1:34am August 23, 2014

My mother’s account of an encounter between me and the police.

Mind you, this was mild compared to some encounters I’ve had, and I still think being DFAB and white saved my ass more than once during these encounters. During almost every encounter I had with the police, I was doing nothing but walking down the street or sitting down somewhere, and someone called the cops to report someone “suspicious” or “disoriented” or “wandering”. There were only a handful of times when I was doing something like screaming or trespassing that would cause attention.

This time, I had run off from a day program after a fight broke out. The rest is in my mother’s words:

I remember the day program incident and this is from my viewpoint as a parent. According to the day staff the violence was sudden and unexpected and did not personally involve you but witnessing it triggered your PTSD and you ran right out of your shoes. I remember they called your father and said you were just suddenly gone. Your shoes were there and a shawl but not you. They had looked for 15 minutes and couldn’t find you anywhere. By the time your father arrived it had been 45 minutes. He immediately had them call the police for help in finding you fearing that running scared like that in a city you might run right into something horrific or someone who might harm you. Two hours later we got a phone call that you were at the police station and had been “found” miles away. We rushed down and I have to admit the picture you see on television of a found child with ice cream cone in hand was the image I anticipated. I will never forget being led back to a back room where two very large armed policeman were sitting outside a locked room. You were inside that locked room, cold and hungry and thirsty and barefoot shivering without a blanket or water or a kind word. I was shocked.

To give some more background:

The cops locked me in that room. And then I curled up on the floor. One of them said “She’s curled up on the floor, is she okay?” And the other said “Don’t worry about her unless you see her feet hanging at the height of the observation window.” (Suicide jokes, lovely.) They both laughed. Then they listened to the police radio, where they laughed about other “crazy” people they had to pick up that day, or that other people were picking up, and how “hopeless” these people were and how they all belonged in mental institutions. They made a lot of really horrible jokes about “crazy people” and “loonies” and the like. It seemed like forever before my mother got there. And mind you also – this was one of my better encounters with the police. I’ve had far worse, ones where I came out with injuries and ended up in mental institutions for lengthy periods of time.

Anyway, I’ve had such horrible experiences with the police – some of them violent – that I get nervous every time I hear a siren or see a cop. And mind you, I’m white. Most white DFAB people have no reason to be afraid of the cops. But being autistic seems to mean that I’m not safe no matter where I go, I don’t belong outside on my own, and someone is always going to call the cops if I venture more than a block away from my neighborhood alone. Hell, people used to call the cops on me in my own neighborhoods in California. People who ought to have seen me before. Sometimes I’d have people follow me around in their cars with their cell phones out, trying to get a response out of me and calling the cops when they couldn’t. As if walking around without being able to talk is a crime.

If it was that bad for me, I can’t imagine what it’s like for autistic men of color or anyone who passes for a man of color. Other than that I’m sure that while I got roughed up a fair bit, they die a fair bit, and where I got sent to mental institutions for walking down the street, they get sent to jail or prison for walking down the street. (Which one is worse depends on the situation. When I was in the psych system, there were people deliberately doing things to get sent to jail from the psych system, and there were people deliberately doing things to get sent to the psych system from jail, depending on which one they saw as better or worse from personal experience. So you can’t make assumptions there, both are really dangerous scary places that do a hell of a lot of harm to anyone unfortunate enough to live there for even a few days.)

Anyway, just wanted to send in my two cents about autism and the police. If a young white DFAB person can get roughed up by the police for walking down the street while autistic, then anyone can, and anyone who isn’t white and DFAB is likely to get it a lot worse than I did. I remember having to tell another white DFAB friend that it’s not normal to have people calling the cops on you from the age of 13 for being outside, when you’re white and presumed to be female. She, like me, had taken it for granted that this is just what happens when you go outside. I have not been able to go outside safely on my own since I was 13, every time since then has been a risk. And if it’s a serious risk to me, you can imagine what it is to people without the privileges I have.

Every town I move to, I try to educate the police about autism, but every town I move to, I worry it won’t do any good, especially for autistic people of color.