join the force, Alexander said, but on Monday he said perhaps the training needed to be bolstered.
“That is becoming more and more apparent,” he said.

More individualized training for officers is an unmitigated good. It is, however, also a limited solution. As with the death of Kristiana Coignard and Charley Robinet, along with so many others, we have to expand our lens and not look only at the moment of death.

What I want to know is why, in a situation that so clearly involved mental health issues - I mean, a naked man crawling around acting erratically is a mental health call - this officer ended up in the position where he killed Hall. Where is the crisis intervention team? Where are the mental health professionals? What teamwork has already been put in place between law enforcement and mental health?

De-escalation and crisis training are good. They might have kept Hill alive. I hold the officer responsible for shooting an unarmed naked man. But I want to know what the whole department, the whole state, is doing to prevent such deaths. The solutions have to be structural.

The death of "Africa" at the hands of the LAPD

Yesterday was the day of mourning for people with disabilities killed by their caregivers. I stood in the cold with a small group of people at the University of Chicago, candles mostly blown out by the wind, reading names. I noticed that some of the names included individuals killed by law enforcement, and while I think that's not the intent of the day, I mourn their deaths. We might still be standing their reading names if we had a master list of these kinds of cases.

We mourn. And we draw attention to their deaths as a way of remembering them and demanding no more. And then there are more. And we say stop. And the deaths do not stop. But neither do we. It was a hard night last night and a grim morning of writing, but thank you for reading, thank you for bearing witness, and thank you for continuing to say no more.

Here's one more:

"Africa," an African-American, unarmed, psychiatrically disabled, homeless man was killed by police in LA on Sunday. I have a piece filed on some of the issues raised by this killing. Note the intersection of factors - race, poverty, ability. Once the LAPD demanded compliance, a violent outcome was almost assured.

There's a graphic video posted below. It's awful and DO NOT FEEL OBLIGATED TO WATCH IT.

What I will be writing about today are the moments before the shooting, before Africa is tackled, before he allegedly reached for a gun. He's unarmed and clearly in mental health crisis (perhaps triggered by the officers charging in on him). That's where our accountability efforts need to focus. Once we reach the trigger point, it's all too late.

Here's the video. Again, it's very disturbing. Be careful with yourself.

UPDATE: the original poster made his video private. Here's a link to a youtube video. Not embedding because I don't want it to autoplay for you.

Lavall Hall - The Cult of Compliance Claims a New Victim

It started, as it so often does, with a family member calling 911 for help for a loved one in mental

health crisis. Lavall Hall was outside, in Miami Gardens, when police arrived. He had a broomstick.

Miami Gardens police officers Peter Ehrlich and Eddo Trimino fired their Tasers at Lavall Hall after he struck them with the metal end of a broomstick. The Tasers had no effect. Then they chased Hall for about half a block before he turned and charged at them. As Hall neared, Trimino fired his gun five times, striking Hall twice, once in the arm, and the kill shot to his chest. Hall was still alive and “struggling” when the officers handcuffed him and placed him faced down on the street. He died moments later.

Note - He was running away and the police chased. Then when he turned, they were too close to maintain space. As I wrote about for the death of Kristiana Coignard and Kajieme Powell, the minute we enter a situation where the police have decided that the suspect must obey commands or be shot, shooting is inevitable. Here's Hall's death as described by the chief [my emphasis]:

That version of Sunday morning’s violent encounter between Lavall Hall, 25, and the two Miami Gardens cops came from Miami Gardens Police Chief Stephen Johnson, as he addressed the media at police headquarters Tuesday night.

“Tremino encountered the subject and gave him several commands. He continued to be combative,” said Johnson. “They did the best they could.”

They may well have done the best they could. But they didn't do enough. 

As Hall headed east on Northwest 191st Street, Tremino gave chase. “Mr. Hall at that time began to physically attack the officer,” Johnson said.

After hitting Tremino in the head with the broomstick, Johnson said Tremino fired his Taser. It had no effect. Hall headed south on Northwest Second Court, about half a block from his home. Tremino continued to chase. As Hall turned and charged toward the officer, Johnson said Tremino fired his weapon five times.

“He gave him several commands,” said Johnson.

Ehrlich was treated at the scene. Tremino went to the hosptial and received stitches. Both officers are on paid administrative leave. Johnson said both officers are veterans who have received crisis intervention training.

