Police brutality, BLM and the disabled perspective
By: Marijn Maas
Tags: Disability, Police Brutality, Defundthepolice, BlackLivesMatter, Disability Activism

Over the last year police brutality and the movement to address it have again come to the foreground after the killing of George Floyd. Powerful slogans like ‘defund the police’ have become widely talked about and are changing how we think about the role of the police and how we can improve underserved communities. One thing I don’t see widely discussed is how disability and ableism connect to these topics. Over the last year I have thought a lot about how I, as a disabled person, can add my voice to this movement in my own way. So in this essay I would like to discuss my thoughts on police brutality and BLM and disability activism. This is mainly to give a disabled perspective on what BLM is fighting for and to give my reasons from that perspective to support them, but also to discuss what I think I, as a fledgling disabled activist can learn from them.

A quick note, most of my writing in this piece will be focussed on the US. In part this is because there is more information out there, but mostly it is because BLM is an originally American movement. It is important to say though, that these problems definitely exist in other places, albeit in different form.

A protester was pulled from his wheelchair at a BLM march in LA.

Given that about 11% of the US population has a disability (US census data), what percentage of victims of police brutality do you think have a disability? I’ve asked this question to a few people and they all severely underestimate it. It is half. HALF! When I first started reading up on this I was astounded; as you probably are too. I needed to understand why this is the case. There are some caveats to this number since there are different ways you can define disability, both in the population and in the victims. The percentage is agreed to be somewhere between one third and two thirds, which at the low estimate would be a three times overrepresentation. Assuming this estimate is true, this would mean that in regards to police brutality, being disabled is about as dangerous in America as being Black. However, the media often does not report on disability or uses disability (often mental illness) to blame the victim.

In saying this, I in no way want to steer the discussion away from the injustice being done to people of colour in the US. When you look further at the statistics you actually see that are large amount of the victims of police brutality are both African American and disabled. For example Eric Garner, who was choked to death while saying “I can’t breathe” eleven times, had asthma and other health problems. When Dethorne Graham quickly left a convenience store without buying something, a police officer suspected him of theft, pulled him over. Dethorne Graham got out of his car and behaved ‘suspiciously. Graham was having a diabetic episode, something which he tried to communicate to the officer. Instead of helping, the police officer cuffed the unconscious Graham and threw him against his car, suffering a broken foot and other injuries. The 1989 Supreme Court decision about this case set the standard of ‘reasonableness’ that is currently being used in police us of force cases.

The police being aware of a disability, often doesn’t help. Mohamed Bah’s mother called the police because she was worried about her son. When the police showed up to his apartment he panicked and locked himself in his room. The police broke down the door and found a scared Bah with a knife in his hand. This gave the police enough justification to shoot to kill. Quintenio LeGrier’s father called the police because his son was having a ‘freak out’. Quintenio himself also called 911 three times that night and had asked for medical help for his mental health in the past. When the police showed up they found LeGrier holding a bat and according to the police he was acting aggressively. Instead of de-escalating, the officers opened fire, killing LeGrier and Bettie Jones, an innocent bystander.

You might think that this differs from the police brutality against African Americans since there was no ‘disability profiling’ - they aren’t being targeted for their disability - but the disability inarguably plays a role in all these encounters, either as a justification for the force used by the police or as a contribution to the lethality of the encounter. When you combine this with the fact that black bodies are seen as more threatening, you get some very bad outcomes.

I can’t talk about my experience with racism and what the solutions to the systemic racism of the police could be. Other writers and BLM activists are doing great things in that department already. I can however talk about some of the other solutions that BLM is proposing, which is to look at police training and the role of the police. The police is not trained to de-escalate or appropriately deal with people having mental episodes. When all you have is a gun, everything is a target. Especially since the average training time for a police officer in the US is 600 hours and the ‘reasonableness’ standard set by the Graham case means that officers don’t even have an obligation to de-escalate. This is a lower standard than the US military! This shows the need for large scale police reform: demilitarisation, better training and an alternative to police that can respond to mental health calls and other situations where armed police is not necessary.

What these cases also show is how disability is a systemic problem affecting certain communities more than others. African American communities have higher rates of disability in every age group and socio-economic background. This disparity is especially apparent in disabilities that are acquired later in life by environmental factors like poverty, lower quality nutrition, inadequate access to preventative care, lower access to health insurance, healthcare treatment and research that is racially biased and environmental factors like lead poisoning. This shows that there is also need to fix these root causes of disability and that anyone who considers themselves a disability activist needs to acknowledge that certain communities are more affected than others.

These two things; police reform and investing in communities are two main tenets of the BLM movement. What I think is so great about the BLM movement is that they are so consistently looking at root causes of the problems. Although I think ‘Defund the Police’ is not perfect as a slogan — I don’t think it intuitively covers what it meant to say — I do think it is a great rallying cry and way to focus the conversation on what needs to be done. It just so happens that what needs to be done cannot be separated from disability, so when I look at the BLM movement I see a movement that is also fighting for me, for people with disabilities. The movement is platforming people with disabilities and including solutions that will specifically help those with disabilities. I don’t think it is useful or needed for people with disabilities to be the focus of this movement, but I do think it is important that people with disabilities add their voices to the movement and that we talk about how Black Disabled Lives Matter. I see this as a coalition of the oppressed and even though I think Black Lives are rightly the major party in this coalition, people with disabilities should stand together with them.

