Global Crisis

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.

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.

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."

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.

1. The other kids are standing up for their classmate, telling the bus driver he can't do it.
2. One child was holding the cell phone that caught this video and led to the arrest of the driver. Another child, at about 28 seconds, can be seen pulling out his phone to record the driver.
3. It's the "cult of compliance" embodied, yet again. The driver gives a command, the student disobeys, and the driver then uses that to justify (to himself and in the aftermath) his use of force. It's the same phenomenon as Spring Valley High and thousands of other incidents (use the tags to track them, though I'm still implementing tags consistently in the first 500 post on the blog). From the local news report:

Johnston police said the driver approached 15-year-old Christian, a student with special needs, after he failed to follow the bus driver’s instructions regarding a seat assignment.

Police said the student directed an inflammatory comment toward the bus driver who grabbed the student's coat, hit the boy in the face and pushed him to the floor.

Here's the video. Obvious warnings apply, though it's more disturbing than graphic.

Here's a disturbing and complex manifestation of the cult of compliance: 

Starting next week, San Francisco will be the fifth county in the state to implement Laura’s Law, the measure that allows judges to force severely mentally ill people to get treatment.
The measure is targeted toward people who are resisting care and have a history of hospitalization, incarceration or violence. Family members, mental health providers or police officers can petition the court to compel patients into outpatient treatment, though patients cannot be forced to take medication.

The devil, of course, is in the details of how it's regulated and enforced. But a history of hospitalization and incarceration does not mean, by itself, at risk for perpetrating violence. I see this law as spreading fear and stigma, the last thing the mental health community should want.

This is a video of a school cop grabbing an African-American teenager by the throat for, it appears, trying to walk away. There had been a fight, the officer was telling him something, and the boy was trying to leave.

Unless the boy was making some kind of threat, which no one has claimed he has, there's no justification other than raw assertion of power for this action.



The police officer needs to be disciplined. But won't be. He'll use lack of compliance as a justification for whatever action followed.

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!).