Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Well, it’s the new year. Here’s a report (excluding disability) on police violence in 2017. Here’s the Washington Post on police killings in 2017 including mental illness. Reading through these cases, I feel we’re making no progress. Still 25% known mental illness, still reasonable estimate of a third to a half involving disabled people in some …
There is no de-escalation training that can build better policing. There is no video monitoring that can hold police accountable. So long as cops can say, “I was afraid,” even when video evidence shows that they are lying, they are legally entitled to commit murder. Patrick Harmon, a black man with, according to his sister, …
Two deaths of disabled men at the hands of law enforcement have been in the news lately. One was black, a veteran, and a mental health crisis spun him into custody, where an officer (allegedly) broke his neck. The other was white, nonverbal, autistic, and walked away from his group at a park, where an …
My home-away-from-home community of Minneapolis-St. Paul just learned that the police officers who killed Jamar Clark will not be charged. This case has become a focal point for Black Lives Matter in the Twin Cities. There’s another case though, that is getting both legislative and media attention: John Birkeland. He was killed during a mental …
Today at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, CA, I’ll be attending a showing of Where is Hope, a film on police violence and disability. I’ve seen the film, and it’s direct and powerful, forcing viewers to really think about the experience of violence at the hands of law enforcement, and particularly why that violence …
Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope …
Sureshbahi Patel was beaten by an Alabama police officer for, as near as I can tell, not speaking English. I like to think of this as akin to other situations in which people do not process verbal commands – whether through hearing loss, not speaking English, ear buds, sensory processing, etc. The man who beat …
I’ve been out of town so haven’t been commenting directly on the Laquan McDonald killing. Two major points. First, I believe that the elected officials of Chicago tried to cover this up and delay justice for political gain. The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for …
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 …
Poster for Different Lenses, One Vision conference. Next Wednesday, November 18, I will be offering a public lecture on police violence and disability at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for their “Different Lenses, One Vision: A collaborative discussion on ‘otherness’” conference. I argue that the experiences of people with disabilities must be …