Global Crisis

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.

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.

When Eric Garner's killers were not charged, I wrote a piece for CNN about the intersection of disability and race in his and other deaths at the hands of law enforcement.

Ever since I heard that Freddie Gray asked for an inhaler before the police closed the door on the van and began give him his (alleged) rough ride, I've been pretty sure that the same lens applies to his death.

That sentiment was confirmed by an excellent piece on Gray's lead paint poisoning a few weeks ago in the Washington Post.

“There was a big hole when you go up the steps,” Gray recalled in 2009. “There was a couple of walls that wasn’t painted all the way, peeled. . . . And like the windows, paint was peeling off the windows.”

Before Freddie Gray was injured in police custody last month, before he died and this city was plunged into rioting, his life was defined by failures in the classroom, run-ins with the law and an inability to focus on anything for very long.

 Many of those problems began when he was a child and living in this house, according to a 2008 lead-poisoning lawsuit filed by Gray and his siblings against the property owner. The suit resulted in an undisclosed settlement.

Reports of Gray’s history with lead come at a time when the city and nation are still trying to understand the full ramifications of lead poisoning. Advocates and studies say it can diminish cognitive function, increase aggression and ultimately exacerbate the cycle of poverty that is already exceedingly difficult to break.

It is nonetheless hard to know whether Gray’s problems were exclusively borne of lead poisoning or were the result of other socioeconomic factors as well. From birth, his was a life of intractable poverty that would have been challenging to overcome.

It's impossible to point to a single factor and say - lead paint! Or - poverty! Or - racism! That's why intersectionality matters. We don't have to, and shouldn't, because that's not how humans work. Each of us is shaped by intersecting factors, and for Gray, those intersections proved fatal.

“Jesus,” Dan Levy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the effects of lead poisoning on youths, gasped when told of Gray’s levels. “The fact that Mr. Gray had these high levels of lead in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information.”

Levy added, “And the real tragedy of lead is that the damage it does is irreparable.”
By the time Gray and his family moved into the hovel on North Carey Street, which became the subject of the subsequent litigation, the amount of lead in his system had fallen. But he and his sisters began developing problems.

His sister, Fredericka, developed issues with aggression, Gray said in a 2009 deposition. “She still got problems like that,” he said. “She still do. She always was the aggressive one. She liked to fight all the time and all of that.”

Equally troubling was the children’s performance in the classroom. The twins and an older sister were diagnosed with either ADHD or attention-deficit disorder ADD, and Fredericka’s academic career was “riddled with suspensions,” court records say.

It wasn’t any better for Freddie, who never graduated high school and was often absent from his studies because of truancy or suspensions. “All the schools that I went to, I was in special education,” Gray said.

Today in the Baltimore Sun, there's a letter Zosia Zaks, who is the manager of programs and education at Towson University's Hussman Center for Adults with Autism and also teaches disability studies courses. Zaks writes:

Why is no one discussing Freddie Gray's disabilities? Historically, disabled persons have had a higher risk for ineffective interactions with law enforcement personnel. Recent examples in our geographic area include the cases of Nellie Latson and Robert Saylor. This is not to discount factors of racism at all. But disability discrimination or "ableism" is the most hidden "ism" of all and our society is just not dealing with it. In Freddie Gray's case, racial discrimination is compounded by disability discrimination and when we ignore this fact, any solution to the problem of police bias and brutality will be incomplete.
The police must be trained in how to respond to individuals with developmental disabilities of all races. This does not mean we make excuses for the actions of adults with disabilities — visible or invisible. All adults must be held to the same standards of the law. What is does mean is that people who communicate, think, learn and emote differently must have the accommodations, supports and guidance needed to level the playing field. This also means that civil workers in a city like Baltimore in which hundreds of children have sustained lead poisoning must receive training to ensure public safety for all citizens.
We have been promising persons with disabilities the right to full community integration for decades. This promise rings hollow when society refuses to analyze and to discuss openly how we collectively and personally respond to the diversity of disability.

Readers of this blog will know how wholeheartedly I back Zaks' analysis here. It's vital to include the disability lens in our understanding both of this tragedy and how to reduce the risk of these incidents in the future.







http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bs-ed-gray-disabled-letter-20150502-story.html

The Washington Post has published a report based on a leaked document. We don't know who leaked it to them. In it, a prisoner who was placed in the police van some time after Freddie Gray was restrained, claims that he heard banging from Gray's compartment. At no time did this anonymous prisoner see Gray.