CIT is useful, but it's not a panacea. Maintain distance, call backup, be ready to gang tackle even if it means being hit with a broom handle.

These officers will be found innocent of any wrong doing (let alone criminal charges), but once it became a comply-or-die situation, that's a death sentence for people with psychiatric disabilities who cannot comply.

And so Lavall Hall is dead. Last week it was a man throwing rocks in Pasco. The week before, Coignard.

Who will die next week because police insist that people in mental health crisis be normal or be killed?

#CultOfCompliance - Wheelchair Users Attacked by Police

Recently, video has surfaced of police trying to throw a man in a wheelchair from his chair. Allegedly, the individual ran over the officer's foot.


Here are some other incidents worth remembering. And these are just the ones caught on tape.

• Brian Sterner thrown from his wheelchair by an officer who thought he might be faking (I write about this as the "pencil test" for wheelchair users).
• Dwight Harris thrown from his chair in DC in 2011. He was allegedly intoxicated and not complying.
• Indiana police officer knocks Nicholas Kincade from his wheelchair for bumping into an officer.
• Here's an Oakland school security officer beating and throwing a student from his chair. He was arrested and fired [Note - Not technically "police" but school culture, I argue, is part of the broader cult of compliance. If you are new to the blog, start here for that concept].

That's just five that happened to be caught on video. How many more are out there?

There are circumstances in which a person in a wheelchair might indeed threaten an officer. Wheelchair users are human. They can carry firearms. They can break the law. I do not believe, based on what we know, any of these incidents meet that standard. I would suggest the following guideline - if you, as a law enforcement officer, would not consider breaking the individual's legs, also do not knock them from their chair.

If a wheelchair user does something requiring a law-enforcement response, such as intentionally rolling over a foot (those chairs are heavy), two choices emerge. 1) Arrest/cite them. 2) Let it go, the way one might at a little nudge from a shoulder as someone brushes by you. There is no option #3 - dehumanize them.

Because that's what these acts are - dehumanizing and intentionally so, stripping away the one tool which allows a wheelchair user real independence. They say - your ability to be a human is contingent on our say-so.

And as always, notice the intersections. It isn't necessary to be black and a wheelchair user to be victimized, but when race and disability intersect, things get dangerous fast.

Disabled Black Man Holding Spoon Killed by Police. Racists Cheer.

In Texarkana on Monday, a woman called 911 (click for the call) at around 2 AM to report a person in her garage. The woman was frightened and said that she heard banging on the windows from the person in the garage. A police office came to investigate, and found an African-American man holding something in his hand. The officer said the individual came at him in an aggressive manner, and so fired at him, killing him.

The man was Dennis Grigsby. From the article, "Family members say Grigsby had mental problems." He was holding a spoon, the officer said with the handle up, and the officer thought it was a knife.

The local NBC affiliate reports:

"Grigsby then allegedly made an aggressive move towards the officer while carrying a metal object. The officer said he ordered Grigsby to stop but he continued to approach, forcing the officer to fire a shot into Grigsby's chest."

His mother said.

"He was real sweet. He would never hurt anybody. He had a mental illness," said Evelyn Grigsby, Dennis Grigsby's Mother.
She was asleep inside their home when the shooting happened and she says she didn't know her son had left home.

I don't have any information on Dennis' disability, but readers of this blog know how these stories play out, because they happen again and again and again. In this case, Dennis wandered from his house, ended up in the garage, and then started making noise. Perhaps he was trying to get out and was confused. Perhaps he merely was interested in the spoon and the windows. We don't know.

The police officer demanded he comply and shot him when he didn't. It's fairly clear to me that the police officer followed his training, although a man alone in a garage with a metal object is, I believe, someone you could back away from instead of forcing compliance. That's a police strategy point I come back to a lot. There are often other options unless someone is in imminent danger, but we lack the details to judge this one right now.

UPDATE: Notice, though, how the police are reporting the story. Scott Eric Kaufman (of RawStory, but in an email conversation, and quoted with permission), said: "And really, "shank of the spoon"? They're pre-weaponizing it to make the shooting more plausible."

So, another person with disabilities killed by police, as is true of at least 50% of all people killed by police. This one had a spoon. Whether or not the officer should be held accountable is a question I can't answer, but I can demand that this be considered a tragedy and that our thoughts be with Dennis and his family.

