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SOURCE F: Academic - Ria Cheyne, "CHAPTER TWO Character and Closure: Disability in Crime"

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SOURCE F: Academic - Ria Cheyne, "CHAPTER TWO Character and Closure: Disability in Crime"

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book chapter, JSTOR

similarities with horror fiction and crime (in terms of people with disabilities)

citation:

“Character and Closure: Disability in Crime.” Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction, by Ria Cheyne, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2019, pp. 53–80. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvsn3pp7.6. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

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Character and Closure: Disability in Crime from Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction on JSTOR

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Blind Man with a Pistol, the title of a 1969 crime novel by Chester Himes, is a phrase designed to generate a potent affective response. Primary among the range...

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SOURCE D: Argument - Will Bunch, "I can’t stop thinking about the beauty of Elijah McClain, and the banal evil of the cops who killed him" 

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SOURCE D: Argument - Will Bunch, "I can’t stop thinking about the beauty of Elijah McClain, and the banal evil of the cops who killed him" 

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argument, POV of news columnist

Elijah McClain no longer walks the Earth for three reasons: He was Black. He was “different.”

And he was trying to do both in a suburb of Denver with an out-of-control police department that all too often views those things as a criminal offense.

citation:

Bunch, Will. “I Can't Stop Thinking about the Beauty of Elijah McClain, and the Banal Evil of the Cops Who Killed Him: Will Bunch.” Https://Www.inquirer.com, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 July 2020, www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/elijah-mcclain-killing-three-aurora-police-officers-20200705.html.

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If you want to last more than a year or two in journalism, you're supposed to have some kind of switch that doesn't fully block the flow of human emotions - that's simply not possible - but dampens your deepest feelings to the level where you can function, to sit at a keyboard and tell a story of unspeakable tragedy or unfathomable evil and somehow survive until the last paragraph.

The year 2020 has been the toughest test of that valve I could imagine. The subway workers and the truck drivers who walked into the wrong place at the wrong time to meet their invisible killer, the grandfathers who survived World War II or Korea but could not outlive the coronavirus - and then the suffocating racism of a system that keeps killing Black men and women who are simply jogging through a neighborhood, or even just trying to sleep in their own bed.

As a newspaper columnist, I've tried to write about the sorrow and the outrage of 2020 the way that my high school football coach Rob Pickert tried to teach me to play defensive end, with reckless abandon but under control. And I thought I was doing OK until I learned about the death last August of a 23-year-old Black man named Elijah McClain, who bought an iced tea at a convenience store, encountered three Aurora, Colo., police officers, and was inexplicably killed in the span of about 15 minutes. Now I can't stop the tides of sorrow that such a beautiful young man no longer exists, or bury my unvarnished rage at the police department that killed him. That valve that's supposed to control my emotions is hopelessly broken.

Elijah McClain no longer walks the Earth for three reasons: He was Black. He was " different." And he was trying to do both in a suburb of Denver with an out-of-control police department that all too often views those things as a criminal offense.

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I would challenge anyone to listen to Elijah's last words - "I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That's my house. I was just going home. I'm an introvert. I'm different. I'm just different, that's all. That's all I was doing. I'm so sorry." - and not feel both oppressive sadness and a numb befuddlement that three grown men in blue could be so devoid of a soul to continue to choke him, even as he vomited and struggled to get out those all too familiar words, "I can't breathe correctly."

I want to be clear. It's not that McClain's life is more or less valuable than George Floyd, suffocated while handcuffed and calling out for his mother, or Breonna Taylor, a lifesaving EMT who was shot eight times in a botched no-knock drug raid, or Ahmaud Arbery, murdered for jogging through a mostly white neighborhood. Each is a senseless victim of systemic racism in the United States of America, and yet there is also a special poignancy in the way that the introverted McClain knew that he was a different kind of soul - and how he was embracing that and making his difference something truly special.

"He was the sweetest, purest person I have ever met," a client at the massage therapy business where the 23-year-old worked - in what he hoped was a pit stop on the road to art school - told a Colorado newspaper. His mother, Sheneen McClain, described her son to Yahoo News as "a lightworker," constantly focused on helping others. Elijah taught himself guitar and violin, and he would even go on his lunch break to a nearby animal shelter and serenade the stray cats there. He was a vegetarian. When those three Aurora cops confronted McClain on the night of Aug. 24, 2019, he told them, "I don't even kill flies."

