Journalist – Historian – Speaker
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 …
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 …
Over the last week, news and reaction about the Ethan Saylor case continued to unfold. I want to use my Monday morning blog to highlight an especially important response from http://kimchilatkes.com/. The author is also a parent of a child with Down syndrome and wrote in response to this story from Maryland. In the story, …
For the past year, I have been writing about a persistent pattern of police violence against people with disabilities. I have been particularly focused on the Ethan Saylor case, of course. But the stories proliferate, with a new one almost every week. On Monday, I argued that you can read both the Times Square police …
I’ve been trying to write about non-compliance and police violence to no avail, so far. I’m not sure what’s not catching editors’ eyes about my various essays (and soon I’ll just start posting them here), as I think there’s a very big story happening before us, but we get distracted by tasers, by drones, by …