Police violence frequently targets disabled black people - and we hardly ever talk about it
Police violence frequently targets disabled black people—and we hardly ever talk about it
Rachel Anspach
Fusion
McKenna died on February 8, 2015, days after officials in the Fairfax County Jail Tasered her four times with 50,000 volt shocks while attempting to “extract” her from her cell. Disturbing footage of the altercation shows McKenna naked, frightened, hooded, and shackled. Officers in hazmat suits swarm her small, limp figure, tasering her even after she loses consciousness. As they force her out of her cell, McKenna can be heard saying, “You promised you wouldn’t kill me.”
She was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child and ended up in jail—and then dead—after police were called as first responders while she was experiencing a mental health crisis. The Fairfax Co. Sheriff’s department cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing, and in fact lauded the “professionalism” and “restraint” that they allegedly demonstrated.
“We need to move toward a comprehensive understanding of how ableism and racism are part and parcel of the history of the United States,” Talila Lewis, co-founder of the organization Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf and professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, told me. “Ending police brutality demands that we advance racial justice, economic justice and disability justice simultaneously.”
The advocates I spoke to support a wide range of solutions, including divesting funds from police forces and investing in community mental health services; funding 24/7 crisis hotlines that aren’t linked to the police; and creating a national mandate to collect data on police misconduct that is disaggregated by disability and other identity markers. While the ultimate goal is to reduce community interactions with law enforcement, in the meantime, police trainings should be created and led by people of color with disabilities.
“There is no liberation for black people if there is no liberation for black disabled people,” said Lewis. “All of our liberation is inextricably linked to the liberation of the next person.”
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