Police Violence in 2017

Well, it's the new year. Here's a report (excluding disability) on police violence in 2017. Here's the Washington Post on police killings in 2017 including mental illness.

Reading through these cases, I feel we're making no progress. Still 25% known mental illness, still reasonable estimate of a third to a half involving disabled people in some capacity, still vastly disproportionately people multiply marginalized by disability, race, class, gender identity, etc.

And the killings are just the worst outcomes, overlooking all the violent and threatening confrontations experienced by marginalized peoples that do not result in fatalities.

So many good programs out there, well-intentioned folks thinking hard, but the numbers stay about the same.

Back to work.  

Patrick Harmon - #CultOfCompliance

There is no de-escalation training that can build better policing. There is no video monitoring that can hold police accountable. So long as cops can say, "I was afraid," even when video evidence shows that they are lying, they are legally entitled to commit murder.

Patrick Harmon, a black man with, according to his sister, psychiatric disabilities, was pulled over for biking without a light. As the encounter escalated, he ran away and the police shot him in the back. Later, they said it was a terrifying encounter ... but video demonstrates that this was not the case. No weapon, no threats, just a scared man being non-compliant.

There is no reason to expect justice here, because our system doesn't promote justice. It promotes compliance.

Do not share the video. No one needs to watch it. We know what it shows.

Two Deaths and the Cult of Compliance

Two deaths of disabled men at the hands of law enforcement have been in the news lately.

One was black, a veteran, and a mental health crisis spun him into custody, where an officer (allegedly) broke his neck. The other was white, nonverbal, autistic, and walked away from his group at a park, where an officer (allegedly) slammed him to the ground and caused his death.

Here are the stories.

Elliot Williams died in 2011, but a new lawsuit and released surveillance video have made it news.

Elliott Williams spent the last five days of his life in a Tulsa County jail, paralyzed and lying on the cold concrete floor. But despite the 37-year-old Oklahoma man’s pleas for help, guards did nothing to save him, a lawsuit claims.

At one point, jailers dumped Williams’s limp body into a shower and left him there for an hour. The dying inmate “would not stand up but we did give him a shower anyway,” a captain later testified, according to a sheriff’s office internal report.

Another officer saw Williams face down in the shower, screaming, “Help me!” according to the internal report.

“He’s acting like he’s paralyzed, but we know he’s not,” a mental health worker told Williams’s dad, court papers allege.

Detention officers, nurses, and even a jail psychiatrist accused Williams of “faking” an illness. His family says they declined to administer medical care or transport Williams to a hospital—until it was too late.

Williams died in a pool of his own saliva and vomit. Notice that although he had psychiatric disabilities, what killed him was an officer deciding that a threatening step required slamming him to the ground, during which he suffered the neck injury.

Meanwhile, just Wednesday, Paul Gianelos walked away from his group at a park, so his caregivers called the police to help find him. For reasons that aren't clear, when Gianelos wouldn't quickly comply with orders to get in the car, the officers - at least one of whom had Crisis Intervention Team training - decided to escalate the situation (instead of, for example, calling for help from the professionals who cared for Gianelos). From WUSA9 in DC:

Fairfax police say a 20-year veteran officer with crisis intervention training, spotted
Gianelos along Annandale Road, about a mile from the park. Police say the officer tried to talk him into coming back to the group home outing. Gianelos apparently refused, and police say he became combative and began to struggle with the officer. Gianelos was handcuffed, and fell, hitting his head. Rescue crews were called and police say when Gianelos was being transported, he went into cardiac arrest and died.

We don't have more details yet, but I've read a lot of these reports, and I suspect we'll find out that the officer simply decided that compliance, rather than patience, was mandatory.

For new readers, here's some information on the cult of compliance and law enforcement.

• Original post.
• Label/tag search on the site.
• Ferguson and the Cult of Compliance (Al Jazeera America, 8/15/2014)
• The Outrage of Handcuffing Children in Schools (CNN.com, 8/5/15)
• The Corrosive Cult of Compliance in Our Schools (Al Jazeera America, 4/22/15)

 And many more. 

