But right now, Senator Chuck Schumer is currently battling the DOJ over who will control the funds for the surveillance of autistic children and adults who wander under Kevin and Avonte's Law. This is the latest chapter in the continued tragedy of another crop of ID tag monitoring initiatives paired with autism awareness training. These initiatives are meant to give autism parents that false sense of security that their offspring won't be harmed in an encounter with police. I used to believe such training was the magic bullet that would solve this. I watched while one disabled POC after another died at the end of such encounters and wept, realizing I was totally wrong. Any law enforcement ID program, registry of biometric information and DNA, or other such efforts to reduce catastrophic encounters with disabled community members who are neurodivergent or have an invisible disability label do not help the potential victims. They may reduce law enforcement risk, and they may make families and police feel better. Tagging humans without their consent and surveilling them does not reduce wandering it may or may not make it easier to find missing autistics. But regarding the death toll of neurodivergent African Americans caught in catastrophic encounters with law enforcement, nothing has changed. They are still dying regardless of how much training, IDs, tracking, or biometric database building is involved. That means this is not working for our families. I breakdown when I am forced to repeat the names of every young autistic African American who was shot dead by officers who knew their disabilities, were already trained in de-escalation techniques, were carrying tasers but used guns instead [see Stephon Watts ], and in some cases actually knew the victims personally from previous encounters [see Paul Childs III.] Some of the officers involved in some of the shootings and excessive use of force incidents had histories of prior bad acts that received little or no disciplinary action [see Gilberto Powell’s case]. I want anyone reading this to feel our people's pain. We can only reduce the deaths and irreparable harm when we understand that repeating and mandating solutions that aren't working perpetuate the cycle of harm to disabled Black populations. All these programs that flip the responsibility for being victimized to the disabled person in crisis and present the solution as somehow being centered on wearing identification, carrying communication cards, or being known to law enforcement as a neurodivergent individual need to leave the catastrophic police encounter conversation. We have to consider what it means to have identification tags hanging all over our loved ones letting anyone and everyone know our disabled folks are vulnerable and excellent targets. We have to approach these things better than mandating solutions without including folk who know what it means to be autistic and marginalized in multiple ways. These people may be invaluable in crafting better solutions. I cannot emphasize enough that not listening to everyone in this conversation is costing lives. It should not matter whether or not a person is visibly disabled. It should not matter what the respectability factor of a citizen is. We all have Miranda rights, civil rights, and the right to equal humane treatment by law enforcement and criminal justice representatives in our country. We have all seen enough videos of law enforcement officers dumping visibly disabled people out of their wheelchairs and forcing off prosthetic limbs and crutches from citizens to understand by now that being aware a person is disabled doesn't prevent deaths or excessive use of force during engagement of those in crisis.
The most infamous historical instances of wrongful incarceration, wrongful institutionalization, and eugenics programs always began with asking the future victims to carry special identification, wear visible badges, distinctive clothing, or segregate themselves from the rest of society in very specific ways that allowed them to be easily singled out or rounded up for harm later.
Neither parents nor any other stakeholder in the disability justice conversation should be lulled by the myth that somehow, autistic loved ones will be saved if the police get more disability identification or autism training or autistic offspring have a big red sign on them saying I AM [fill in invisible disability label]. All of these methods of risk reduction depend entirely on the good graces of the officers. They also could actually open an avenue to deflect liability from city and state government by giving them a loophole to avoid responsibility for harm to citizens who won’t or can't carry these extra identity cards. Should autistic children and adults register themselves in law enforcement databases, particularly in a world of racial and ableist profiling? What are the ethical and legal concerns regarding DNA kits given to law enforcement in case an autistic child goes missing in an age where police are grabbing familial DNA without consent to aid in criminal investigations? These are things we must think about carefully before pushing for mandated autism registries and other things that might come back to harm our loved ones.
Think! What makes us believe this when every single disabled person who has died never had the opportunity to show any officer ID or anything other proof of disability because the distance they stood from those who shot them dead was too far to do anything of the sort? I need to reiterate what has been pointed out about the shooting of Korryn Gaines: "While the Baltimore County Police Department is equipped with a Mobile Crisis Team that "pairs a mental health clinician with a police officer to provide emergency police response to persons in need of crisis intervention," this unit was never called in to de-escalate the situation. Korryn Gaines was shot through the outside wall of her house and her toddler son, who they knew was in her arms because she was live-streaming this, was shot in the process. What good would Korryn's ownership of ID with “I am a childhood victim of the lead paint problem that Maryland government refuses to hold slum lords accountable for and have a permanent intellectual disability as a result” have done here?
The task before us is to reduce encounters altogether, spend money on community-based crisis response and respite centers, and educate communities about how to be more inclusive of their neurodivergent members. Mobile crisis response teams do no good if they aren't deployed and tactical assault teams are sent instead.