That's not, of course, what's happening, at least not in some places. I want to focus now on the combination of hate, mistrust, ignorance, and ableism in this Facebook thread from the local news, in which some white folks show just how much they either don't get it or don't care. You can click on their profiles, see their beautiful children, their boats, their love of football, their pretty lives, all while reading their lack of empathy for Dennis.

It's a morass of pro-violence speech, reinforcing the #cultofcompliance, saying that if you don't obey a cop, you deserve to die. One says she feels so sorry ... for the cop. Few express sadness for the victim. Many bluster with bravado, saying that if someone broke into their home, they'd kill them before the cops had a chance (and I believe them). Lots of comment trashing liberals and the liberal media. Lots of comments linking this killing to Garner and Brown and so many others.

It's loaded with ableism, people saying that if Grigsby was so "mentally challenged," he should have been in a home. Here's a sampling.

Brandy Thorn If he was that mental then he should have been in a home not someone else home!

Jo Ann Hill Odom Thank you Brian , if he was that mentally challenged , why was he not in a facility that could take care of him ? Does not make sense that he was able to make the decision to even break into someone's house if that mentally ill . Mental illness is a very bad thing for any family to deal with and sometimes they can not control the person with the mental illness because they get out of control , so I do understand the hurt that his parents and family are feeling ! I do understand both sides if this story and I think Channel 12 is doing a great job with this story cause they are covering both sides of it with all the details they have ! We have to have officers on the street to protect us ! If not what would this world be ???? Just saying ......

Dakotah Klein Put you damn hands up!!! It's not that hard. Even go to the ground. You retards wanna play badasses till you get 3 in your chest.

And then there's this.

Ray says - call a crackhead if you hate cops. 

Stuart, in what I think is a libertarian critique, shows a picture of what is likely Nazi (or other fascist execution), saying "Never forget that this was legal at the time ...what unjust actions has your government codified into action?"

Then Kenny says that everyone on death row should be treated this way, pistol to the back of the head. Save the taxpayers some money. 

This is the divide in America. That even in a situation when police kill a black man with intellectual disabilities who was only holding a spoon, there's no sympathy, no empathy, and certainly no second thoughts. The Cult of Compliance lives on in these people. 

Restraints - Handcuffs on 6 year old is a sign of failure and #cultofcompliance

In Georgia, a 6 year old with special needs was placed in handcuffs:

When a Georgia mother arrived at her 6-year-old son’s school last week in response to a call that he was misbehaving, she was greeted by a shocking surprise: Her first grader was in handcuffs.

Lakaisha Reid’s 6-year-old son Patrick is a special needs student at Pine Ridge Elementary in Stone Mountain, Ga. On the morning of December 5, Reid got a call from the school asking her to pick up her son and bring him home early. “They said he wasn’t having a good day,” Reid tells Yahoo Parenting. “My husband and I walked into the school and heard my son yelling and screaming.” The couple found him in a room on his knees with his hands cuffed behind his back. The school resource officer was standing behind Patrick, holding him in place.

In Washington, a 6 year old with special needs has been told he can't ride the bus without, basically, a straitjacket. 

Dean's son, Wyatt, is a first grade student the Hood Canal School in Skokomish. The 6-year old was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, a behavioral issue, when he was younger, Dean says, and has had discipline issues on the school bus.

The family now faces a tough decision: allow Wyatt to be restrained on the bus or find alternate transportation to school.

"It just flat-out violates everything as far as any civil rights I would think anybody would ever have," Dean said.

The district calls the restraints a "safety vest," and says it only uses them after multiple discussions with both a child and the parents, Superintendent Shawn Batstone said Tuesday. Parents must sign off on use of the restraints before they are deployed.

Behavioral issues can be really challenging for everyone, including the child in question. I don't know all the specifics of either case. I wonder, though, why there isn't a 1:1 aide for Wyatt on the bus? Why use a transportation system that requires the bus driver to do anything but drive? My son does not have specific behavioral disorders, but for the first year he had an aide on the bus every day (we put him on the regular bus as a means of increasing his degree of inclusion).

Mostly, I just want to say this: Any intervention, accommodation, or response to special needs that ends up with handcuffs on a six year old is a FAILED INTERVENTION.

John T Williams - Deaf First Nations Woodcarver Killed by Police (from 2010)

This story was just brought to my attention in the comment from "Mel" in my previous post.