The Wrong Approach on Media, Policing, and Disability

My home-away-from-home community of Minneapolis-St. Paul just learned that the police officers who killed Jamar Clark will not be charged. This case has become a focal point for Black Lives Matter in the Twin Cities.

There's another case though, that is getting both legislative and media attention: John Birkeland. He was killed during a mental health crisis when police came to check on him in February. Despite knowing he was in crisis (I'm told), police found he had a warrant for giving a false name once and decided to arrest him. He fled into the house, they broke open his door, sent in a dog, found him a closet, he came out and stabbed the dog, and they killed him. It's a tragic case and a classic "lawful but awful" example of how police mishandle mental health crises.

The problem is this piece by Minnesota Public Radio columnist Bob Collins. who positions this as "protest Birkeland, not Clark."

With so much activist and media attention focused on Jamar Clark, there’s been little energy left for the community to wonder why John Birkeland of Roseville had to die because he once gave a wrong name to police.

Birkeland, 57, was in the middle of a mental health crisis in February when Roseville police were asked to check on him and make sure he was OK. Assured by Birkeland that he was, police discovered that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest for giving a false name to police. So they broke down his door, sent a police dog in, and followed. Birkeland fled to a closet.

When the cops opened the closet door, he stabbed a police dog (the dog recovered), so nearly a half dozen police shot him dead.

There were no protests. No calls to see the police video, and almost no public consideration of how it might have gone differently.

Many police reform activists are suspicious that disability rights folks, especially white folks like me and Collins, are trying to use disability rights to derail the Black Lives Matter movement. This kind of framing only confirms that analysis, that to talk about mental health or disability is to diminish the need to talk about race. That's 100% wrong. They intersect and the specifics of the discrimination are not the same. The reasons black men are harassed and killed by police are not the same reasons that people with disabilities are more likely than abled people to encounter the police and for those encounters to go wrong. And yet, to understand the totality of the problems with American policing requires thinking about both racism AND ableism (AND classism AND heterosexism AND AND AND).

I've been explicit in the aspirational intersectionality of my project, but I see Collins' framing far too often from folks who want to talk about disability.

The most vulnerable are people who are multiply marginalized. Here's what I said in a recent interview that does a pretty good job of summarizing my approach:

Sarabia: Does what you're doing, putting it into a different context, does it minimize what so many people have been pointing out lately, that this is an attack on African-American civilians.

Me: It /is/ an attack on African-American civilians. And it plays into our long history of both individual and structural racism in American society. But one of the things that we've learned under the principles of intersectionality, is that when you are marginalized in multiple ways, you are multiply endangered.

So for example, many of these names of high profile victims of police violence - Kajieme Powell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray - these were all African-Americans and that's not a coincidence. It's an indictment of our, of the racism in American society. But all four of those people were also disabled ... and I don't think that's a coincidence either. So if we're really going to work on this, we need to look at these people as whole people, and think about the ways that racism and ableism intersect with each other and magnify each other.

Note: I was pleased to see a link to the recent Guardian coverage of the Ruderman report I co-authored at the bottom, as the whole point of that report was to conveniently provide journalists with a frame in which to place individual cases. I'd like Collins to re-read the discussions of intersectionality in the report, such as:

Taking an intersectional approach allows us to examine the roles of ableism—individual or structural discrimination against people with disabilities—in police use of force, without ignoring racism, classism, sexism, or other relevant issues.

We argue that disability intersects with other factors (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) to magnify degrees of marginalization and enhance risk of violence. When the media ignores or mishandles a major factor, as we contend they generally do with disability, it becomes harder to effect change. We also operate from a broad, cross-category, set of definitions for disability, inclusive of physical, developmental, intellectual, psychiatric, emotional, and any other form of disability that might fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

We need to find and make allies across categories, across movements.

Where Is Hope - Police Violence and Disability

Today at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, CA, I'll be attending a showing of Where is Hope, a film on police violence and disability. I've seen the film, and it's direct and powerful, forcing viewers to really think about the experience of violence at the hands of law enforcement, and particularly why that violence falls so heavily on people with disabilities.

Here's the event page. If  you're in the area, come see it. Or follow them on Facebook/Twitter and find out when there's a showing you can attend.

Here's a profile of Leroy Moore, one of the creators. 

