What one black man’s death tells us about the criminalization of disabilities
Jailing the disabled disrupts mental health care for those on the outside also.
Kevin Matthews loved to give people things. Every Tuesday he would go to Church’s Chicken and bring back a leg, thigh and biscuit for his mom, $1.69. Sometimes he would come back with the box soaking wet, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes late into the evening, sometimes having helped himself to some of the chicken.
His mom and sisters laughed as they talked about the times he’d come home with gifts he seemed to have plucked off the curb: a dirty teddy bear, pieces of paper. He loved Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, all excuses to give gifts to his mom.
He called his family multiple times a day, they said, and he was fond of telling people he loved them, over and over. Sometimes Kevin would go missing for a day or two, but then he would turn up at his sister’s house and stay for a week, offering to mow her lawn or clean the house while she was at work.
“We wrapped our arms around him, our whole family did,” Kim Matthews, his older sister, said. “Because he was special. From the day he was born, as he started growing up and we saw something was wrong, we extra loved him hard.”
Kevin was diagnosed at age 11 with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He saw doctors and took medications throughout his life, but his main support system was his family: his mom, Valerie Johnson; his sisters, Kim and Karen Matthews; and his little brother, Lavell Matthews.
In their working-class neighborhood on the northwest edge of Detroit, Kevin always had a place to stay, usually living with his mom. And when he was sick, his whole family knew how to care for him — comforting him when the fear and paranoia kicked in, accepting his quirky and sometimes childlike way of moving through the world.
But the 35-year-old, generous and friendly, was easy to take advantage of, so the family worried. His older sister said he was beat up and robbed many times. A few times, he was hauled off to jail, or just picked up and driven home by police officers — often for something as simple as going to sleep on the street or drinking in public. His family said he didn’t really understand the laws. But he never carried a weapon, his mom said.
“He never had anything in his pockets but trash.”
When he died, the family never got a phone call. On Dec. 23, 2015, they stood outside at the edge of a police barricade in the rain for hours near the border of Dearborn and Detroit, around the corner from Johnson’s house. Just out of sight down the block, Kevin’s body lay on the street. An autopsy report later showed he had been shot at least six times, some at close range. The shooter was a uniformed member of the Dearborn Police Department.
Police violence has been all over the headlines in recent years, but there’s been less discussion of how disabilities may have played a role. Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner all died while in police custody. Like Kevin Matthews, they all had disabilities or chronic illnesses.
The likelihood that people with mental illnesses or other disabilities will be killed by police is impossible to measure. There are no national databases tracking this kind of information. That said, a few numbers point to high levels of contact with police.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 32 percent of people in prisons and 40 percent of people in jails have at least one disability.
Nearly half of all women in jail are disabled. And new evidence of police mistreatment of people with disabilities is mounting: the Department of Justice’s recent investigation into the Baltimore Police Department found the department was “interacting with individuals with mental health disabilities in a manner that violates the Americans with Disabilities Act,” routinely using what it called “unreasonable force” in interactions with people with mental disabilities.
One analysis of police killings looked at media reports to track people with disabilities killed by law enforcement, and estimated that anywhere from a third to half of people killed by police officers from 2013 to 2015 in the United States had some kind of disability. The numbers suggest a trend of criminalizing disability itself, said Lawrence Carter-Long, who co-authored the analysis.
“If you tell a person who’s autistic to freeze or stop, and maybe they’re overstimulated at that moment, you’re basically asking them to not be autistic,” he said. “You’re asking them not to be disabled, which is impossible.”
In addition to the potential for tragedy, there are financial costs.
“Community-based treatment and prevention services cost far less than locking an individual up and keeping them behind bars,” said Rebecca Vallas with the Center for American Progress, citing research she compiled in a recent study of mass incarceration of people with disabilities. Another study found county jails spend anywhere from 30 percent to 300 percent more on prisoners with mental disabilities.
It’s still not clear what happened the day Kevin died. As his mother remembers it, she was waiting for Kevin to come home in the early afternoon. She got a call from his girlfriend, who was just around the corner, saying somebody had just been shot. Johnson knew immediately that it was Kevin — a mother’s instinct, maybe. She rushed to the scene, and for hours she and a growing group of family members gathered on the street in the rain. They went home after dark, with no confirmation that Kevin’s body had been removed.
The family never heard from the police, but read in the news that the Dearborn police chased Kevin across the Dearborn border and into Detroit. A police press release mentioned a probation violation and said an officer pursued him on suspected larceny.
“The officer chased the subject and encountered him several houses away, in Detroit, where a struggle ensued,” read the release. Dearborn police have since acknowledged that when he died, Kevin was unarmed.
An investigation into his death was turned over to the Detroit Police Department, which has since passed the investigation to the Wayne County prosecutor. In an interview in August, assistant prosecutor Maria Miller said they were still awaiting the results of forensic tests, and would not give a timeline to release more information.
Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad said the incident is undergoing thorough review, but declined to give details. He confirmed the officer who pulled the trigger has been on paid administrative leave, and that Kevin had several previous interactions with the Dearborn police.
“I’m confident that most people we come in contact with, we treat in a very civil manner, but particularly Kevin Matthews,” he said, calling Kevin’s death “profoundly regrettable.”
Since Haddad became the chief in 2008, he said, the department has increased training and awareness on mental health and cognitive disabilities, and reduced its use of force significantly through new policies and requiring officers to report all uses of force.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve done here over the last eight years, because our use of force has dropped down over 90 percent,” he said, noting that a majority of people his department comes in contact with either have a mental impairment or a substance use issue. “Good people make mistakes. We try to de-escalate any threat of violence, and the trip to jail is not what we’re after.”
But Leroy Moore, an activist who produced a film about disability and police and cofounded the National Black Disability Coalition, said people with disabilities, especially black people, are frequently profiled and targeted for minor infractions. He thinks giving police mental health training isn’t the right use of funds, because it doesn’t address the underlying problems of profiling and criminalization
“Police should not be the first ones on the scene for a mental health disability or any kind of disability,” he said.
Dearborn is only four percent black. But both of the people — this includes Kevin — fatally shot in Dearborn over the last year were black. They were also both mentally ill. The family of the other person, Janet Wilson, filed a $10 million wrongful death lawsuit against the Dearborn police in August.