In 2010, John T. Williams, a Native Alaskan woodcarver, was walking down the street holding a 3-inch folding knife and a piece of wood.

Officer Ian Birk approached him from behind, firearm drawn, and ordered Williams to drop the knife.  Williams kept walking, so Birk shot him in the back four times. Backup arrived, and then they approached the body and cuffed him. As near as I can tell, no first aid was applied. Video is below.

Birk was not charged.

After an inquest into the Seattle police shooting last month, four of eight jurors said they believed Officer Ian Birk thought Williams posed a threat during the Aug. 30 incident. Three couldn't determine whether he did. Only one juror believed Williams actually posed a threat.

Witnesses to the shooting testified that Williams -- a heavy drinker who had mental health problems, according to family members -- wasn't threatening the officer and that Birk may have fired in haste. Birk, however, maintained that he feared for his life and had to shoot Williams. 

When you watch the video, it will be hard for me to understand how an armed officer approaching a slowly walking man in his 50s from behind could justify being afraid. But this is the pattern. No one can prove whether or not the man was afraid (although "reasonably" afraid is, as I understand it, the legal standard).

Here's why this case matters especially to me. Williams was deaf in one ear. He was, according to a family member, wearing earbuds at the time as well. He couldn't hear Birk. And because he couldn't hear, he was killed, and the killer escaped without criminal charge.

The police review board did find the killing unjustified, Birk resigned, and the city settled a lawsuit for 1.5 million dollars.

This is the cult of compliance. This is the "be normal" or die mentality, which demands that each of us comply in a "normal" way or be deemed a threat. Mostly the cops get away with it. Sometimes they are held accountable. Rarely they are charged with criminal conduct.

It happened last week in Bessemer, AL. It's going to happen next week too, somewhere.

Presume Compliance - Miller, Hunt, Crawford

In the world of Down syndrome, we talk about "presuming competence" (hey, go buy a shirt!). That instead of "awareness," we'd like to see a shift to a general presumption of competence first. More on this in pieces to come.

I've been working, though, on ways of re-describing the strategic problems with police procedure as it feeds the cult of compliance. Police operate on a presuming non-compliance basis, so as soon as they get any evidence to confirm that presumption, they too often strike.

What would "presume compliance" policing look like? How dangerous would it be? I keep thinking that to roll back the proto-police state, we have to ask police to assume more risk, and that's going to be a very hard argument to make.

Here are three stories, though, of when presuming non-compliance leads to fatalities.

On Saturday a deaf man was shot and killed by Florida deputies, allegedly because he didn't comply with commands quickly enough. Here's the story:

Hernandez, 35, fired his service weapon, killing Miller, because he perceived a threat, a sheriff's office spokesman said.
The sheriff's office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are investigating the shooting, and would not release further details.
Miller's 25-year-old son witnessed his father's death. He told the Ledger that his dad, who only had two percent of his hearing, was further impaired because his hearing aid was broken at the time. He denies that his father was a threat.
“I kept telling them that he can't hear them,” the 25-year-old, who's also named Edward Miller, told the Ledger. “I kept telling them he can't understand them.”
The son told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that Hernandez shot his father six times while his dad sat inside a vehicle in the tow yard.

Meanwhile, there's John Crawford. The surveillance video of his death has gone viral just as the Grand Jury has declined to convict the officers that shot him. Attention has rightly focused on the 911 call in which Ronald Ritchie told police Crawford was waving the gun around, including at children.

Crawford wasn't. He was on the phone, distracted by the call, and likely didn't hear the police until just seconds before they shot him to death.

Then there was Darrien Hunt, the man with a sword shot in Utah as he ran away. Most recent reports think he was cosplaying from . The Guardian says [my emphasis]:

Attention was swiftly drawn online to Hunt’s remarkable resemblance as he walked around on the morning of 10 September to Mugen, a swordsman character in the short-lived Japanese anime series Samurai Champloo. The Comic Con convention had also taken place in Salt Lake City, about 35 miles to the north, the weekend before the shooting.

Hunt’s aunt, Cindy Moss, previously told the Guardian that a witness to the confrontation with police had told the family that Hunt “had his earbuds in, and was kind of doing spins and stuff, like pretending he’s a samurai”.

These three stories are obviously very different. Miller was white, Hunt mixed race but appeared black, and Crawford black. Crawford had a fake gun and a lying 911 call (which is probably criminal in Ohio, I'm told). Hunt had a sword and was acting "weird." Miller had been shouting a lot and that was interpreted as anger, rather than hearing loss.

