Is it a crime to be autistic? Based on the devastating and lengthy record of autistic people who have been killed by police, it might as well be.
When Elijah McClain was stopped by police he had committed no crime. Yet he was placed into a chokehold before being injected with Ketamine, leading to his death.
While a great number of autistic adults have been killed in police encounters, I know many will excuse these murders by blaming these victims of police violence. I think it is far more damning and irrefutable to see the number of autistic children who have been severely injured or murdered.
Michael Valva, an NYPD officer forced his 8-year-old Autistic son to sleep in an unheated garage. He has been convicted of murder, because his son froze to death.
Police tried to murder 13-year-old Linden Cameron, who was experiencing a meltdown. Apparently the procedure for handling a child throwing a tantrum is to shoot them 11 times. Linden asks the question: “why did they shoot me”?
Eric Parsa was 16 when police put him in a chokehold and held down for 9 minutes and 6 seconds before he died, yet the coroner ruled the death an accident.
Jeremy Mardis was only six when police fired 18 rounds into the vehicle he was sitting in.
Stephon Watts was 15 when police killed him in his own home.
The response by authorities is always the same: police go through training to help them identify and interact with autistic people they encounter. If only they had just a little more training and a slightly bigger budget they would stop killing us. Yet, despite this training, a disproportionate number of people killed by police have a disability.
The mechanism is frequently very simple: many disabled people are unable to immediately comply with orders that police give, and failure to comply is a death sentence. No amount of shouting will help a deaf person hear an order to get their hands out of their pockets. People who freeze up in stressful situations due to autism or PTSD don’t have the ability to obey (and police deliberately make a situation more stressful). An auditory processing issue may cause someone to not comprehend the command right away. Someone with epilepsy who is having a seizure cannot “stop resisting”. A wheelchair user cannot simply “get out of the vehicle”.
Despite policymakers being aware of this problem, nothing of consequence is ever done to fix the problem. What I want to know, like Linden Cameron, is why? Why is it that we as a society allow this atrocity to continue?