It was just one of the many ways that McClain died as he lived. He was helping someone else - his brother, dashing out late at night to get him that iced tea from a nearby convenience store. Elijah was skinny, and he reported he suffered from both asthma and anemia. It was the latter condition that could make him cold enough, even on an August night, to head out in a coat and a ski mask. An unnamed resident along the busy highway near the Aurora-Denver border called 911 because of the ski mask and because the youth was "waving his arms."

He was being Elijah. He was being different. But "different" doesn't go over too well in a suburb like Aurora, a place that, according to a deeply reported piece by Yahoo's Alexander Nazaryan, bills itself as "the Safest Large City in Colorado." That's partly a dig at Denver next door, but also to erase the memory that in 2012, a white madman with crazy red hair walked into the multiplex showing the new Batman flick and fatally gunned down 12 people. The Aurora police calmly arrested James Holmes - who'd had a shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle, and a Glock - in the parking lot without incident that night.

Elijah McClain, the unarmed Black violinist, would not be so lucky.

The 911 caller who described him as "sketchy" added: "He might be a good person or a bad person." But the three officers who showed up - Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema - never stopped assuming that McClain was "a bad person." McClain, for his part, could not control his introvert's unrelenting panic over the encounter, telling the officers, "I have a right to go where I am going," and struggling to contain himself as the officers sought to search and then restrain him. "Please respect my boundaries," he insisted.

The situation had no direction to go but south. The three cops and their "bad person" bias saw panic and resistance, and a shopping bag with iced tea as a potential weapon. Or so they say. None of McClain's plaintive cries for mercy, nor the fact that he was indeed unarmed, seemed to register at all with three men who were morally deaf, who applied a chokehold called a carotid hold that restricts blood to the brain and can render its subject unconscious and then watched responders inject McClain with a dose of the tranquilizer ketamine that was too much for his tiny body. The 23-year-old was already unresponsive when he was loaded in the ambulance, although he wouldn't be pronounced dead until hours later.

In the 1960s, trying to make sense of a seemingly bland Nazi bureaucrat standing trial for his role in murdering Jews in the Holocaust, the writer Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase " the banality of evil." She was trying to describe how an ingrained system, devoid of empathy or compassion, entices thoughtless "joiners" to sign up for its amorality. Such ugly conformity is the exact opposite of the beautiful way that Elijah McClain lived, celebrating his "difference." In American policing, the George Floyd protests have been an overdue wake-up call to the banal evil of this system that caused Woodyard, Rosenblatt, and Roedema to almost robotically choke the life out of a vibrant human being.

Everything that's happened from the second McClain's limp body was placed in that ambulance - the fact that all three officers' body cameras were somehow " dislodged" during the encounter and failed to record key evidence, the cops' bizarre claim that this 140-pound man who happened to be Black had superhuman strength, or that the panicked introvert had reached for their gun, the medical examiner who somehow concluded that the case of a man who was healthy before his fatal meeting with Woodyard, Rosenblatt, and Roedema was somehow " inconclusive" and not a homicide, the elected DA who declined to charge them, and the " outside investigator " who routinely testifies on behalf of cops - is all so damn banal and numbingly predictable that I want to scream.

The Aurora Police Department is both emblematic of the inherent racism in America's criminal justice system and yet also much worse - overwhelmingly white (only 4% of its 700 officers are Black) in an increasingly diverse suburb, more reflecting Colorado's history as a bastion for the KKK and other hate groups than either the new stereotype of the state as a refuge for liberal potheads or the reality of a vibrantly diverse metropolitan Denver.

That may sound harsh, but I'm not sure how else to explain a department that felt so unthreatened by the white mass murderer James Holmes, yet also where over the last five years, its officers - as chronicled by Yahoo's Nazaryan - violently arrested a 60-year-old disabled Black man in the dead of night, made a Black man leave a coffee shop where he was merely trying to eat a muffin, beat up a Latino man working on a car in his garage after a "loud noise" complaint, and tried to fire a lieutenant caught on his body cam calling the crowd who'd gathered at a police shooting "Alabama porch monkeys." That lieutenant was reinstated by an arbitrator. So familiar. So banal. So evil.

Yesterday Aurora, Colorado was holding a violin vigil for Elijah McClain, who was known for playing his violin, especially to animals.