I have so much going on right now but this issue upsets me so much I made the time I frankly don’t have to write this. Again. If we don’t address the true problem our neurodivergent loved ones will keep paying the price with their lives. So let's define the true problem regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us. How do we help our loved ones avoid catastrophic encounters with any law enforcement officer who may have committed previous bad acts involving excessive use of force without being held accountable for them or who may be ableist, racist, transphobic, or otherwise biased against those in the community who are marginalized? The problem is not a problem of awareness of disability, lack of training in the identification of invisible disability, or any other method that blames a victim for not appearing disabled enough. Again, the police were aware of Korryn Gaines' psychiatric disability but did not choose to deploy the Mobile Crisis Team. Skewing the definition of the problem prevents sustainable solutions and costs lives. It's time to end misguided efforts at mandating faux feel-good options that give no real safety but provide great optics for organizations and generate income for individuals promoting them in conferences and paid training programs. Define the true problems and help drive change to create real protections that save lives. Our loved ones are dying. Help take the first step away from this road to hell paved with our parental and professional good intentions. |
Showing posts with label autism training for law enforcement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autism training for law enforcement. Show all posts
Saturday, August 3, 2019
On The Dangers of Faux Solutions to Catastrophic Encounters with Law Enforcement
Thursday, June 29, 2017
#AutisticWhileBlack: Justice For Marcus Abrams
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| Marcus Abrams after his encounter with police. Image of the face of an African American male with injuries to his face Credit City Pages |
"Tuesday night after Black Lives Matter St. Paul wrapped up its protest of Gov. Mark Dayton, the group gathered in front of the governor’s mansion to hear sisters Jacqueline Vaughn and Neenah Caldwell recount a harrowing interaction between their 17-year-old brother and police.
Vaughn told the crowd that on Monday evening her brother, Marcus Abrams, who is legally blind and autistic, "was coming home from the State Fair and off of Lexington and University was beaten brutally by the police. He was beaten so bad he was in a seizure and declared dead for 15 minutes." She added that police accused her brother of being under the influence.
According to Metro Transit spokesman Howie Padilla, police were driving by the Lexington station at about 7 p.m. that day when they saw Abrams on the light rail tracks, “a dangerous situation for anybody.” Officers asked Abrams to get off the tracks, so the teen jumped back on the platform. Officers then began to question him.
What happened afterward is under review. Video footage of the station is not yet available to the public and Padilla isn’t ready to confirm exactly what led officers to take Abrams to the ground. He said the teen suffered a split lip, though if Abrams also went into a seizure, it would have been beyond the officers’ ability to recognize it definitively.
Padilla said officers eventually called medics and took Abrams to the hospital, where they discussed what happened with his mother. Abrams’ mother said she intended to file a complaint, though has not done so as of Wednesday afternoon.
“After the mother notified us of the teen’s challenges and issues, we determined that he should go home with his mother rather than the juvenile detention center,” Padilla says.
On Tuesday, Vaughn said it was a witness who called an ambulance to take her brother to the hospital."
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| 60 #BLM protestors marching to the Governor's office. Credit City pages. |
Marcus, now 19, suffered a seizure from the beating and was declared dead for fifteen minutes. Please explain how someone legally blind goes from being beaten to having to face charges of attacking an off-duty policeman and now facing a competency hearing? The rapid deterioration and perversion of this case force back haunting memories of the case of Neli Latson. Beyond tactile issues and issues of gait and sensory concerns that have very little to do with competency but are part of an Autism diagnosis, as someone who was blind for a time there is nothing more invasive than being touched without one's consent. It is terrifying regardless of the degree of disability to have some random hands laid on you by people who you may not be able to see well enough to identify.
Note the lines I highlighted. 1. Abrams followed instructions but was later subjected to such a beating that he had a seizure. 2. The officers' ability to recognize a man having a seizure was said to probably be beyond their abilities. 3. It was a witness who called an ambulance to take Marcus to the hospital. Video footage was not released to the public. It would be revealed later that Marcus was placed in a chokehold preceding the beating.
I don't know if there is video footage from this latest accusation of assault where he was also tasered.
I can't imagine what a taser does to someone with a seizure disorder.
I don't know if there is video footage from this latest accusation of assault where he was also tasered.
I can't imagine what a taser does to someone with a seizure disorder.
The story of Marcus Abrams is parallel to the story of Reginald "Neli" Latson. After four years of everyone sitting on their hands and Neli suffering the permanent effects of being placed in solitary confinement, people came together to help Neli's attorneys and they at least freed him from one hell, that of the criminal justice system, but he is still being held in confinement within a facility in the mental health system when he should never have been in either place.
Will we sit on our hands and watch another young man, blind and autistic while black, have his life destroyed like Neli's? Someone has to act now. Someone needs to reach out to #BLM in Minnesota, to his mother and sisters, to his attorney. This time, let's do something before he is irrevocably harmed.