The differences matter and what I am about to say does not erase them.

These are also the same story. A man with a permanent or temporary hearing impairment - deaf, phone, earbuds - gets the attention of the police, doesn't respond to verbal commands quickly, and so the presumption of non-compliance leads to death.

Being deaf in front of the cops is dangerous. That's long been clear. But just as we all move in and sometimes out of different stages of disability, putting on earbuds or listening to a phone call also renders you less likely to process verbal commands, functioning like hearing loss in terms of creating a vulnerability to a trigger-happy law enforcement officer.

The only solution that I can see is to change the strategic approach on a fundamental level to "presume compliance."

#CultOfCompliance - How a White Guard Decides It's Funny to Fake-Frisk Black Boy with Down Syndrome

Yesterday, in something of a rage, I wrote the story of an African-American boy with Down syndrome who was heading to his first day of school in Syracuse. His parents were with him and, as they entered the school, they paused to take a picture.

A white security guard intervened and pushed the boy against the wall to 'assume the position' as if he were being frisked.

"Wait, wait, wait, hold on,'' Brandiss Pearson [the boy's mother] recalls the sentry saying. Then the sentry turned Brandon to face the wall and lifted Brandon's hands above his head on the wall, as if to be frisked, she said.

"And he starts laughing and says, 'Now take the picture, he's in the right position,' '' Pearson recalled.

This is racism, ableism, and authoritarianism. Racism because the "right position" for a black boy in this guard's eyes is against the wall. Ableism because he's relying on the fact that Brandon has Down syndrome to make it funny - indeed, Brandon thought it was all a game. To me, that intensifies the awfulness of it.

Authoritarianism because this is one way that the cult of compliance has entered our schools.

I don't want to overlook this last point as I wallow in the anger at the racism and ableism. Schools are not militarized yet, not in the ways our police forces are, but they are increasingly a part of our compliance-driven state.

Within the school, the guard has intensifying power to control the space and control the bodies - especially the bodies belonging to people of color - all in the name of safety. And sure, safety is important, but as Bruce Schneier says, 1) We're bad at assessing risks and 2) all security comes with trade-offs.

There are consequences when we fill our schools with guards, with metal detectors, with draconian dress codes, with zero tolerance policies, with the constant drumbeat of fear that your school or your kids' schools or your neighborhood school is beset by armed gangs ready to do battle or psychopaths ready to commit a massacre! There are consequences and we have not properly assessed the trade-offs here between security and not just loss of freedom, but loss of sense of self-worth and the price of empowering men like this security guard.

Our schools do need security, sadly. What they don't need is a demand for total compliance. They need guards who understand their job is to protect and empower the students as they chase their future, not control, not dominate, not bully.

This guard is a bully. He's the same as the kids who dumped feces and urine over an autistic boy who thought he was doing the ice bucket challenge. He's the same as the people who sent mean texts to a girl with seizures. He's the same as the "teachers" who use electrical shocks to "control" people with autism. He's the same.

But he has a kind of power in the school that he's used to exercising, and it seemed like it would be funny to him, and if it's funny to him, surely it's funny to the parents and boy too.

The incident is disgusting. The guard will likely be fired (he's been suspended). If he talks to the press, he'll express regret, he'll say that he was just trying to make a joke and didn't think about it. I believe him that he didn't think. Such acts of petty control have become normal, and if Brandon didn't have Down syndrome, if the guard just pushed another black boy up to assume the position, we probably wouldn't hear about it.

I'm going to end with a quote from Alice Goffman's controversial book On the Run. One thing that even her critics agree is that she did a good job showing the consequences of police abuse, not just on the people arrested, but on the whole community. She writes:

I saw children give up running and simply stick their hands behind their back, as if in handcuffs; push their body up against a car without being asked; or lie flat on the ground and put their hands over their head. The children yelled, “I’m going to lock you up! I’m going to lock you up, and you ain’t never coming home!” I once saw a six-year-old pull another child’s pants down to do a “cavity search.”

These are the trade-offs of our pursuit of perfect safety and total compliance - Brandon against the wall, the six-year-old pretending to do a cavity search.

UPDATE: The guard was fired. That's good. The question is whether the school admin will also think about the culture that enables such a guard to exist in the first place.

