Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Time for change
- 2 A brief history of policing
- 3 Don’t police solve crime?
- 4 The protest movement never stopped: from Black Power to zero tolerance
- 5 Police violence is the pandemic
- 6 The protection racket
- 7 Disabling policing, protecting community health
- 8 The failure of reform
- 9 What is to be done?
- Notes
- References
- Index
7 - Disabling policing, protecting community health
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Time for change
- 2 A brief history of policing
- 3 Don’t police solve crime?
- 4 The protest movement never stopped: from Black Power to zero tolerance
- 5 Police violence is the pandemic
- 6 The protection racket
- 7 Disabling policing, protecting community health
- 8 The failure of reform
- 9 What is to be done?
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Many videos went viral after the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021, however, one that was particularly disturbing were the images of a group of police publicly beating a young man who had a physical and cognitive disability. There is an absence of systematic evidence internationally on the extent of police violence, including lethal violence, against people with disabilities and mental ill-health – this absence is part of the state’s strategic ignorance which disavows knowledge of the targeted victims of state violence noted in Chapter 5. However, we know from individual cases and research data that the problem is extensive. Some of the most well-known police killings in the US which spurred the BLM movement involved Black Americans with disabilities, including Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tanesha Anderson, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland. In Canada in the 3 months between April and June 2020 in the lead-up to mass protests over police killings, six people died during mental health-related contact with police: Ejaz Ahmed Choudry, Rodney Levi, Chantal Moore, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Caleb Tubila Njoko, and D’Andre Campbell. All were Black, Indigenous, or people of colour. Four were shot dead by police. The other two fell from balconies after police intervened. The circumstances of these deaths provided a powerful impetus to Canadian calls to defund the police and to provide non-punitive support for people in need. Similarly, in Australia, police fatal shootings and violence against people with disability have been detailed in evidence to recent state and federal royal commissions into mental illness and disability. It has also been a source of First Nations activism in relation to deaths in custody. According to The Guardian’s database Deaths Inside, during 2018–2019, nine First Nations people with disability died in police custody.
There is extensive police intervention into the lives of people with mental ill-health and cognitive impairments, and policing is a key part of the disablist and ableist processes of state control. I use the term dis/abling to encompass these dual processes of (i) the directly disabling effects and outcomes of police violence and trauma which cause disability, and (ii) police intervention, criminalisation of, and violence against people with disability because of ableist assumptions of what constitutes normative behaviour.
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- Information
- Defund the PoliceAn International Insurrection, pp. 130 - 146Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023