Image credit @jtknoxroxs

During this quarantine I thought a lot about the movement and how I would like to add my voice to it, but I also reflected on the disabled community and our activism. Even though we are a large part of the population, I don’t feel that we are united enough to push change. When you compare it to BLM you see a movement that is much more united and able to communicate their grievances in a clear and consistent way, bringing on board a lot of people that might not be personally affected by the problems. A major difference is of course that there are specific terrible events that started the BLM movement, but I think there are fundamental characteristics of disability that make it harder to organise. Here I’d like to discuss two major ones and talk about how we can possibly look to BLM for solutions.

The first important thing is that the disabled community is incredibly diverse. Because the issues around disability often involve needs — either needs that are not being met by society or needs that are assumed, this makes it difficult to unite around common interests. A wheelchair user has different and sometimes even opposite needs to someone with visual impairment. Besides that, personality can also complicate things, since people with the same disability might want to be treated differently; I personally dislike being offered help, but someone else might appreciate it.

The diversity of needs means that disability activism is often around a specific community with a specific need. The D/deaf community is fighting for caption and translators and wheelchair users are fighting for accessibility. This is not to knock those communities at all; it’s great what they are doing and sometimes these specific things are what you can get done. There are also of course overarching organisations that fight for people with disabilities in general, but I feel that individuals feel more like the belong to their specific group, than to the larger group of disabled people. This I think makes it hard for us to organise in a larger way.

In my previous essay I talk a little bit about how my perspective on my own disability has changed and in parallel to that my idea of who belongs to ‘my group’ has evolved too. I would say that now I consider all disabled people to be on my side and I on theirs. I don’t know if this is common feeling yet though. People with disabilities that have less impact on their daily life or those who acquired disabilities later in life have a less strong disabled identity or might be less interested or be less able to participate in activism.

Last week I spoke to someone who had an invisible disability and she clearly was worried that I would consider her disability to not be relevant or severe enough to be considered a ‘real’ disability. But disability is disability. There is a lot of shame, self-doubt and gate-keeping around disability and if we want to move forward that needs to be addressed. I personally learned a lot from the LGBTQIA+ pride movement about that how being proud of your identity is different than the ‘normal’ pride. You’re not proud of achievement, you didn’t choose to be this, but you are deciding that you are proudly carrying your identity front and centre, in the face of oppression. Fuck the haters basically.

Disability is unfortunately overrepresented in the LGBTQIA+ community as well.

The second important thing that makes disability activism difficult is that is that where racism and sexism often comes from negative beliefs about the qualities that the other has, ableism often comes from a place of pity or altruism. This means that a lot of ableism can be described as benevolent ableism, e.g. ableism that is meant well and comes from people trying to be helpful instead of coming from a place of hate. This definitely happens with other forms of discrimination, and the term is actually co-opted from benevolent sexism, but I think this is more common with ableism. People try to help those with disabilities, but in part because of the variation I mention above, they do it in the wrong way. This makes it much more difficult to correct people’s behaviour when they are being ableist, because the intention is pure. If someone starts pushing me up a hill, that is a huge shock and invasion of my bodily autonomy, but in their mind they were going to do their good deed for the day. The benevolent nature of ableism can make it difficult to stand up for yourself as a disabled person. You don’t want to be pitied or treated in a way you don’t like, but you also don’t want to hurt people’s feelings when they are just trying to help.

Benevolence also makes any discussion on a societal level difficult. In part this is because it is harder for disabled people to ask for improvements to the system when many are dependent on certain parts of the system, for fear of losing what they have. Combined with the diversity of needs, the benevolence also makes public discussions difficult, since it requires a level of detail and usually not possible in public discourse. Often the discussion therefore boils down to something universal and tangible: money. How much is everything going to cost? The result of this is that disability is often framed as a burden or charity from the tax payer. As disability activists we need to find a way to change the framing of these conversations, in the way that BLM keeps the conversation grounded on the injustice that needs to be fixed, instead of discussions of cost. The changes the BLM movement wants are going to cost money, but the discussion is around how they want to high-level change, on a policy level but also on a social and societal level.

I want to end by saying that I do think that change is brewing when it comes to disability even if I think that there is still a long road ahead. The fact that disability is a part of the changes that BLM is pushing for is a great step in the right direction and I think disability activists are getting more and more opportunities to affect change. As someone working in film, I’m also very excited that more films about disability are coming to the mainstream. Crip Camp and Rising Phoenix are two great documentaries both streaming on Netflix and Peanut Butter Falcon and Give me Liberty are great films with disabled leads (actually played by people with disabilities) that won some major awards. I think these films can play a great role in changing preconceptions that people have about disability, so definitely check those out if you are interested.

#DefundThePolice

#BlackDisabledLivesMatter

Some sources and background information

Shadow Report on Police Brutality Against People with Disabilities, which includes description of police brutality against disabled people.

A page with links to important articles involving Disability, BLM and police brutality

Vox article with numerous examples of police brutality against disabled people

A report by the national disability institute on disability, race and poverty in America.

More links to articles available at request.