#CultOfCompliance - Thought Crime and Involuntary Commitment

Today's stories about compliance take a different spin. Thankfully, no one is being shot or tasered by the police in these examples. Two men have, however, been involuntarily committed for what they might do in the future.

One is an English professor. His case has not made the news but he was involuntarily committed and tweeted about it. I understand there has been some misinformation and definitely misinformed speculation (I was responsible for some of it). It's put the issues of involuntary commitment front and center, especially given the next case.

The other wrote science fiction set centuries in the future. He worked at a school. His story was set at a future school, beset by violence. And then he was taken for a mandatory emergency psych eval, his home and school were searched for weapons and drugs, and as far as I know he remains un-free. More details below.

When police justify violence, they often speak as follows: I told the person to comply, they didn't comply, so I felt there was an imminent danger to me, I felt at risk or threatened, so I had no choice but to shoot/taser/beat the individual. I'm sure I have hundreds of those justifications in my file by now.

In my work on the cult of compliance (click here for the overview), though, I am arguing that such incidents reflect a broader cultural veneration of compliance, a decreasing tolerance for risk, and the rise of authoritarian strains more generally in our society. As people with disabilities often behave in unpredictable ways, a compliance-driven society will tolerate such unpredictability less and less, which is my point of entry into the broader issue.

Involuntary commitment is predicated on incarcerating someone for actions that they have not taken yet. It's based on predicting imminent danger. As such, it's subjective (though there are medical requirements), it's been historically subject to immense abuse, and it's one of the topics on which my research is going to focus over the next few months.

Involuntary commitment is an important tool for law enforcement and mental health treatment. The problem is that it has frequently been abused as a way of enforcing social norms or even for eugenic purposes. Deviancy often gets classified as a mental illness, mental illness gets classified as a danger to society, a danger to society requires incarceration, and into institutions the deviant is forced.

Here's an excellent overview of the history of involuntary commitment. People familiar with Queer history are very much aware of the dangers here, because homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder subject to psychiatric treatment and commitment and such things as shock therapy (i.e. torture to remove homosexuality). Here's an upbeat piece on "danger" redefined, saying things are pretty good now (and they are much better). Here's a consumer factsheet on your involuntary commitment rights from HHS (that word consumer baffled me).

Alicia Curtis, the author of the overview, notes some of the complexities of the situation. She writes:

Dr. Paul Chodoff, who has written several articles on the topic, points out that the focus of the involuntary commitment law on "imminent harm" as the main criterion for commitment, leads psychiatrists to feel frustrated that their work is aimed more at serving the police state in keeping dangerous people off the streets than in carrying out the aims of psychiatry. He argues that the involuntary commitment law should be broadened to allow commitment of those with a mental illness who need hospitalization due to the severe state of their illness, whether they are dangerous or not.

Chodoff is right to some extent. For a long time, people with psychiatric disabilities (for illness vs disability, see here. When I use "illness" I am intentionally mimicking common use, not endorsing it) were routinely committed. Then we as a society moved away from that model, leading in some cases to better inclusion in communities. In too many cases, though, it's led to homelessness and the rise of prisons as the de-facto institution for the mentally ill.

Moreover, every time there is a mass shooting in which "mental illness" is involved, politicians and law enforcement call for looser involuntary commitment laws (see Sandy Hook). In fact, right after that event, a teacher was committed for buying a gun and claiming that the government was behind the massacre. Maybe he was a danger; I don't know. He denies it. And I don't agree with his conspiracy theory, of course. Still, I see involuntary commitment function, in many cases, as a tool of social control. And that worries me.

So these are the debates. What is the best way to manage situations when we perceive a risk of harm to self or other by someone who cannot, by themselves, seek help? How can we avoid the abuses of the past?

Here's the recent story.

Patrick McLaw writes science fiction. He teaches, well, taught, language arts at a school in Cambridge, MD. One book, The Insurrectionist, tells the story a huge school shooting in the 29th century (i.e. 900 years from now). McLaw is black. He is 23. He writes under an alias.

As near as I can tell, based on reports, he was suspended from his job, banned from school property, and involuntarily committed. Law enforcement swept the school and his home, finding no weapons or explosives.

And then there's this.

