Global Crisis

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

The boy came down the hall just as I was arriving at preschool with my daughter, Ellie. In a voice filled with excitement, she said, "Michael [not his real name], come look at my new backpack! It's the Avengers!" Indeed it was, or at least the four male heroes. Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and the Hulk, in vivid color, charging forward to fight evildoers.
Michael responded with far too much skepticism for a 5-year-old boy. "You mean, you like Avengers? Or is that your brother's backpack?"
Ellie completely missed it. "No," she said, "My brother got Minions. I got Avengers!" Then she raised her arms in the air, blasting laser beams out of her hands at the bad guys, and ran off to her classroom. Evil doers, beware.

Off to school, backpacks rampant!

"They reacted based upon the training that they've been given from the academy. We were thankful that no officer was injured from protecting themselves from risk of great bodily harm."

I come to this topic not as a partisan in the specifics of Salaita’s situation but as an advocate for faculty engagement with the public. Over the last year, I have written periodic columns for The Chronicle about the ways that academics can and should write for general audiences. Recently, I even suggested that "sustained public engagement" of any sort should count for hiring, tenure, and promotion.
When I write about this topic, I often get told that the real problem is that academics are snobs. We like living in an ivory tower, goes the argument, and we look with disdain on getting our hands dirty in the public sphere. There’s plenty of snobbery to go around, it’s true, but the Salaita affair shows a different, and I think more powerful, force that keeps many academics from commenting on important contemporary issues: fear.

• I wrote 2500 words or so on This American Life and their practices of using (or not) trigger warnings. As near as I can tell, they warn for racism or the existence of sex, and sometimes violence. Never disability issues.
• I had a couple of pieces on the #cultofcompliance (hey look, a hashtag. You could use it on twitter!) - Two reactions to my writing from New York writers, a comparison of the police in Chicago during the NATO riots and those in Ferguson, and then a blog on Kajieme Powell. I wrote - it's possible that police needed to kill Powell, but I have some questions. As I've learned more in the days that followed, it's more and more clear that the police put themselves in a position in which killing Powell was the only option. I will have a CNN piece on this tomorrow (probably).
• I mentioned that Dawkins is trolling families like mine, by linking to a piece on him by Amanda Marcotte.
• I talk about Nico escaping from the house, or seeming to, and my babysitter calling the police. As I write about police violence, these are the stakes for me and my family on a personal level. We need the police to be better on disability issues.
• Finally, I wrote a post on "The pencil test" for disability, in which I talk about Takei, Bieber, and Tampa Police throwing a quadriplegic out of his wheelchair to see how disabled he really was.

"Someone with the Twitter handle @Andy00778. wrote that the picture shows how “much fraud there is today,” adding “Hope insurance company see it!”

The picture does not show fraud. What it shows is a disabled person using a tool—her wheelchair—to live independently. If any judgement is to be made about the photo at all, it should be celebrated for showing that independence."

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes... put it last night, “You end up expecting drama from these situations, because everything is always heading toward a heightening point.” Al Jazeera America’s David M. Perry described the clashes between police and citizens in Ferguson as an example of “the cult of compliance” that has normalized state violence against unarmed U.S. citizens. “The significance of the events in Missouri extends beyond the very real and terrible pattern of police killings of African-American men. It is an intensification of years of cultural shift in which law enforcement and other authority figures have increasingly treated noncompliance as a reason to initiate violence.”

Noncompliance can mean anything from a young man resisting a policeman’s order to move from the street to the sidewalk — the inciting incident that, we’re told, might have ended in the shooting death of Michael Brown — to a reporter understandably chafing at police edicts to stay penned into a particular area or turn off his lights and cameras. The cult of compliance was on display during the Occupy protests — remember the UC Davis pepper-spray incident? — but there’s something singularly unsettling about watching it rumble through the flat streets of a small Missouri town, its streetlights and signage blurred by tear gas.

If recent events in Ferguson are any indication, something like a culture of violence has permeated some of America’s local police departments, too. Cops and prison guards occupy different places on the hierarchy of corrections enforcement, but the primary interactions of both groups are with similar populations: the poor, the mentally-ill, and the non-white. In Ferguson, the majority-white police force has mishandled not only an encounter with a young black man but with the scores of majority-African-American protestors who’ve demonstrated in the aftermath of that man’s murder.

The consequences of this are not felt equally. The cops have weapons of war and the psychological empowerment that comes with them; the prison guards have a code of silence and institutional advantage, a tacit reinforcement of power and privilege that serves to Other the inmates under their keep. The people of Ferguson have tweets, photos, video, and rapidly-eroding Constitutional rights.