Here's a piece by Moore on a forum on the issue from 2001, but he's been working on this since the early 90s. I feel very fortunate to be able to learn more about the history of this movement from him.

If you are concerned about police use of force and disability - and if you read this page you probably are - you could try to bring Moore and his co-creator, Emmitt Thrower, to your campus, organization, or community. 

Intersectionality: Including Disability In the Police Use-of-Force Discussion

Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope this document functions as a useful tool to help shift our perceptions.

One of our concerns, and something I think about daily as I've been writing on this beat for most of the last three years, was to make sure that our contribution added to the broader efforts to reform American policing, rather than offered a way to derail from critical ongoing conversations such as Campaign Zero and Black Lives Matter.

On Monday morning, Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) had me on their show "The Morning Shift" to talk about the white paper. Tony Sarabia, the host, gave me a chance to talk about our intersectional approach, asking:

Sarabia: Does what you're doing, putting it into a different context, does it minimize what so many people have been pointing out lately, that this is an attack on African-American civilians.

Me: It /is/ an attack on African-American civilians. And it plays into our long history of both individual and structural racism in American society. But one of the things that we've learned under the principles of intersectionality, is that when you are marginalized in multiple ways, you are multiply endangered.

So for example, many of these names of high profile victims of police violence - Kajieme Powell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray - these were all African-Americans and that's not a coincidence. It's an indictment of our, of the racism in American society. But all four of those people were also disabled ... and I don't think that's a coincidence either. So if we're really going to work on this, we need to look at these people as whole people, and think about the ways that racism and ableism intersect with each other and magnify each other. 

We wrote something similar in the White Paper:

Taking an intersectional approach allows us to examine the roles of ableism—individual or structural discrimination against people with disabilities—in police use of force, without ignoring racism, classism, sexism, or other relevant issues.

We argue that disability intersects with other factors (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) to magnify degrees of marginalization and enhance risk of violence. When the media ignores or mishandles a major factor, as we contend they generally do with disability, it becomes harder to effect change. We also operate from a broad, cross-category, set of definitions for disability, inclusive of physical, developmental, intellectual, psychiatric, emotional, and any other form of disability that might fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Intersectionality is tricky. It's not a magic word that cures all forms of unconscious bias. It remains my aspiration, however, in every word I write about social justice and civil rights.

No Accountability in Alabama #CultOfCompliance Case

Sureshbahi Patel was beaten by an Alabama police officer for, as near as I can tell, not speaking English. I like to think of this as akin to other situations in which people do not process verbal commands - whether through hearing loss, not speaking English, ear buds, sensory processing, etc.

The man who beat Patel and sent him to the hospital is not going to be held accountable in Federal court.

Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala just threw out the case against Madison police officer Eric Parker, who faced up to 10 years in prison for excessive force in the sidewalk stop of an Indian citizen.
Judge Haikala late Wednesday filed a 92-page opinion, ending with: "The Government has had two full and fair chances to obtain a conviction; it will not have another."
A team of three federal prosecutors had twice tried Parker last year for the takedown of 57-year-old Sureshbahi Patel on the morning of Feb. 6, 2015. Both trials ended with a deadlocked jury.

Here's Parker's defense:

Parker twice testified that he lost his balance and fell. He also testified that Patel repeatedly jerked his hand away from Parker. "It concerned me that he was going for that weapon I presumed he had," testified Parker.

Patel, who had just arrived from India to help care for his grandson, testified he does not speak English and did not resist. "I did not try to run away but I did go back a couple of steps to show them my house, my house," testified Patel through an interpreter at the second trial. "They put their hands on me and I was just standing and did not move."

There's video. But juries want to believe cops, or want to believe it's ok to beat up non-compliant brown people, or something.

Look at all the maybes - Parker imagined that Patel was going for a weapon that Parker imagined Patel had.  And so put him in the hospital.

Without accountability, there is no peace.

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.

Cult of Compliance - Linwood Lambert's death

There is new video of the death of Linwood Lambert.

If police want to have TASERs, which they do and they should, then the people who abuse them have to be held accountable.

