Police abuse occurs often enough in society in general that many well-known incidents (especially against blacks!) stand out in the public consciousness: Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, and Abner Louima are just some examples. The latest in the news these days concern Sean Bell in New York, who was shot 50 times, and here in Los Angeles, just up the road a ways at UCLA, where Mostafa Tabatabainejad was tasered by a UCLA security officer a couple weeks ago. Often, these actions are against minorities, or people at a disadvantage when confronted by police. Unfortunately, we deaf are no different.

As many of you probably already know, Doug Bahl was assaulted by officers in Minnesota, apparently after a routine traffic stop. According to the initial online reports through various blogs, Bahl was pepper sprayed in the eyes, then beaten, then held over an entire weekend, all without the benefit of an interpreter, before he was released. You can see pictures of Bahl here, and Mishka Zena and Ridor both commented on this sad incident. MNSpeak also comments about Bahl’s run-in with the police.

Right now, Bahl is apparently not commenting on what has happened (although either he or his family apparently consented to the release of pictures of him), per his lawyer’s advice. The facts are still a bit sketchy, but regardless of what attempt(s) Bahl made to indicate his deafness, there is no excuse for the suffering he went through, and there certainly is no excuse at all for the lack of interpreting services, especially in a large metropolis such as Minneapolis-St. Paul. I can’t find any coverage in either the Strib or the Pi Press; this kind of thing should not go unnoticed.

Regardless of what story eventually emerges from Bahl’s traumatic experience (and I wonder when those photos were taken; if it was soon after he was beaten that’s horrible enough; but if that’s what he looked like upon release, one can only imagine what he looked like in the immediate aftermath of the attack by the police), what’s really sad is that this isn’t an isolated incident. The scary part here is that Bahl could have been any of us, under the right (wrong?) circumstances. Ridor himself has commented a few times on his blog about incidents involving the police and deaf individuals: Jeff Beardsley and the North Las Vegas police, and a disturbing incident involving two deaf men and the Falls Church police.

Ridor isn’t the only one; while I can no longer find it, Trudy Suggs commented on a past version of her blog about five or six years ago about her own experience with the police, and she recently wrote about another example of mistreatment of deaf people by the authorities at i711.com. Some of you may remember a few years back, when the Detroit police shot to death Errol Shaw. Despite whatever mental problems Shaw may or may not have had, the shooting was an extreme reaction that really wasn’t necessary.

I cannot find further information, but on this page, under the comment posted by MAC titled, “022 is watching” is a description of the pepper spraying and shooting of a deaf man named David Baker in Burlington, North Carolina. Of course, as dissected on several sites over the past couple of months, there’s the well-known tragedy of Carl Dupree, who died in Ely Center on the Gallaudet campus in the fall of 1990 (and it’s amazing to me that despite the problems clearly demonstrated in October 2006, the BoT *still* has yet to do anything about DOSS/DPS; I’m hoping the new interim president will make reform of this department one of his or her first priorities next month). Here in Los Angeles, a lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department is in the process of being finalized. You can see the details of the settlement here (scroll down about halfway).

It’s not even limited to the United States: in Poirua, New Zealand, there’s this case of a deaf man who was mauled by police dogs, and this release from the Canadian Hearing Society discusses the case of a young deaf man who was attacked by Toronto police. All of these are just a few of the cases that I turned up through a couple of simple searches; what other incidents and tragedies have happened that are not reported, or receive minimal coverage?

While all the recent energies of the community has been focused on Gallaudet, as the case of Doug Bahl illustrates, we have many, many other injustices to right, and many other issues that are, to my mind, of equal or greater importance than who leads a college campus. Even if Bahl’s case turns out to be far more complicated than it seems, the lack of interpreting is completely inappropriate. As the pictures of Bahl and the details of the cases I’ve listed above indicate, police officers and other authority figures often commit assaults and other actions that are disproportionate to the actual situation.

This is where we can start to harness and channel some of the targeted actions similar to what many groups did during the Tent City Protest; bring attention to community relations with the police where you live. Contact the newspapers, the television stations, and community organizations. Develop educational materials and work with elected and appointed officials. Work with or push your local social services agency to take action. Those of you that vlog could take a page from Joseph Rainmound and create a vlog that combines photos of Bahl and other victims with commentary on mistreatment and lack of access to interpreting from authority figures. This is a problem that we can come together to solve, and a problem we need to tackle now, not tomorrow. One Errol Shaw, one Doug Bahl, one Carl Dupree is enough– we don’t need more.