Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Most of my writing on the cult of compliance focuses on police violence. It’s where the deification of compliance is most visible and most dangerous. Schools, however, are another site for such practices, especially as they turn into bunkers. Sometimes such moments turn violent, but there are more subtle forms, such as this story out …
Not a case of beer The blog Police State USA does a fantastic job of tracking and writing up incidents of police brutality, overreach, abuse, and other nefarious conduct. I continue to focus on the cult of compliance. This story is from the summer of 2013: Three female college students went to the grocery story and …
This is my 200th post on the blog. It’s not a happy one. As long-time readers know, my work on the Ethan Saylor case led me to coin the phrase the “cult of compliance.” This phrase allows me to link diverse moments in which authority figures respond to non-compliance with egregious acts of violence and place …
In September I wrote about a mentally-ill man who was shot at by police for not listening. He ran into traffic in Times Square so they shot at him. Well, today he was charged as responsible for the people that the police shot. “The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent …
On Thursday, a vigil was held for Ethan Saylor, the man with Down syndrome whose death led me to coin the phrase, “cult of compliance.” I see the consequences of that cult everywhere. It’s a world in which police demand total compliance and use lack-of-compliance as justification for abuses both small and great (and fatal). …
A friend sent me this link. It’s a story I haven’t heard before, but I just want to demonstrate that here, again, is the veneration of compliance by police. This is much like the Saylor case or the Antonio Martinez case in California where police explain the violence due to non-compliance and police demonstrate their inability …
Imagine you are walking down the street listening to music. Police see something about you that they don’t like. They are behind you though and call on you to stop. You can’t hear them. What happens next? I’ve written cases in which Deaf people experience just this – the police feel disrespected and they react. …
Last week, a 13-year-old boy named Andy was walking home carrying a toy rifle. Police seem to have mistaken him for a grown man, called for him to drop the gun. As he turned towards the squad car (I think, based on reports), police fired on him. They hit him with seven bullets, according to …
Jonathan Turley brings us another example of what I call the Cult of Compliance: In this article and attached video, police throw a woman into a concrete bench, breaking several bones in her face. A lawsuit has followed. They arrested Cassandra Feuerstein in Skokie after finding her asleep at the wheel, and charged her with drunk driving. …
One of my concerns with the language about disability and violence, whether domestic, in institutions, or in public, is an easy tendency to link the violent outcome to the disability, rather than focusing on the perpetrator of the violence. Such rhetoric doesn’t tend, or in I think intend, to excuse the violence, but it does …