When three Virginia police officers put Linwood Lambert in a squad car around 5 a.m. on May 4, 2013, they said they were taking him to the ER for medical attention because he was speaking delusionally. Just over an hour later, Lambert died in police custody.

He was never given medical care, though the officers of South Boston, Va. did drive him to the hospital. He was not initially put under arrest, though the officers ultimately arrested him, shackled his hands and legs, and tased him repeatedly. While in custody he was agitated and ran from the officers. Ambulance workers say police later claimed he fought them at a time when videos show he was actually unconscious. Police dispute that account and deny allegations of excessive force.

Repeated tasers are often the pattern in these deaths. Repeated tasering of a restrained individual may be excessive force. We need better protocols and accountability.

Public Lecture on Disability and Police Violence - Harvard School of Public Health

Poster for Different Lenses, One Vision conference. 

Next Wednesday, November 18, I will be offering a public lecture on police violence and disability at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for their "Different Lenses, One Vision: A collaborative discussion on 'otherness'" conference.

I argue that the experiences of people with disabilities must be part of our national conversation about police use of force. People with disabilities are frequently targets of police violence. Disability intersects with race, class, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity, often intensifying risk and degree of marginalization.

The good news is that if we approach this problem the right way, we can build a more just and humane society for everyone.

My talk is at at 5:30 at the Kresge Cafeteria.

You can RSVP for the event here.
Conference Facebook page here.

Location:
677 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
(617) 495-1000
www.hsph.harvard.edu/

See you there!

Cult of Compliance: 77 Year Old Blind Man Beaten by Police; Police Department says "Within Department Policies"

This case is from 2012, but I first noticed it on this DailyKos diary. It's a perfect example of the "cult of compliance," a phrase I've been using since 2013 to link otherwise discrete incidents of police brutality, creeping authoritarianism, and broader examples of cultural discourse that venerate compliance as the greatest of all virtues.

Here's a 77-year-old blind middle class white man beaten by police. It's not knowable how this case would have turned out had he not been disabled, or been black, or been younger, but it's important to mark the ways in which he could resist police narratives of justified use of force, at least in the eyes of a jury. It often takes a "perfect victim" to win any kind of restitution. He sued and just won $400000. Here's what seems to have happened:

White of Eagle was trying to get back home from a conference on technical advancements to assist the blind. He arrived at the Greyhound station downtown to learn the bus he wanted to get on was full. He says the employee told White he could stay at the station and wait.

Then a security guard told White he was trespassing and called police. The security guard did not tell White the police were on the way. When Officer Kyllion Chafin arrived on scene White asked to see his badge.
"He says how are you going to look at my badge if you're blind?" explained White. "I said I just want to touch your badge. He said you're not touching me."
That's when the incident escalated. Chafin pulled White's arms behind his back and threw him onto the counter, hitting and causing bleeding to White's head.
...
After putting the man in cuffs, Chafin's supervisor Sergeant Robery Wyckoff began to record an interview with White without reading him his Miranda rights.
...
Wyckoff was promoted to Lieutenant last year.

Another article notes: "Bleeding from the head, White was handcuffed and taken to the Denver jail. He was released about eight hours later, near midnight. No criminal charge was filed against White."

Both Chafin - the officer who decided that a blind man asking to touch his badge - and the Lieutenant, are still Denver police officers.

The Denver Police Department did not respond to specific questions but did send the following statement:
"We believe in the judicial process and respect the jury's decision. The Department of Safety and the Denver Office of the Independent Monitor took part in reviewing the incident, and the Denver Police Department found that the officers' actions fell within department policies. We are always looking for ways to improve."

Here we have a civilian, as nonthreatening as could be, asking for a reasonable accommodation to verify the identity of a law enforcement officer (LEO). Instead, the LEO decided that his non-compliance justified force, and slammed him down on a desk (there are pictures of his bloody head, if you're the doubting kind). Notice, though, the chain of the cult of compliance, starting with the bus employees who decided that throwing out an old blind man was the right call.

Here are two principles:

1. Lack of compliance, on its own, absent other threat indicators, must not be used to justify force. 
2. Officers who violate principle #1 must be held accountable for their actions by law enforcement itself. If such actions do not violate department policies, change your policies.