With school starting Tuesday, some parents tell WBOC they are concerned about safety, but both Wagner and Phillips said there is nothing to worry about.
"There will be a Cambridge Police Department presence at Mace's Lane middle school for as long as we deem it necessary," Wagner said.
"I think that the various police agencies that we have, working in conjunction with the board have a handle on the situation and I think we're going to have a safe and happy opening day of school tomorrow," Phillips said in an interview Monday with WBOC.

Reaction to the case from Reason, DailyKOS, The Atlantic. There's been lots of links made to Soviet practice of incarcerating dissident artists, but I think that's not what's going on here.

Rather, this is about a demand for thought-compliance. To think about a school massacre is to create the possibility that one might do it. Any evidence of violence must be met with overwhelming response - loss of freedom, loss of job, public exposure.

And then the kids can have a "safe and happy opening day of school" in our zero tolerance, and highly compliant, world.

Sunday Roundup - Police Violence, Gender Norming, Dissertations

It's been a busy week of writing and I hope you are enjoying this holiday weekend.

Most of the week was spent on the cult of compliance and police violence. I started with a piece on CNN on 4 police killings of people with mental health issues. I argued that we need to think about psychiatric disability - disability comes with protections and the need for accommodation - rather than illness. As usual, I added some blog followups.

I also wrote a post about four stories of police violence for "Living while Black." Black men attacked for sitting, not walking, raising hands, and keeping hands in pockets. One of the story also involves autism. Thank you to everyone who read it here or one of the sites on which I shared it.

I published an essay called "Save the Dissertation" (it saved me) on Chronicle Vitae, with a followup on the blog. There's a lot of talk in Higher Ed about reshaping graduate education, and no doubt a lot of reform is needed. But for me, the dissertation process, in all its turmoil, is how we become scholars. If we want to come up with new ways to do this, that's fine. We don't, however, get to test it out on grad students. Senior scholars at R1 schools - you go first. Then apply for grants, sabbaticals, chairs, etc. with the results and let us know what happens. 

I had two essays. The fun one was on Huffington Post and was about my approach to "parenting against the grain."  My daughter got an Avengers backpack. Some boys doubted it was hers. I also wrote a blog about my son and gender norming, and the complexities there (due to Down syndrome).

I also published a book review. It's got 2 errors I'm trying to have fixed. Overall, publishing blogs on HuffPo has been fun, but I'm not sure I get a lot more out of it than writing here. More on that next week.

#CultofCompliance - Living while Black

Here are four stories literally just from last night (they happened at different times, but made news yesterday). They illustrate the way racism enables and is enabled by the cult of compliance. The cult provides an intersectional lens in which race and class dominate the middle, with disability not far behind. When these categories overlap in a single individual, trouble beckons.

Incident 1: Sitting while black in a public space. 

The African-American man was sitting outside a store, waiting for his kids to get out of school. The store clerk got nervous - a black man sitting! For ten minutes! - so he called the police. When the police arrived, they demanded his ID. He didn't comply:

The man in the video tells the officer he was sitting in front of the store for 10 minutes as he waited for his kids to get out of school, and that the area is public and he had a right to sit there.
“The problem was —” the female officer begins.
“The problem is I’m black,” the man fires back. “It really is, because I’m not sitting there with a group of people. I’m sitting there by myself. By myself, not causing a problem.”
Eventually a second male officer approaches the man in the video and attempts to restrain him.
“I’ve got to go get my kids,” the man tells the second officer, pulling his arm away. “Please don’t touch me.”
“You’re going to go to jail then,” the second officer says.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” the man replies.
At this point, both officers grab the man.
“Come on brother,” the man says, “This is assault.”
“I’m not your brother,” the second officer replies. “Put your hands behind your back otherwise it’s going to get ugly.”
Eventually the officers start to cuff the man and he drops his cellphone and the video goes black.
“I haven’t done anything wrong!” we hear the man yell. “Can somebody help me? That’s my kids, right there! My kids are right there!”
“Put your hands behind your back!” the male officer screams.

Then they tased him.

UPDATES (8/29/14) - More on the Chris Lollie story from the City Pages in the Twin Cities. Charges has been dropped. Police defended their actions. Lollie is filing a complaint and considering a lawsuit. Lawyers weigh in. MY QUESTION - Who called it in at the bank. Do you use that bank? Can you talk to the manager?

Incident 2: Hands in pockets while black and autistic

This was from three years ago, but I just heard about the story yesterday when the judge dismissed the lawsuit. A boy was in his yard when the cops pulled up.