Then the police decided they'd seen enough. pic.twitter.com/aujN7xxpAQ
- Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) June 28, 2020

The Aurora Police Department is so comfortable in its skin of racist white supremacy that it feels no pressure to clean up its act now that the national media is paying attention. When the George Floyd uprising brought renewed focus on the McClain case and the lack of charges, a June 27 protest at the township building brought out a spirited but peaceful crowd, including musicians who played their violins in Elijah's memory. Their soothing music attracted Aurora cops in full riot gear, who busted up the gathering and even turned pepper spray on demonstrators and the stunned violinists.

This weekend brought a fresh outrage when it was revealed that three different Aurora officers, smiling and laughing, were fired after taking a picture reenacting the fatal chokehold not far from where McClain was killed. I know I should be shocked, saddened, angered, whatever ... but the fundamental inhumanity of the Aurora police has already been established, and my outrage dial is already turned up to 11. The photo is less of a shock than simply more confirmation.

Look, I support any and all police reforms, and this journey of 1,000 miles to end American policing as we know it needs to start with the baby steps. You want a law to ban chokeholds (Aurora ostensibly enacted such a rule after McClain died)? That's great. Training around implicit bias? I guess it couldn't hurt. But does anyone honestly believe that a lukewarm new law or two and a couple of days of training can break through an entrenched culture of white supremacy? It can't. The only real reform that makes any sense is to end the Aurora Police Department as we know it, fire its other 697 officers, and replace them not just with a new system, but with new people, so that conditioned white supremacists like Woodyard, Rosenblatt, and Roedema aren't responding every time a privileged white suburbanite dials 911.

In the meantime, I want to see Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema arrested, tried for murder, convicted, and forced to spend life sentences in a tiny cell, with the violin music of Elijah McClain piped in all day, to ensure that every agonizing minute of their remaining time on Earth is spent in contemplation of the time they stole from such a beautiful - and different - soul.

Then I want a peaceful civic army of bulldozers to pulverize every atom of the Aurora Police Department, and a lush green park to rise in its place - with vegetable gardens and a big lawn for rescued dogs to frolic, and a tuition-free art college and a gazebo where violinists will play day and night. And if you think my vision is hopelessly naive, it's because I'm doing everything I can to keep my journalist-emotion valve from completely washing away in this flood, so I don't write what flows in the darker hours.

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I can't stop thinking about the beauty of Elijah McClain, and the banal evil of the cops who killed him | Will Bunch

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If you want to last more than a year or two in journalism, you're supposed to have some kind of switch that doesn't fully block the flow of human emotions - that's simply not possible - but dampens your deepest feelings to the level where you can function, to sit at a keyboard and tell a story of unspeakable tragedy or unfathomable evil and somehow survive until the last paragraph.

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SOURCE B: Argument - Pamila Lew, "Op-Ed: I’ve Dedicated My Life To Fighting The Abuse Of People With Disabilities & I Support DA Gascón’s Reforms Eliminating Sentencing Enhancements"

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SOURCE B: Argument - Pamila Lew, "Op-Ed: I’ve Dedicated My Life To Fighting The Abuse Of People With Disabilities & I Support DA Gascón’s Reforms Eliminating Sentencing Enhancements"

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argument, POV of attorney

First, we must end the isolation of disabled people that makes them vulnerable to abuse and neglect in the first place.

Violence proliferates behind closed doors. For decades, disability advocates have pushed for access and community integration.

citation:

Lew, Pamila. “Op-Ed: I've Dedicated My Life to Fighting the Abuse of People with Disabilities & I Support DA Gascón's Reforms Eliminating Sentencing Enhancements.” Wla, 4 Jan. 2021, witnessla.com/op-ed-ive-dedicated-my-life-to-fighting-the-abuse-of-people-with-disabilities-i-support-da-gascons-reforms-eliminating-sentencing-enhancements/.

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For the past two decades, I have worked as an attorney at Disability Rights California, investigating abuse against people with disabilities in every conceivable setting, from sexual assaults by staff members against residents in nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals, to physical abuse against special education students.

Over the years, I've been approached by victims' rights advocates who have asked me to join their efforts to create harsher penalties, including mandatory sentencing enhancements, when the survivor of a crime is a person with disability. Time and again I have refused, often to their consternation.