Sunday Roundup: Four Important Posts on Disability

I finished a major corporate (disability-related) project this week and am hard at work on a major non-profit (disability-related) project now. That, plus teaching, plus the book, has slowed me down in terms of writing for mainstream media, but I trust that the depth of these bigger projects is more than worth it.

In the meantime, though, instead of blogging less, I'm taking ideas that might have made for publishable essays and placed them here. This week featured four posts that I think matter.

1. How Not to Kill Someone in Mental Health Crisis. This is a video, from the UK, of a person with a machete not being killed by London police. It's instructive and important.
2. Disability, Trauma, and the Assault at Spring Valley High - If 25% of all American children have experienced trauma, it means we have to rethink fundamental systems in our schools.
3. Peter Singer's Tells - A controversial philosopher who argues that the correct ethical decision in the case of disability is euthanasia/abortion, reveals that he doesn't think those positions should be such a big deal. To him, they're old news.
4. Adventures in Universal Design: Handwriting Notes and Take-Home Tests - My approach to universal design for learning. We're learning the wrong thing from the research on handwriting.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

#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.

Civil Suits Against Police Under Attack - The Waning Power of Civil Law to Counter Police Violence

I've been away over the weekend, so am a bit behind on stories to write. I try not to write when spending family time on vacation! Ahead this week - apologies, deaths by taser, death by gunfire, thoughts on undergraduate achievement. I'm also writing about the Middle Ages, the local Zoo, public intellectuals, and the Game of Thrones.

For Monday, though, I want to talk about civil suits. One of the reasons that Sheehan vs SF worries me (see my piece here) is that it may make it harder for civil suits against police to get in front of juries, and already lawyers don't want to take those cases. It's hard to sue police and win.

Here's an example from Richmond, VA.

In 2005 (the wheels of justice can grind exceedingly slowly) the police in Cambridge, Md., acted on a tip and found a small amount of marijuana residue in a trash can. At 4:30 a.m. on May 6, a SWAT team executed a search warrant on the apartment of Andrew Cornish. A jury would later find the commandos failed to knock and announce themselves properly. As they rushed through the apartment, Cornish came out of the bedroom with a sheathed knife in his hand. The police say he advanced on them. One of the officers shot Cornish twice in the head, killing him.

Elapsed time: about 30 seconds.

So we have a situation in which SWAT was found to have killed someone after not following procedure.

Cornish’s father sued, claiming the police used excessive force and violated Cornish’s constitutional rights. The first point was quickly dispatched with. (Lesson: Never bring a knife to a gunfight.) But as Balko points out in his Washington Post blog, on the second point the courts agreed. Not only that, “both the trial court and the appeals court that ruled against Cornish’s father acknowledge both that the police violated the knock-and-announce rule, and that they lied about doing so.”

Yet two out of three judges on the 4th Circuit panel (both George W. Bush appointees) decided nevertheless that Cornish bore all the blame for his own death. Other courts have reached similar conclusions in similar cases, you see — so that must make it OK: The police can break into your home unlawfully and shoot you dead, and nobody is at fault for that except you. Not only that, according to the court majority “no reasonable jury could have found that the Officers’ knock-and-anounce violation proximately caused Cornish’s death.”

That is irrefutable, in the same way the no-true-Scotsman fallacy is irrefutable. If I say to you, “No Scotsman would shave his beard,” you can show me countless cleanshaven Scotsmen. Rather than concede I was wrong, I can say, “Well, no trueScotsman shaves his beard!” The revision renders all your counterexamples irrelevant by definition. So while it’s easy to imagine plenty of juries that might blame the police for Cornish’s death, the court can simply write them all off by contending no reasonable jury would.

I think the "reasonable" jury and "reasonable" officer standard is dangerous.  In the Sheehan case, the city is arguing a reasonable officer might have concluded that Sheehan had a gun, had hostages, was making explosives, or could escape out the window. In fact, none of these things were true. In fact, neither officer at the scene believed these things to be true according to initial reports. But a reasonable officer could have, says the city, so the suits should be thrown out.

This writer ends:

The courts, including the Supreme Court, have granted wide latitude to police officers, partly because — they say — officers who exceed the scope of their authority can be held responsible through lawsuits.

