Placard for Deaf Drivers Reveals Problems with Policing

Cincinnati has a new red and white placard that deaf and hard-of-hearing drivers can place in their car to inform police officers of their disability. Here's an image from a local news tweet.

.@CincinnatiPD & students at @uofcincy help design traffic stop safety placards for the deaf & hard of hearing. pic.twitter.com/M6C6fOcGvn

— Angela Ingram (@Newslaw1) November 26, 2015

The placard says, in part:

I am a Deaf/HH Driver

Failure to cooperate with your verbal commands

means I AM NOT hearing you

I do not read lips

Using a flashlight at night will prevent me from

seeing any gestures

Qualified interpreters must be provided ...

From the article:

Officer Richard Longworth is with Cincinnati Police Department's Community Relations Unit and helped design the placards.

"It's bright red. It's split between red and white. We wanted highly contrasting colors that the officer would be able to notice if he shined his light up on to a car," said Officer Longworth.

Drivers display the placard where the officer can easily see it. It explains that the driver has special needs and it also has tips for the driver on how to handle the traffic stop. The placards are necessary because police need to know why a person is not responding to verbal commands.

Longworth explained, "It's going to be seen as some form of passive resistance." "He's going to be giving verbal commands and if they're not responsive to those commands, it's going to raise his stress level even higher."

All of this is true. Too many police take non-compliance on its own, absent other indicators of danger, as a threat requiring escalation. Deaf individuals are at risk.

No one, though, should be required to wear a special badge, piece of clothing, or put up a sign in order to be guaranteed their basic rights. I am concerned that such placards teach police to look for the placard and, if visible, give people their rights. If not visible, well, then it's back to violence as a reward for non-compliance.

We've seen this before. In the wake of the Ethan Saylor killing, some people proposed teaching our kids hand signals, indicating - I am disabled! In Colorado, autism advocates proposed a yellow shirt saying, "I have autism. If I am alone please call 911."

This shirt, like the placard, like the hand signal, all convey the same message to police: Don't treat me as badly as you normally treat other non-threatening but non-compliant individuals. 

This is the medical model, in which we attack inequalities diagnosis by diagnosis, rather than working on the underlying problem.

As regular readers know, I call the underlying problem the cult of compliance. You can follow the tag below to see other examples.

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."