That's news. A prisoner heard banging. That ought to get published.

Unfortunately, WaPo decided to go with a reiteration of the prisoner's suppositions.

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.
The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.
The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe.

I just wrote about questioning narratives. Here's another case where the narrative must be taken apart.

First, notice all the hypotheticals and room for doubt: "might have" "not clear" no "additional evidence" "written by a police investigator"  "could not see him" - there is literally no evidence here except that Prisoner A heard banging.

But instead, we get in the lede, the headline, and crawling across cable news channels, the message that Freddie Gray broke his own spine. It's not going to persuade many, but it will introduce enough doubt to keep pro-law individuals and policy-makers from vigorously pursuing justice for Gray.

Moreover, imagine this prisoner, now caught up in the Freddie Gray story. The police interrogate him about what he heard. I can imagine a scenario in which the investigator says, "You heard banging?" "Yes." "Like he was trying to hurt himself?" "Yes." And then writes down, "Prisoner A says Gray was trying to hurt himself."

Did that happen? No idea. And the Washington Post also has no idea either.

There is a good story to write about this leaked document, a necessary story even. Banging could mean an attempt to self-injure in an effort to get a big settlement (the implication here), but also could be the last pleas of a dying man for help, unable to call out anymore. Banging could be a lot of things. All we know is Prisoner A heard sounds.

The people who wrote this piece are journalist pros in a way I will never be, sludging through the day-job of it all for one of the great papers in America. But I believe the way this piece was written reflects poorly on the ethical decisions made by the writers and the editors. It serves the agenda of the leaker and those who want to introduce doubt to the investigation of the death of Freddie Gray.

Because when there is doubt, time and time again, in front of juries, the media, and the public, law enforcement officials receive the benefit of that doubt. And the Washington Post has made it easier for Gray's killers to escape justice.

UPDATE: Let's imagine that the BPD had reliable evidence beyond this one prisoner that Gray's injuries were self-inflicted. They would have released that within 24 hours of his death as an attempt to forestall unrest, rather than letting the investigation play out. This leak is a sign of the weakness of the investigation to exonerate the police, rather than a sign of Gray's culpability.

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.

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.

Walter Scott's killing has made national news, propelled by a cell phone video that allegedly shows the officer dropping a TASER by the body, trying to make the death look justified. When Scott died, I expected to hear defenders of the killing blame Scott for running, but there's been relatively little of that. Instead, Officer Slager is being rendered a bad apple, rather than the sign of a systemic problem.

But absent video, there's little question in my mind that Slager would have gotten away with this. That tells me two important things.

1. Body cams are necessary. They must be deployed with appropriate mandatory activation policies. They will cause some new problems and need to be carefully monitored in terms of storage and use of video, but they are quite simply needed. The failure to turn on one's body camera must function as a gross violation of policy and perhaps indication of wrongdoing. There is no other way to regain trust than to have the verification of video.

2. Police testimony generally has a powerful evidentiary status, a fact that Slager tried to exploit in his alleged crime. For example, Justus Howell was killed in Chicago just a few hours after Scott. He was allegedly in the midst of a deal to buy a handgun when the cops got involved, and ran away with the gun. Running with a firearm is likely justified legally (although I have not heard any evidence that Howell was in fact trying to use the firearm, so any threat remained speculative). The police have told a very clear and consistent story about the incident. Do we believe them? How can we, when this story about the death of Walter Scott, told before the video was out, also is very clear and tells the story of a justified shooting.  I am not saying I in fact think the Zion police are lying. In fact, I think that it's almost certain that their narrative is accurate. But, Slager's conduct forces us, as responsible citizens, to question police narratives.

EDIT - The New York Times has a piece about officers being assumed to tell the truth unless there's evidence to the contrary. They suggest that might have to change. I agree.

Moreover, these are not the only deaths in the news of late.

I wrote about Lavall Hall, the man in mental health crisis holding a broomstick, who police chased as he ran, and shot as he allegedly turned back to them (fearing the broomstick). Now the lawyers for Hall's family have released video, I suspect trying to link their case to Scott's.

The police aren't happy.

