Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope…
Michael Marshall is the latest victim of the Cult Of Compliance. Last November Marshall, who had schizophrenia, was placed into prone restraint and died, choking on his own vomit. This piece discusses the technique and links it to the death of Ethan Saylor and Eric Garner. Notice how the DA places blame for Marshall’s death…
There is new video of the death of Linwood Lambert. If police want to have TASERs, which they do and they should, then the people who abuse them have to be held accountable. When three Virginia police officers put Linwood Lambert in a squad car around 5 a.m. on May 4, 2013, they said they…
My first piece for Al Jazeera America is a big one: The Cult of Compliance. As regular readers know, I have been talking this for a long time and thinking about police violence in various ways for even longer. I used the phrase for the first time on this post from August 17, 2013. The…