My refusal might appear counterintuitive. I believe, however, that levying longer prison sentences does little to address the root causes of abuse and neglect, and even less to protect survivors, or to ensure they receive a measure of justice. Instead, it employs the same misguided logic that created our system of mass incarceration in the first place.

Truly meaningful change can't be achieved with punitive measures such as longer prison terms, even if imposing them might feel momentarily cathartic. Real change takes time, planning, effort, and courage.

First, we must end the isolation of disabled people that makes them vulnerable to abuse and neglect in the first place. Violence proliferates behind closed doors. For decades, disability advocates have pushed for access and community integration.

With the 1999 landmark case of Olmstead v. L.C., the Supreme Court set a powerful legal precedent that argues for community-based services. Yet, more than 20 years after Olmstead, people with disabilities still remain needlessly segregated in separate classrooms, schools, and institutional settings, a situation that urgently needs to change.

There is also an urgent need for resources to be put into programs that empower individuals about their choices. Right now, too many parts of our system actively socialize people with intellectual disabilities to be compliant, which leads directly to their exploitation. According to data collected but not yet published by the U.S. Department of Justice, people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate seven times greater than nondisabled individuals. We should ensure that people are educated about their right to safe and consensual sex and their right to bodily integrity.

Experts find that education about one's personal rights is one of the best ways to combat sexual assault. Similarly, we can do more to teach people about their legal rights, including the understanding that abuse is a crime that should be reported.
Finally, we must ensure that when people with disabilities do report abuse, they are met with respect and accommodations for their disabilities by everyone in the criminal legal system, from the police, to prosecutors, to defenders, and the court.

I have met many survivors who have told me that when they attempted to report a crime, they were ignored or worse, discredited. Police frequently fail to interview the survivor, wrongly assuming that limited verbal capacity means a person cannot communicate. I have investigated cases where the police only interviewed a person's caregiver, who was in fact the alleged perpetrator.

All this brings me to why I support newly elected DA George Gascón's reform agenda: I have seen over the years how our current legal system does little to protect people with disabilities from abuse, and wastes public funds on a system that disproportionately punishes Black and Latino communities, and the disabled individuals within those communities. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an estimated 32% of individuals in prison, and 40% of those in jail reported having at least one disability.

Gascón's plan to eliminate sentencing enhancements is a courageous step in the right direction. As he takes on the enormous task of reforming LA's criminal justice system, he would do well to invite people with disabilities to the table.
Pamila Lew is a senior attorney with the Investigations Unit at Disability Rights California. Disability Rights California is the state protection and advocacy agency, mandated under federal law to protect and advocate on behalf of people with disabilities.

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Op-Ed: I've dedicated my life to fighting the abuse of people with disabilities & I support DA Gascón's reforms eliminating sentencing enhancements.

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For the past two decades, I have worked as an attorney at Disability Rights California, investigating abuse against people with disabilities in every conceivable setting, from sexual assaults by staff members against residents in nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals, to physical abuse against special education students.

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SOURCE E: Expository -Eunice C. Wong, Rebecca L. Collins, Jennifer L. Cerully, Rachana Seelam and Elizabeth Roth, "Racial and Ethnic Differences in Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination Among Californians Experiencing Mental Health Challenges"

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SOURCE E: Expository -Eunice C. Wong, Rebecca L. Collins, Jennifer L. Cerully, Rachana Seelam and Elizabeth Roth, "Racial and Ethnic Differences in Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination Among Californians Experiencing Mental Health Challenges"

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book chapter, JSTOR

racial and ethnic minorities are significantly more likely than whites to delay or forgo needed mental health care and/or drop out

MH stigma in marginalized communites

citation:

Racial and Ethnic Differences in Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination Among Californians Experiencing Mental Health Challenges, by Eunice C. Wong et al., RAND Corporation, 2016, pp. 1–12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt1d41dhg.1. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

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Racial and Ethnic Differences in Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination Among Californians Experiencing Mental Health Challenges from Racial and Ethnic Differences in Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination Among Californians Experiencing Mental Health Challenges on JSTOR

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Racial and ethnic minorities are signifi cantly more likely than whites to delay or forego needed mental health care, and, if they do seek treatment, they are m...