As the video played at the news conference, one of the attorneys for the family said Daniels can be heard telling police before the shooting, “Please don’t hurt my child, please.”
A spokesman for Florida State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told ABC News that the investigation is ongoing and they have concerns the video may endanger the investigation into the incident, but the office could not stop the family from releasing the video.
"We investigate every police use of force as a potential criminal case, and that’s why the premature release of this video may well interfere with the investigation," the spokesman told ABC News.

Maybe the premature release is an issue, but to me, I think it's that the video makes the police narrative more questionable. The narrative is:

"The officers were faced with a dangerous situation. They have already given statements to investigators indicating Mr. Hall struck them with a weapon and deadly force was used. The reasonableness of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene. The reliable evidence will establish Officers Trimino and Ehrlich acted appropriately.”

And then there's Donald "Dontay" Ivy - Tasered to death in Albany.

The family of Donald "Dontay" Ivy, 39, described him as a paranoid schizophrenic they said suffered from heart problems. His relatives waited for answers later in the day about the death of a man they said was quiet and introverted as they gathered outside their Second Street residence, several blocks from where the incident unfolded.
Police said Ivy fought with the officers, Michael Mahany, Joshua Sears and Charles Skinkle, at Lark and Second streets and led them on a brief foot chase. The officers started performing CPR on Ivy 11 minutes after the confrontation began at 12:36 a.m., according to a police spokesman.
Police leaders have not said why the officers confronted Ivy or how many times he was struck with a Taser. Ivy was pronounced dead at Albany Medical Center Hospital after he arrived in an ambulance at 1:10 a.m., a spokesman said.

Details on the case are still pending. But Ivy is remembered as a "good kid." Family members argue that the police knew that Ivy was disabled and should have approached the situation differently.

Police nationwide have faced scrutiny for their use of deadly force, especially toward the mentally ill. Ivy's family is questioning the fatal actions of Albany police, since they believe Ivy's illness was apparent.
"They would have known that he was mentally ill," Okwuosa said. "And they would have dealt with it from that perspective. Which they did not, and as a result, I had to see my nephew in the morgue today."

Meanwhile, the DA has announced an independent investigation.

Louis Hayes is a Chicago area SWAT and CIT trained police officer trying to change certain core strategic approaches employed by police. He's got a new piece up about "lawful but awful" cases, many of which involve disability. Hayes writes:

What I read from activists’ and advocates’ intelligent responses (SPECIAL NOTE: intelligent) to many of the high profile “Lawful But Awful” cases is a sense of officers needlessly rushing into action. While I dispute many of their claims in the recent national cases, they do have a point. In SOME cases, I see videos of officers creating their own jeopardy – by closing the distance, acting too quickly, moving in before gathering more information. When this is combined with the agency not properly training its officers in recognition of mental illness or disability, this is counter to any claim of “risk management.”
Critics of the above stabilize mindset (generally from inside police work) claim this higher goal is too risky for officers and puts them at risk. I contend not. I argue that when taken from an analytical perspective of risk, I am not asking officers to accept more risk. Actually quite the opposite – expose officers to less risk, thereby needing less force to overcome the lower risk! I also advocate the complete empowerment of police officers to use quick, decisive force levels and options when necessary…up to and including deadly force.

Hayes and I don't always agree (he's too fond of TASERs for my liking, for example), but I think he's one of the sharper voices from WITHIN the law enforcement community to recognize the challenges of reshaping policing.

In fact, I just did a radio interview in which the host, politely, asked me how I respond to the accusation that I'm anti-cop. I wish I had this document at hand when answering. In fact, this kind of response can make the officers safer as well as protecting us and our civil liberties.

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.

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

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.

The apartheid government of South Africa had a problem (well, it had a lot of them, but bear with me). It wanted to discriminate by race, but how does one deal with mixed-race people? It came up with the infamous "pencil test," in which a pencil is pushed through a person's hair, and how easily it emerges determines the classification. The pencil test is penetrative, with overtones of the state's control over black bodies medically, sexually, and in so many other ways. For me, it's always been a symbol of the whole evil apartheid construct.

It's been on my mind lately because of a broad discussion about disability and fakery. How disabled must a person be to qualify as "disabled" under the law? Being disabled comes with certain civil rights protections. Being disabled to a certain degree entitles one to a check from Social Security every month. Being disabled, as Justin Bieber knows, can enable one to skip lines at Disneyworld (instead of linking to Gawker or TMZ, why not read the great Emily Ladau on Bieber). Being disabled, in the eyes of the abled world anyway, comes with advantages (great parking!), sympathy (oh, your son is cute), and money.