Let's see how well the white activists who usurped the voices all too familiar with the narrative of the black disabled victims of catastrophic encounters with police step up to the plate now and fight for those whose victimization and subsequent unjust criminalization they've profited from. This is where the bill, for individuals who treat the black disabled body like data to be collected for discourse and display and the human victims of horrific harm like revenue streams and potential training, speaking, and writing for pay fodder can learn what true advocacy means. Marcu Adams should not be stripped of his civil rights and committed to a mental institution. Time to save a life about to be destroyed.
DO SOMETHING.
#SaveMarcusAbrams, #Blind and #AutistcWhileBlack
Resources:
The Case of Marcus Abrams
The Case of Neli Latson
Reginald Latson's case points to a major scandal in US prisons:
Friday, January 2, 2015
Catastrophic Encounters with Police: The Case of Tario Anderson And the Way Forward for Neli Latson
Tario Anderson, 34 Black, nonspeaking autistic, was walking down his street to visit family on the evening of Christmas day. He was placed in the glare of police spotlights, yelled at, at which point having done nothing wrong, he placed his hands in his pockets and continued walking. When police spotlighted and threatened to tase him, Tario ran. Neighbors tried shouting and warning police that Tario was autistic but they wouldn’t listen. His mother came running and repeatedly asked them to stop, even demanding they arrest her instead, shouting if anyone was at fault, she was. They used a taser on him, multiple officers fell on him while he was face down writhing from the taser shocks. Video shows Tario crying out in pain and calling for his mother. The Greenville police later announced that they now realized Mr. Anderson could not understand the commands given to him by police and all charges (interfering with police investigation and resisting arrest) would be dropped. The family is suing. In 22 years this could be my son, walking in his own neighborhood, unable to respond to police. So this is extremely, nightmarishly, personal. Even the gentle way his mother reached up to soothe the wound on his cheek during a news interview made me so upset at what happened to him. Mr. Anderson is 6 feet 6 inches and 350 lbs of calm, gentle, giant human being. He did not deserve this treatment. He may not recover from the trauma of it.
Despite my maternal horror at what happened to Mr. Anderson, this case is unusual in that the police recognized a wrong had been done, explained that it is not within the scope of law enforcement to diagnose or simply accept that any person has a condition that might impede their ability to understand and respond to police commands. They released Mr. Anderson as soon as this was understood and apologized. The critical thing here was that the police, once they realized their error, acted to make things right.
In essence the case of Reginald Latson and the case of Tario Anderson should have ended the same way. But the presumption that when someone speaks to you they are properly processing what you say, and when they fail to follow commands they are doing so in defiance shows an ignorance of the auditory processing disorders, scripting, echolalia, and other concerns that not visible or understandable to people who have no personal or professional familiarity with neurodivergent people. Invisible aspects of disability tend to lead people who have no knowledge of neurodivergence in general and autism combined with intellectual challenges in particular to draw the false conclusions that have devastated Mr. Latson’s life. The relief I have that Mr. Anderson is free from prosecution is tempered with the heartbreak of knowing that this should be what is happening right now to Neli Latson. Instead, he is going to tried again for something that was clearly a function of his solitary confinement and a mental health crisis of such gravity that he was suicidal. The Stafford county prosecutor pursued a case that is always treated as a minor infraction and managed within the corrections system. Prosecutor Eric Olsen was hell bent on punishing an individual based upon his own personal racial profiling and ableism. Quoting Ms. Marcus' Washington Post article: "Latson’s intellectual disability, Olsen has argued in court, is “an aspect of convenience. When his advocates want him to be (unprintable slur for intellectually disabled), he is.” "
I am asking that the next thing we do for Neli Latson is to appeal to Virginia’s attorney general to drop the charges against him and allow him to be transferred out of the corrections system and into the DD system where he can begin to heal from the harm done him. Mr. Latson only differs from Mr. Anderson in that his ability to speak masks invisible disability. There is only one person in the entire state of Virginia who continually insists Mr. Latson be prosecuted. That man’s prosecutorial bias calls into question the entire case history to date. Mr. Latson should not have to be placed in a position where he pleads guilty to something that was beyond his ability to control and leaves him at the mercy of a prosecutor who has made his enmity, racial bias, and ableism plain in open court.
While I am very upset by the entire Christmas day catastrophic encounter, harm and arrest of Tario Anderson, I have to commend the Greenville, S.C. police department for releasing him and acting to drop charges against him as soon as they had verification of Mr. Anderson's diagnosis. If only Virginia showed the same understanding of Mr. Latson’s disabilities and realized being able to manage verbal speech doesn’t equal understanding what is said by others well or accurately, particularly in situations of high stress.
The Greenville S.C. police department showed the forthrightness to do rapid damage control when this catastrophic encounter with police happened and wrong had been done to an autistic Black man. Time for Virginia to follow suit and make things right for Mr. Latson.
#FreeNeli
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