Comments on: Disabled people and the police

By: osprey

osprey — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 04:33:51 +0000

Thank you Neo for taking up this thread and posting the Marlee Matlin video. I am almost deaf now and if ever stopped by police intend to keep my hands stationary where they can be seen and let the LEO know that I am deaf, but intend to cooperate fully but that I need to know clearly what their instructions are. Here are a couple more video links to training videos for first responders and police:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSKZHZdflmc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9aNpMRHH2c

By: DNW

DNW — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 22:23:16 +0000

Geoffrey Britain Says:

September 28th, 2016 at 4:54 pm

If a society wishes it’s police forces to focus upon assistance and service it must behave in a way that supports it. When a society tolerates a large segment that behaves lawlessly, yet demands protection from that segment by the police, it forces its police to act proactively in their assumptions, with the predictable results we face today. “

That’s right. The most behaviorally incontinent wind up setting the public agenda for all; and as a result have the privilege of shitting everyone else’s life up – turning the whole world into an accommodationist rubber room … or police state.

I am weary of the mentally ill and their problems.

By: huxley

huxley — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:33:49 +0000

A middle-school friend of mine had brain-damage. At the age of 37 he was gut-shot by a policeman.

Of course he had attacked the policeman, knocked him down, taken the man’s nightstick away and started beating him with it.

By: Mark30339

Mark30339 — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 15:37:50 +0000

These are all very interesting complications for doing police work. Imagine how many PhDs are necessary to properly comprehend the frailties and dysfunctions of the human misfits one is to encounter in police work. And even if one’s brain is big enough to hold all the information coherently, there is no guaranty that behaviors wont’ be misinterpreted or distorted by threat perception.
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Most of us mammals are here because of a heavy dose of “false positive” perceptive responses. We perceive something and tend to presume it’s a threat, and 90+% of the time our positive response for threat was unnecessary, i.e. a false positive. Imagine our survival prospects if our wiring was the reverse; that it we presume we are safe when we are not.
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Clearly the Crutcher situation was a perfect storm of problems for Officer Shelby. A more experienced officer may have perceived the threat more appropriately. The question is, do we want to establish impossible standards for doing police work. We all need to agree that failure to follow police commands properly increases the threat perception of police and unfortunately raises the risk of death or injury for the suspect failing to obey.

By: Philip

Philip — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 15:37:18 +0000

lassitude, I like your userid. I like all such words that are erudite and somewhat out of fashion.

Watching this video, it struck me that ASL must be a rather challenging language. One has to watch both hands, ranging over a considerable physical space with a wide variety of gestures, as well as the speaker’s face. Eyes, mouth, hands, elbows, all in action at the same time. I wonder if it poses any major difficulties if the speaker and listener are not in a direct face-to-face with each other, i.e. in those moments when the oblique view was being shown in that video. Does that angle hamper understanding of any phrases in ASL?

By: Daniel in Brookline

Daniel in Brookline — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 15:30:49 +0000

JJ makes an excellent point. Police are on edge, and think they’re being unfairly judged. Citizens are on edge, and think police are unfairly targeting and profiling.

This would be an EXCELLENT time for a Presidential candidate to promote better understanding… and to encourage less-confrontational behavior.

(Mind you, it would be even better if the sitting President were to do so. But he doesn’t seem inclined to calm things down.)

What I’d like to see is a candidate who says: “Listen, a lot of people have had a lot to say about police violence. And police forces across the country are under much closer surveillance than they used to be for this reason. But we, as American citizens, should also do our part. Here with me today is a good friend of mine, Police Chief John Q. Smith of XXXXX, who wants to explain how best to deal with the police, so that at the end of the day, we can all go home safely.”

Neo: many thanks for pointing out some of the issues relating to police stops and people with disabilities. It’s not a simple issue. I’m not aware of any cases in which a criminal pretended to be, say, deaf, before targeting police officers… but it’s probably only a matter of time. (You can bet the police are alert for that; they have to be.)

By: lassitude

lassitude — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 05:27:46 +0000

If you’re holding a gun and are confronted by cops with guns drawn, is it really an excuse that you can’t hear their orders to drop your gun that you keep it raised?

By: Artfldgrs

Artfldgrs — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 03:49:29 +0000

Police are not the biggest dangers for the Deaf who tend to have a low rate of offense for similar reasons as you worried about. like setting off the alarm, and the claxon is going, and they don’t know it?

what is infinitely more dangerous are those idiot drivers trying to make a yellow light and toot the horn to clear the way assuming everyone can hear.

there is actually a whole host of conditions, many rare, that have caused issues, but seldom reported as part of any problem.

By: parker

parker — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 03:40:26 +0000

The Weaver Stance is the best stance for handgun accuracy, bar none. Few not familiar with handguns would naturally assume the Weaver Stance when confronts by a LEO, especially if they have mental health issues. Something seems fishy here.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 03:31:22 +0000

Geoffrey Britain:

When I heard that story, I though “suicide by cop.” Very sad, but that’s what I think was going on—a somewhat deliberate provocation by a person who seems to have been mentally unbalanced.