How to Train Cops Right

This isn't the comprehensive Guardian training that should replace the counter-productive and lethal Warrior training American cops get now, but it's a start.

Crooks and Liars:

Prince George's County is just north of Washington, D.C. in Maryland, and home to the wealthiest majority-minority population in the United States. It also just elected it's first woman as County Executive, Angela Alsobrooks. Their school system educates the largest number of students with disabilities in the state. This makes the partnership between Prince George's Police Department and the Maryland Department of Disabilities so fitting, and such an encouraging move forward.

WAMU reported,

Police officers in Maryland are required to get training on how to handle interactions with people with disabilities. But the law doesn’t say how police academies should achieve that goal. Starting this fall at Prince George’s Community College, people with disabilities are doing the teaching — and they’re doing it through improv.

During one recent training, trainers acted out a short play in front of a small audience: A mom can’t get her teenage son to stop playing video games. Things escalate, and soon the son threatens to hurt her. She calls the police. When they arrive, she tells them her son has autism. Eventually, he opens his bedroom door for the officers, who take the time to calm him down. The mother, son and police officers in the play were all acting, but some elements feel real: The scene was unscripted, the officers are actual police officers and the man playing the son does have autism.

According to the ACLU, "in 2018 alone, police have shot and killed 64 people with mental health disabilities." There are laws that guide how police are required to proceed when dealing with those with disabilities, and when they don't, consequences are tragic and deadly. Rarely are officers held accountable for such deaths.

SNIP

The program is considered "best practices" because it includes people who have disabilities, rather than simply hiring people without disabilities to portray them in the role-playing situation. This creates a more authentic scenario for the police officers, and helps them practice patience, deescalation, and calm. All the while, the person with a disability who has been hired has been trained thoroughly, reassured, and understands this is a role-play situation, and that they are safe.

Evil Walmart: Banning Disabled Man and Then Lying About It

From Alternet:

What began as a normal trip to San Tan Valley Walmart to get Christmas ornaments ended in Cantrell being roughed up by law enforcement and slapped with a life-long Walmart ban.

Cantrell had gone to the super store to ad match as he usually did but this time was told by an employee that he couldn’t. He subsequently complained to management which resulted in the employee calling the police. 

Cantrell says when he returned to Walmart four days later, three deputies met him.

“I was handcuffed, humiliated and embarrassed in front of everybody at Walmart,” Cantrell  told ABC 15.

However, Walmart has hit back, saying that Joe was banned because he threatened an employee. 

Uh, huh. See, this is what comes of being an evil corporate motherfucker: nobody believes anything you say.

All Police Who Use Tasers Are Murderous Thugs

Because this shit happens everywhere, all the time.

Digby:

They shot him full of electricity from the back. He couldn't hear them coming.

There have been too many horrible stories of violence lately, but some still have the power to shock. This is one:

The family of a 12-year-old boy known only as “A.M.” in court documents is suing police, the American School for the Deaf and the city of Hartford, CT over allegations that police unnecessarily Tasered the boy after school officials abused him and denied him food. According to the Courthouse News Service, the student ran away from the school to a construction site to escape staffers who had beaten and choked him, and it was there that police Tasered the boy, who is “profoundly deaf,” with no warning.

SNIP 

A.M., frustrated and upset that he was being denied contact with his parents, fled the building. At a construction site on the ASD campus, he came face to face with Hammond and other staffers, who attempted to violently subdue him, according to the complaint.

“Defendant Chris Hammond informed plaintiff that he was going to kill him and push him into an unsafe area of the construction site,” said the suit. “Defendant Chris Hammond proceeded to grab plaintiff and punched plaintiff in the face with closed fists.”

The boy reportedly picked up a stick to defend himself against Hammond and the other adult staffers. They retreated from the scene and left A.M. sitting by himself with his back to the school.

Police arrived at the construction site after dark. Knowing the boy was deaf, they allegedly made no effort to warn or communicate with him, but Tasered him from behind. As A.M. writhed on the ground from the “burns, paralysis and pain” caused by the Taser barbs, the two police officers rushed him and placed him in handcuffs.

He was taken to Connecticut Children’s Hospital and treated for electrical burns.

I've documented many terrible taser stories over the years. But those that horrify me the most are ones that feature deaf people who cannot hear the orders to comply before they are shot through with electricity. This is the worst yet. They hit this kid from the back. He couldn't hear them coming. God.

Update: This is an excellent piece from David M Perry in The Nation about this war on the disabled. Horrifying.

Update II: According to the police report the student was holding a rock. Which, according to certain readers, makes shooting him full of electricity a-ok.

 No doubt the school officials, terrified of their abuse of the boy being exposed, lied to the police about the danger from the boy. But he was still a boy. A deaf boy. Armed with a stock and a rock. Against multiple armed and supposedly trained adults.

I hope both the school is shut down and the city forced to pay a high enough settlement that it eliminates tasers and gets its cops real training in non-violent conflict resolution.

McConnell, Paul Reject Protections for Disabled

Really, you people: that wheelchair just makes you dependent. And using those handicapped parking spots is nothing less than mooching. What parasites you are.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) made a rare Senate appearance this morning, sitting in a wheelchair just off the floor so that members would have to see him as they entered the chamber. Why? Because they were poised to vote on ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and Dole hoped to send a message.

It didn't work. The Senate killed the treaty this afternoon, with a final vote of 61 to 38, which seems like a lopsided majority, but which fell short of the two-thirds necessary for ratification. Eight Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats in support of the treaty, but the clear majority of the Senate GOP voted to block it.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, for those who've forgotten, is a human rights treaty negotiated by the George H.W. Bush administration, which has been ratified by 126 nations, including China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

But most Senate Republicans saw it as a threat to American "sovereignty," even though the treaty wouldn't have required the United States to change its laws. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the treaty with bipartisan support in July, Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) explained the proposal simply "raises the [international] standard to our level without requiring us to go further."

In other words, we wouldn't actually have to do anything except say we like the treaty -- and then wait for other signatories around the world to catch up to the United States' Americans with Disabilities Act.

In other words, this was a great opportunity for repugs to send the message that if they had their way, you crips would have to stop mooching off the taxpayers and make it on your fucking own. 

Kentucky Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul were among the 38 opponents - all repugs.

Three years ago, I recommended that President Obama both test and publicize the determination of congressional repugs to oppose absolutely everything he proposed by recommending bills extolling motherhood and apple pie just to count the repug votes against them.

Since then, knee-jerk repug votes have not just killed satire, but dismembered the body, burned it up and pissed on the ashes.