Rss@dailykos.com (thandisizwe Chimurenga) · Saturday, March 19, 2016, 5:08 pm
NBC News and other outlets reported this week on a new study stating that half of all police shootings in the U.S. are of people with some sort of disability. The report, which comes from the Ruderman Family Foundation whose website states they believe that the “inclusion and understanding of all people is essential to a fair and flourishing community,” looks at media coverage of law enforcement use of force and disabilities over a three year period, 2013-2016. Its main points are:
“ … The media is ignoring the disability component of these stories, or, worse, is telling them in ways that intensify stigma and ableism.”
“When we leave disability out of the conversation or only consider it as an individual medical problem, we miss the ways in which disability intersects with other factors that often lead to police violence. Conversely, when we include disability at the intersection of parallel social issues, we come to understand the issues better, and new solutions emerge.”
“Disability intersects with other factors such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, to magnify degrees of marginalization and increase the risk of violence. When the media ignores or mishandles a major factor, as we contend they generally do with disability, it becomes harder to effect change.”
The Press Herald in Portland, Maine, appears to have been the first outlet that brought attention to the abnormally high number of police shootings of persons with disabilities. Their four-part series back in 2012 found that in Maine, 42 percent of people shot by police since the year 2000 had mental health issues; of that number, 58 percent of them died from their injuries. At that time, the Press Herald said it was estimated that 375 to 500 people shot and killed by police each year nationally were mentally ill. And this was in 2012.
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