And if they can't be held responsible, we lose that very important check on police authority.

Sheehan vs SF: Waiting on Transcripts

Oral arguments for Sheehan vs San Francisco will begin at the Supreme Court in a few hours (it's the

second case of the day). It will provide the opportunity for the court to do a number of things.

Here are the questions before the court:

Whether Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires law enforcement officers to provide accommodations to an armed, violent, and mentally ill suspect in the course of bringing the suspect into custody; and

Whether it was clearly established that even where an exception to the warrant requirement applied, an entry into a residence could be unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment by reason of the anticipated resistance of an armed and violent suspect within.

What might the court do? They could ...

1. Affirm or severely limit the protections of the ADA for people with disabilities as they apply to policing.
2. More clearly define the limits of qualified immunity (the Fourth Amendment issue).
3. Carve out a narrow ruling that sends the case back to the Ninth Circuit and doesn't establish wide precedent either way.

Three, I think, is the best we can hope for. I am not a lawyer nor a Supreme Court expert, but I did talk to a lot of lawyers, though, previewing the case for Al Jazeera America yesterday. I argued: "This case will determine to what extent police can be held accountable to the best practices of their profession." Please consider reading and sharing my piece.

There are best practices. The police did not follow them. Their claims as to the "public safety" risk that Sheehan presented consistently run counter to the facts, but the law in fact allows them to make up what a "reasonable officer" might have imagined, even if neither officer at the time believed it. 

Here's a very useful preview, especially in its summary of the US Government position on the ADA. My emphasis:

The United States’ ADA argument asks the Court walk a line between the Petitioners’ and Respondent’s arguments. Title II requires officers to provide reasonable accommodations during the arrest of mentally disabled individuals. Yet, if objective evidence causes concerns about public or police safety, then it might not be reasonable for police to provide accommodations (i.e., delay immediate entry to arrest). In those situations, safety can outweigh accommodations. And despite the importance of safety, the United States refused to make the safety exception ironclad, arguing that a plaintiff “should remain free to show that special circumstances rendered a modification reasonable.” (U.S. Amicus Br. 7.) For this case, the United States asked the Court to pass on rendering judgment on the reasonableness of the officers’ actions by instead remanding the case to the Ninth Circuit to determine whether Respondent, who would bear the burden of proof establishing that “special circumstances” were present, was owed reasonable modification despite the safety risks she posed.

In terms of the ADA, that's pretty much what I hope for. That the court affirms the right of a person like Sheehan to argue that she was owed a reasonable accommodation. I'd prefer a much stronger position from the government and for the court to enhance the power of the ADA, but I don't expect that.

More later once the transcript is up. Also, I continue to maintain it is ludicrous that SCOTUS isn't live-streamed.

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.

Time Frame and Police Shootings

Yesterday CNN published my new essay on the shooting of a black, homeless, disabled man by the LAPD. I argue that the focus on whether of not "Africa," as the man was known, was reaching for a gun, is the wrong question. Instead, use-of-force incidents should be assessed by taking a broad time frame, looking at the decisions that led up to the violence.

I am writing a longer piece on the upcoming Supreme Court case for Al Jazeera, out sometime in the next few weeks, and so have been thinking about that specific issue a lot, and learning from Seth Stoughton, a law professor at South Carolina. After the Africa shooting, I reached back out to him for more information.

According to Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in police regulation, there are two ways to look at use-of-force incidents. One position advocates for a narrow time frame in which we only examine the moment in which the trigger was pulled. The other argues for a broad time frame, in which the whole chain of decisions leading up to the moment of force is part of the assessment.

In fact, Stoughton notes that the Supreme Court may well rule on this matter in Sheehan vs San Francisco, a case also involving police violence and mental illness. On March 23, the court will hear whether San Francisco police should have considered Teresa Sheehan's disability before entering her room, and whether their failure to accommodate her disability violates the Fourth Amendment. Sheehan was shot, but survived, and is trying to keep her lawsuit from being thrown out. As with most Supreme Court cases, the decision will likely have broad implications.

In an email, Seth wrote me to clarify slightly. "The failure to accommodate Ms. Sheehan’s disability isn’t the basis of the Fourth Amendment claim. The Fourth Amendment claim is for an unreasonable seizure (and one reason this seizure was arguably unreasonable is because officers knew of her disability)."

