The Cult of Compliance: Excellent Framing re Police Murder

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to conuly for the link, here's a typically excellent article from David Perry lollardfish:

contains: police killing disabled people

4 Disabled People Dead in Another Week of Police Brutality

Police don’t need better training; they need to stop treating noncompliance as justification for violence.

https://www.thenation.com/article/four-disabled-dead-in-another-week-of-police-brutality/

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So what do we do? When incidents like these happen, departments and some advocates often focus on two deeply troubling solutions: training and registries. Both are based on the idea that police just don’t recognize disability when they see it, or don’t know what to do if they recognize it. Instead, we need to reframe policing, decriminalize noncompliance, and remove police from as many situations as possible.

In abstract, training is a fine thing. [...snip...] It’s good for police to know what a mental-health crisis is, that autistic people might not look you in the eye, and how to find resources.

At the same time, trainings send the message that the problem is behavior in cases related to disability, rather than core issues related to quick escalation. If a person with autism shouldn’t be brutalized for shaking a string, neither should a drug user. If a deaf person shouldn’t be shot for not hearing commands, neither should a person wearing ear buds.

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Comments

[vass]

That's always what they say. More training, more resources.

[tw: institutional violence against autistic children]

Today I read two news articles about abuse in Australian schools. The first included the key phrase "would you prefer a more aesthetically pleasing chair?" This was a sincere question: the school actually seemed to think his mother's objection to finding out that her son (nonverbal and intellectually disabled but fully mobile) was being strapped into a chair all day was about the chair's appearance.

The second involved the school moving the (intellectually disabled, nonverbal autistic) child from class to class using boxing pads. The child was regularly being injured. He was also self-injuring out of stress. When his mother had asked what caused the injuries he got at school, the school claimed they didn't know. They didn't mention the boxing pads. A specialist observer found that out.

The Education Minister, when asked to comment, said he would talk directly to the parents to resolve this (why to the parents? The parents weren't the perpetrators this time) and that it highlighted the need for teachers to have more training in dealing with "challenging" children, quote unquote.

Did their education degrees not cover not hitting children? Even when the children are really annoying? I don't understand. But then, I wouldn't. My condition is widely believed to be cause failures in empathy.

[jesse_the_k]

There aren't words for how angry those examples make me.

The "cult of compliance" will be the death of many of us. It seemed to creep up slowly, but we're now -- almost worldwide -- living under military rules, if not actual martial law.

Why must someone be obeyed instantly on pain of beating or death?