you can’t support autistic people and support the police. No amount of paint jobs or sensitivity training can stop police from killing with impunity
And fuck the jigsaw puzzle imagery advanced by the eugenicists at Autism Speaks. We’re not a “puzzle” to be “solved“
Half of all people killed by cops have a disability, because cops aren’t trained to recognize or deal with people with disabilities and very few places have people who are trained for those situations easily accessible during emergencies. So the cops come in and do what they’re paid to do - murder anyone who’s inconvenient to the state
All of this except:
More training absolutely will not and cannot reduce the number of disabled people cops kill.
Cops kill members of vulnerable populations because they can get away with it and are even incentivized to do so, not because they need more funding to learn to recognize and interact nicely with members of a vulnerable population.
A lot of these murders happen after a police officer was explicitly informed about the victims’ disability (see the case above!) and “wellness checks” on disabled people with their disability as the explicit reason for the call are frequently violent. In some wellness checks, police start firing without saying a single word to the victim.
Having disability experts available doesn’t help—see the case above where the police killed the social worker lying on the ground with his hands up!!
The issue is the incentives, not ignorance or insufficient funding. “More training” just means more funding, and we should be pushing for interventions that reduce police funding and their incentives to do harm instead.
Philando Castile: murdered for misinterpreting unclear orders
Sonya Massey: murdered for saying something that was interpreted as a threat
I don’t know if they’re autistic. They may not be. But they were both killed for something that could easily be an autistic trait, and they’re both evidence that police are a mortal danger to autistic people.
If you support the police, you can take your “autism awareness” and shove it up your ass.