That's my fault for trying to compress the whole case into a single sentence, and I appreciate Seth clarifying. You should also read this storify of his tweets on the concept of tactical restraint, as I think it's critical for re-imagining policing.

One criticism of every piece critical of police violence is the argument that the suspect should have just complied with commands and he or she would have been fine. Therefore, the failure to not comply justifies the death or violence.

I need your help pushing back against that when you see the argument and have the energy to do so. To make it clear that for people with disabilities, failure to comply may not be a choice, and best practices offer other ways to approach such situations. There will always be moments in which police need to use deadly force. It may even be true that there was no way to approach Africa without violence resulting, though I am skeptical of this. I believe he was another victim of the cult of compliance, and there will be more. Probably within a few days.

Mental Health and Policing - One Day's News

Yesterday, CNN published a piece of mine on the death of Kristiana Coignard. Here's how she died [warning - the video is very disturbing, so follow the link with caution]:

In late January, Kristiana Coignard, a seventeen-year-old woman with bipolar disorder and depression, walked into the police department in Longwood, Texas, with "I have a gun" written on her hand. She also had a knife in her waistband. Officer Glenn Derr approached her, read her message, and quickly restrained her. He then let her go, restrained her on the floor, then let her go again as two other officers entered the scene.

On the surveillance video that the department released, you can see the moment in which Coignard decides to die. She raises her knife and charged at Derr, who shoots, as does one of the other officers. The third officer deploys a TASER, but by then it was too late. She lies on the floor for a few minutes until emergency medical services arrive.

What lessons do we draw this death? I write:

When police misread the circumstances of encounter with an individual with mental health crisis, the possibility for violence rapidly escalates. The only solution is for law enforcement to try to stabilize every encounter, to the extent possible, as if it involved psychiatric disability.

I further suggest that just as police are likely to be over-aggressive when confronting black men, here they were under-aggressive, and that proved just as dangerous. Consistent stabilization tactics must be applied in all circumstances, rather than only when police are fully aware of a mental health crisis. The good news is that many law enforcement officers around the country are practicing just this. The bad news is that too many people are still dying.

I have various searches that deliver articles to me about the intersections of disability and policing. Every day, I read about deaths, trials, exoneration, commitments, and new ideas for training. Here's just a partial skimming of yesterday's news

Phillipsburg, New Jersey - Police shooting of man with a knife in mental health crisis ruled justified.

According to Burke, someone from Read's mental health provider, Bridgeway Rehabilitation Services, had called 911 after Read's landlord reported receiving a threatening letter with photos. Burke did not immediately have information on the contents of the letter.
Officials said that when police arrived at the home Read refused to leave his first floor apartment and was holding a knife.
"Police were able to enter the home and confront the individual. Mr. Read refused to comply with police orders to drop the knife, advanced at the officers and was subsequently shot,"officials said in a press release today.

My question - why enter the home? Was Read actually threatening anyone from inside his apartment? Why not invest the scene with patience, rather than charging in. Once the officers had entered the home, Read's death was guaranteed.

No charges for Michigan police who shot Aura Rosser, a woman holding a knife and in mental heath crisis.

Rosser lived with her boyfriend, Victor Stephens. The night of her death, Stephens called 911 and asked police to “come and get her," according to a memo released by the prosecutor's office. He said he had locked himself in a room and that “she jumped on [him].” He also said he might need an ambulance for his hand.

When Ried and his partner Mark Raab arrived at Stephens’ home, they heard a woman say she had a knife and a man respond, “What are [you] gonna do, stab me?” according to the memo. They then heard a loud thump and entered the home through the front door to find Rosser and Stephens struggling. Rosser was attempting to attack Stephens with a knife while he fended her off, the document states.

When officers ordered her to drop the weapon, she turned on them and advanced, they said, with “her eyes wide open with what appeared to be a blank stare.” Raab used a Taser on Rosser at the same time Ried fatally shot her once in the chest.