This is, of course, nonsense and tracks to the ways that other privileged groups envy the perceived benefits of those who experience discrimination. In the disability world, this often tracks to "how disabled are you really?"

We saw it recently with George Takei's ill-conceived posting of a picture showing a woman standing on her wheelchair to get down a bottle of alcohol in the grocery store. The caption, "There's been a miracle in the alcohol isle," suggested that this woman wasn't /really/ that disabled if she could stand on the wheelchair to get some booze. Disability advocates protested and Takei initially told them to lighten up, which is the first response of so many comedians when called on humor that replicates stereotypes. I was first alerted to it by a friend who can walk about 100 feet before using her wheelchair, and she told me that she lives in fear of being accused of faking and having to defend her disabled state.

There were a /lot/ of articles about the meme and Takei. I thought this one from Scott Jordan Harris at Slate was especially good when he offered an alaternative read of the scene. He wrote:

"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."

Eventually, Takei apologized, at length and sincerely, and the story faded.

I'm writing about this because a 2008 story just made its way to my feeds. I've been working hard on the issue of disability and police violence, but I don't claim to have a master database or anything like a total set of examples. In 2008, my son was one and I was just beginning to apply my training as an academic to disability issues. I wasn't even on Facebook yet.

Here's the story and the post. In it, a cop doesn't believe that someone arrested on a traffic violation is /really/ disabled, so he decides to conduct his own test, dumping him on the floor (and breaking some ribs). This is the extreme case, but it's the same as the Takei meme in its origins (eventually there was an apology and probably a lawsuit).
Our language and our actions around disability and fraud matter. They ripple through the culture, shaping behaviors and ideas beyond. Language - comedy memes - have power. 

Everybody pay attention to these next two sentences, ok?

The report urges a pilot project to study whether first responders – the front-line officers most likely to encounter people in crisis – should have tasers, which advocates say allow police to gain control of difficult situations without drawing their guns. Currently, only Toronto Police supervisors and tactical officers carry the devices.

However, in treading cautiously on the issue, Mr. Iacobucci recommended that officers who use tasers also be issued monitoring technology such as body-worn cameras. He also urged Toronto Police to advocate for studies on the medical effects of tasers, which detractors warn can be unsafe in certain circumstances, and help create a national database on their use.

There's a lot of good things in the report. The "zero death" goal is excellent, as that, indeed, should be the goal of our police forces.

And TASERs are fine as a tool for the police. U.S. experience shows, though, that when you give cops TASERs, they use them all the time. If you make the ubiquitous in Canada, unless you also build rigorous guidelines and prosecute those who break the guidelines, they will become the low-stakes default, as if shooting something with 40,000 volts of screaming agony isn't serious.

Good luck Canada. I hope you handle this better than we have.

She has been charged with a felony for kicking at him after she was flung to the ground. Police reviewed the file and said they did nothing wrong. There is a move-on petition (I have signed it). Here's a local article on the story as the case is being re-reviewed in the wake of viral social media response. Then Huffington Post and CNN. There's lots more.

I argue that along with race, which is central to the case I believe, we've got an example of the cult of compliance. We have made it possible to criminalize non-compliance. If you don't obey police, they can physically hurt you, and if you defend yourself, you get charged with attacking the police. This happens all the time across America, especially to non-white people, but we rarely hear about it. The stories that make the news often involve disability, as the disability functions to absolve the victim of police violence, or at least complicate the narrative. In this case, we hear about the story because it involves a professor the means to leverage social media outrage, to speak for herself, and because professor does still command some respect in American discourse. An average black woman harassed by police is not news, and the new would not cover it.

We also only hear about it because someone called 911 on the COP who was being too aggressive. I'm grateful to that person.

Here's the video. There's also dash-cam video now if you follow that link.


This is the cult of compliance. If she just complies, gives her ID, is nicely respectful, she probably just gets a citation. Stand up for your rights, even as a professor on your own campus, and this is what happens.

As always, we can do better.

Yesterday's piece in The Atlantic has a quite excellent comment section (in general, Atlantic readers' comments are polite and smart, if still sometimes easily led to the hostility that happens online everywhere).