Yesterday was Blackout Tuesday, when people stop business as usual to boost the typically repressed black voices around us. I am white, so I took the opportunity to do so on my Twitter account (and donate to Black Lives Matter), but I also spent a few hours that day learning about police violence and why the black community in the US is so upset.
As you read this, please keep in mind that autism is not a white-only phenomenon. Black and brown autistic people are just as human as I am. Additionally, the police are typically untrained to handle autistic people of any skin color, so it doesn't take much time on Google to find cases of autistic people needlessly shot by the police because the latter misunderstood the situation. Reducing police violence against black people will bring measures that also save autistic people.
Please also keep in mind that the police are not a monolithic organization. Each department will be somewhat different, and each member is a human being. There are some very evil, hideous humans counted among the police (some of whom are in positions of power), but the majority didn't join the police for petty, power-seeking reasons. However, the systems they live and work in have skewed their actions, and even their perspectives.
In the spirit of understanding and building a safer world for us all, I present to you what I found:
As you read this, please keep in mind that autism is not a white-only phenomenon. Black and brown autistic people are just as human as I am. Additionally, the police are typically untrained to handle autistic people of any skin color, so it doesn't take much time on Google to find cases of autistic people needlessly shot by the police because the latter misunderstood the situation. Reducing police violence against black people will bring measures that also save autistic people.
Please also keep in mind that the police are not a monolithic organization. Each department will be somewhat different, and each member is a human being. There are some very evil, hideous humans counted among the police (some of whom are in positions of power), but the majority didn't join the police for petty, power-seeking reasons. However, the systems they live and work in have skewed their actions, and even their perspectives.
In the spirit of understanding and building a safer world for us all, I present to you what I found:
- The police pay a massively disproportionate amount of attention to black people, and this results in more incarcerations and more deaths. You can find proof of this in both scientific research and simply in the statistics of the dead. Racism does, in fact, exist in the system.
- The police, especially in cities, are unionized, and their contracts renew every 4-6 years. These contracts can include things like erasing officers' past misconduct from their files, limiting civilian oversight, and disqualifying misconduct complaints that are submitted too many days after an incident occurs. Here's a good website about this subject, and a study that shows "bad apple" cops tend to stay "bad apple" cops. Ever wonder why "bad apple" cops get to stay cops? This is part of why.
- Police policies often do not require officers to de-escalate situations, intervene if other officers are using excessive force, give a report each time they use force, or even give a verbal warning before opening fire. Here's a particularly good website about this subject. If you thought, like I did, that all of these things would be in every police department's policies... well, I'm very sorry to say they're not. Which is a pity, because these restrictions save lives. The police are not required to exercise even basic protections against excessive force.
- Police forces are being handed military weapons, and the results, predictably, are more dead people and less safe areas. Here's a publicly available study on the subject. The police do not need military-grade weapons to do their jobs.
- When dealing with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities, the police are almost inevitably out of their depth. They don't receive the kind of training needed to resolve those situations. There is another option, though, and it's to have a separate agency to handle those crises. Deaths by police could be reduced by a quarter or more. Here's an article about just such an agency in Oregon. The police are neither prepared nor necessarily needed for crises involving mental health or autism.
Please remember that evil triumphs only when good people stand by. The job of the police is to help keep the peace. That does not include terrorizing racial minorities, shielding their "bad apple" members from consequences, and avoiding reasonable restrictions on their use of force.
To learn more, and stop standing by (and thus silently saying, "this system is just fine, black (and autistic) lives don't matter"), consider:
- Donating to Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero
- Supporting black-owned businesses, including banks. I sadly only know of one black-owned business in my area, but the cookies they sell are quite good (and secretly somewhat nutritious!)
- Advocating for better laws, fair police contracts, community oversight and representation, and limitations on the use of force. Campaign Zero is a great place to start with this.
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