“The fact that Officer Raab chose to draw his Taser does not make Officer Ried’s decision to draw his sidearm a criminal act,” the memo states. “The law of self-defense does not require that the least harmful means be employed before a more harmful level of force may be lawfully used.”

This is a more difficult situation, strategically, as Rosser clearly was threatening Stephens at the time, forcing an intervention by police. I don't know enough about the timing and layout to know whether the TASER could have been used first before firing. If I hadn't read hundreds of these kinds of reports, I'd assume the officers had no choice. But I have read hundreds of these reports, and too often the officers place or keep themselves in proximity to the victim, allowing them to threaten the officers and thus drawing fire.

Mental health is cited explicitly in only one of these dozen officer-involved shootings in midstate Pennsylvania counties, but reading through some, I have my suspicions that others also involved psychiatric disabilities. The one is important, though:

LEBANON COUNTY
March 14, 2012: Samuel Snyder, 57, was fatally shot by police at the end of a 14-hour stand-off that began when state troopers appeared at his North Annville Township home to involuntarily commit him for mental health treatment. Police said one officer was wounded and that Snyder fired 40 to 60 bullets during the standoff.

So, Snyder had a gun and held the officers at bay for fourteen hours. It's hard to argue with this one on an immediate tactical level. Instead, we'd have to look at the failings of our mental health systems that let matters escalate to this level.

Last November, a Shelby Township man suspected of psychiatric disability barricaded himself inside his house and held police at bay for over two hours. He fired three shots, but was taken peacefully into custody. Now:

A mental evaluation has been ordered for a 46-year-old Shelby Township man accused of holding police at bay in his home for more than two hours last November.

Bobby Jo Grimes will undergo an evaluation to determine whether he is fit to face charges of attempted murder, felon in possession of a firearm, felony firearm and resisting arrest for the Nov. 11 incident near Ryan and Auburn roads. The exam was approved last week by Judge Douglas Shepherd of 41A District Court in Shelby Township.

That's one day's news.

Lately, I've been told that the intersection of policing and disability is a niche issue, not a big societal concern. I've had trouble getting traction for some of my stories and pitches as a result.

It's not, though. The niche is us. The niche is humanity. We're all in it, and if not today, then tomorrow, or the next one, as our bodies age and change, as family members are diagnosed, as we come to understand the limitations our conception of normal.

Tomorrow, there's going to be more news, and whether it makes the news or not, soon another death.

#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.

Day in Court: Police Killers of Civilians Tried

District Attorney Kari Brandenburg decided to skip the grand jury process and charge the officers who killed James Boyd, a man with psychiatric disabilities, with murder. Grand juries don't want to indict cops. Juries don't want to convict cops. But at least there will be a day in court.

Here's what the defense will say:

A defense lawyer characterized him as an unstable suspect who was "unpredictably and dangerously close to a defenseless officer while he was wielding two knives."
"I'm looking forward ... to the DA's office presenting one single witness that says this is murder," said Sam Bregman, a lawyer for Sandy.

Meanwhile, today, testimony began in the killing of a 95-year-old man, John Wrana, by police, in Park Forest, IL. Here is what the defense will say:

Craig Taylor carefully followed police policy and the orders of a superior, his lawyer said
"There was nothing reckless about what he did," said attorney Terry Ekl. "He had to make an instantaneous decision based on an order from his supervisor and his own assumptions."

Days in court are necessary, whatever the outcome. Police invocation of hypothetical threats usually, but not always, carry the day. If the police can persuade a jury that it was reasonable for them to fear for their life, they can justify using deadly force. In fact, it is often reasonable. The key is to have fair,  open, civilian-led, assessments of what happened and what the response should be. We give law enforcement enormous powers and that requires accountability and impartial oversight.

The Boyd killing is a pretty stark example of the problems with the Albuquerque PD.  Boyd was surrendering. Moreover, there was never a real threat to begin with. The PD incited this confrontation then responded to it with deadly force, in my reading of the video.

The Wrana case is more complicated. I expect Taylor will be exonerated for following procedure. I think the procedure has problems built into it, but that's a deeper issue.

What I'm happy about is that in both cases we'll to hear what a jury thinks, and that's the key. A system, a trial, an open process. With good attorneys on both sides. A jury of one's peers. That's how our system needs to work.