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SOURCE C: Academic - Heather Strang, "28 Experiments in restorative justice"

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SOURCE C: Academic - Heather Strang, "28 Experiments in restorative justice"

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book chapter, JSTOR

How do people feel when they have broken the law? Does it make a difference whether their behaviour was also against their own values?

And how does this feeling affect their response to regulatory action? As a consequence of questions like these, the moral emotions and their implications for regulatory systems have received increased attention within disciplines such as criminology, sociology and psychology.

citation:

Strang, Heather. “Experiments in Restorative Justice.” Regulatory Theory: Foundations and Applications, edited by PETER DRAHOS, ANU Press, Acton ACT, Australia, 2017, pp. 483–498. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q1crtm.39. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

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Regulatory Theory: Foundations and applications

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This volume introduces readers to regulatory theory. Aimed at practitioners, postgraduate students and those interested in regulation as a cross-cutting theme i...

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SOURCE A: Expository - Jennifer L. Cerully, Courtney Ann Kase, Rebecca L. Collins, Eunice C. Wong and Jennifer Yu, "CalMHSA Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Online Resources: Highlights from an Evaluation of Web Analytic Data"

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SOURCE A: Expository - Jennifer L. Cerully, Courtney Ann Kase, Rebecca L. Collins, Eunice C. Wong and Jennifer Yu, "CalMHSA Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Online Resources: Highlights from an Evaluation of Web Analytic Data"

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book, JSTOR

Reducing stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness is an important goal

According to mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, stigma exerts negative effects by causing people to avoid “socializing or working with, renting to, or employing” individuals with mental health challenges, which results in decreased opportunities and resources and, ultimately, low self-esteem, isolation, and hopelessness

Many individuals and organizations may lack the knowledge or resources on how best to address issues of stigma and discrimination.

citation:

CalMHSA Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Online Resources: Highlights from an Evaluation of Web Analytic Data, by Jennifer L. Cerully et al., RAND Corporation, 2015, pp. 1–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt19w72qd.1. Accessed 20 Jan. 2021.

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CalMHSA Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Online Resources: Highlights from an Evaluation of Web Analytic Data

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Reports on an evaluation of online resources developed by the California Mental Health Services Authority's stigma and discrimination reduction initiative progr...

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TO DO:

double-check dates (2016-on)

edit padlet

read through and link to resource packet

excerpt sources, create audio recordings for the needed ones

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-then make mock-mini annotated bib, cite sources, then start boiling down main ideas and sources
-can also use google scholar
-google searches too, but not as primary source
-can dive into true crime stuff and other cases (wilson rec: hbo doc. Crazy not insane, career of doctor dorthey oputnough lewis)
-revised research question allows me to look at criminality and other areas, but make sure to connect it back to purpose

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-use JSTOR text analyzer
-have computer read aloud abstract. however, this is just for research purposes
-set aside times to fully read through each of the documents/sources found
-> for that, download as a PDF -> use Kami to make PDF highlightable ->if possible, convert to word doc and download text as an audio track
-it's ok to go down rabbit hole but bring it back eventually
-annotate as you go, and interact with text as it's read aloud

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Police violence, mental health, mental disabilities, mental conditions, criminal justice system, autism (ASD), aspergers, anxiety, depression, ADHD, ADD, BPD, ODD, OCD, medication, therapy, treatment, training, education, inequalities, POC, disability, disabled, mental illness, weapons, protocol, stigma, attitudes, behaviors, contributing factors, routines, attention, mental health issues, social workers, panic attacks, panic, panic disorder, democratic system, democracy, healthcare, progress

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what is needed: (only research from the past 4 years, start of trump admin-today) *=final

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what is needed: (only research from the past 4 years, start of trump admin-today) *=final

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1. An expository-based/factual text (chart, graph, encyclopedia entry, article, etc.) -> BLUE

2. An argument/opinionated text (op-ed, essay, etc. written from author’s point of view) ->GREEN

3. An academic (academic or scientific journal) or visual text (photograph, editorial cartoon, painting, etc.) -> PURPLE

4-6.  Your choice – select 3 additional texts that fall into any of the above categories. May not be fiction. -> RED

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To what extent does our treatment of people with mental health issues contribute to the progress of our nation/democracy?

(Purpose is to convince the public that mental health plays a significant part in criminal behavior, treatment of people with mental disabilities, making a case for why we need to pay  more attention to mental health -- purpose fo .)