According to Yearby, her son was standing in front of their apartment on Southampton Road minding his own business when two officers on patrol approached him and questioned him. The officers later said they thought he looked suspicious.
"I ran outside and the police pushed me back and I asked him, 'what was going on?' and [the officer] was like 'I asked your son to take his hands out of his pockets,'" recalled Vicky Yearby.
Yearby said she and a neighbor told the officers her son was mentally disabled but they ignored them and continued to yell at Isaac Yearby and frighten him.
Video captured from the Taser camera shows Yearby removed his hands from his pockets then flailed his arms. Seconds later the Taser fired and he fell to the ground. The lawsuit claimed the fall caused Isaac Yearby to suffer seizures which continued periodically.

And of course, there's no accountability.

College Park Police Chief Ron Fears declined an interview but city spokesman Gerald Walker issued a statement which reads, "The City of College Park's Police Department respects the rights of all citizens and visitors, and pledges to maintain a safe community."
It goes on, "[t]he situation in 2011 with Mr. Yearby was unfortunate; however, Judge Marvin Shoob's summary exonerated our officers and their actions. The College Park Police Department continues to protect and serve, and hopes for the best for everyone involved in this case."

This is not what protecting and serving looks like.

Incident 3 (from Digby and Rawstory): Not Walking While Black 

There was a foot chase and the man, an African American named Gregory Towns, was exhausted, but caught. He wouldn't walk, so they started tasing him, driving him with electric shocks as if he were an animal. He died.

But Police Benevolent Association lawyers representing Weems continued to insist that the officer’s actions did not cause Towns to die.
Attorney Dale Preiser issued a statement saying that the “use of drive stun to gain compliance is permitted under federal and Georgia law

Read that again. Under federal and Georgia law, it's fine to use a taser to "gain compliance."

Incident 4 - Not Resisting While Black

Stop Trying to Take My Gun!" The cop shouted this as he was attacking a black man with his hands up.

Cameras have lately been touted as a major solution to police brutality. And they are definitely a HUGE help. What's interesting to me, and upsetting, is the way that police are beginning to game their speech so that they'll have an excuse for the camera.

As we've seen in the Michael Brown case, "he was reaching for my gun" is the excuse that police use when they shoot someone unarmed. Here's a case where the video catches the whole thing.

All the criminal charges against Marcus Jeter have been dismissed, and two Bloomfield police officers have been indicted for falsifying reports, and one of them, for assault.
A third pleaded guilty early on to tampering. It's all thanks to those dashcam tapes. It's the video that prosecutors say they never saw when the pursued criminal charges against 30 year-old Marcus Jeter . In the video, his hands were in the air. He was charged with eluding police, resisting arrest and assault. One officer in the video can be seen throwing repeated punches.

His hands are in the air, because he's a black man, and he knows that if he looks  threatening, he can be shot with impunity.

The video, starting around 2:30, is terrible. Listen to the cop screaming, "Stop Resisting! Stop Resisting! Why are you trying to touch my fucking gun! Get off my gun!"

They are faking resistance for the camera.

Good news: The cops have been charged. There may be justice in this case.
Bad news: How many other people have gone to jail while the cops screamed, "Stop resisting!" to an unarmed man with his hands up. They are learning to play for their cameras. 

Here's one final link. This is a white man in Florida. His son, who is autistic, was pulled over and the father drove to help, but the cops didn't want his help. This is their command training - a civilian interfering is a threat to their command presence, so they don't allow it. The man calmly asserts his rights, he tells the officers that the boy is autistic. If you watch the video, you can see them look at the camera being held by the son, move to block a little. They grab him, throw him to the ground, tase him, and shout, "GET ON THE GROUND! STOP RESISTING." That, they hope, will provide them with the excuse they need.

Of course they charged him with resisting arrest.

The Cult of Compliance provides our intersectional lens. We know these cases are wrong. We know about them because of video, because of disability, because of luck. Most of the victims are people of color. Most of the victims never get any publicity.

Here's one vital lesson for white folks like me. When Michael Brown was killed, a lot of white people, mostly but not exclusively conservatives, said, "He should have just complied when the police told him to get out of the road." Maybe. Maybe it would have saved him. But as we can see here, there is no correct behavior that will protect a black man from police brutality. All behaviors - standing, sitting, walking, not walking, showing your hands, hands in your pockets - are suspect.