AfterEffect: Against The Erasure of Arnaldo Rios Soto

Arnaldo Rios Soto, a Latinx male presenting autistic man with dark curly hair
wearing a gray t-shirt is holding a brown and tan teddy bear and smiling at the
camera.

Today, the police officer who shot Charles Kinsey goes on trial. I read a news report describing how Mr. Kinsey has not recovered from the trauma of being an unarmed Black man doing his job and trying to tend to his client and explain to the police that he and his client were unarmed and trying to cooperate. The police officer claimed he was not trying to shoot Mr. Kinsey. He wanted to shoot his autistic client, Arnaldo Rios Soto instead.

It is important to note that police radio notified officers that Arnaldo was holding a toy, and officers 20 feet away did not feel under threat. Quoting Mr. Rios Soto's attorney, Matthew Dietz, in the Miami Herald:

 “I can’t believe that every other officer heard on the radio that it was a toy,” Dietz said. Aledda “aimed, but couldn’t hit a 250-pound man sitting cross-legged on the ground, and he’s a SWAT member? If he was aiming at Arnaldo, he’s the worst shot in the world.”

Arnaldo was a passing mention in the story of the aftermath of this tragedy. In fact, the story of what happens to Arnaldo is told in heartbreaking detail on the podcast Aftereffect, which you can listen to by clicking this link: https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/aftereffect

There were two victims of color that day, Mr. Kinsey and Arnaldo Soto. One was an African American carer, the other was his Latinx and autistic client. There shouldn't be a hierarchy of victims that makes the victim struck by the bullet intended for the other the main protagonist in this horror story. I find it sad but not surprising that this news article uses the power of words to leave Arnaldo a voiceless footnote in his own tragedy.

Arnaldo has paid a devastating price for wanting to take a walk away from his group home. He was targeted because he was autistic and wandering in the street on a route usually taken with Mr. Kinsey, clutching his toy truck.  Arnaldo was unjustly arrested, he was placed in the mental health equivalent of hell for too long. Despite his story having a happy ending of sorts (I mean, he's still in a group home), the memories of that day will haunt Arnaldo for the rest of his life, just as they haunt Charles Kinsey.

I think we need to remind the media that today, the police officer who alleged he aimed to shoot Arnaldo Rios Soto, an autistic young man of color, missed and shot his support staff member, Mr. Charles Kinsey, instead.

Read more about Arnaldo, Autism, and catastrophic encounters with law enforcement:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/aftereffect
The low key ableist news article:
 https://www.local10.com/news/local-10-investigates/charles-kinsey-still-haunted-by-memories-of-police-involved-shooting
Other references
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article226624549.html
http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2016/08/mustafas-dilemma.html
http://nosmag.org/arnaldo-rios-autistic-man-charles-kinsey-police-shooting/

Mustafa's Dilemma

Mustafa N. Çevik Garibaldi, reading on our deck ©Mrs. Kerima Çevik

Arnaldo Eliud Rios Soto, the 26-year-old autistic man sitting on the pavement with a toy truck in shock in a viral video could be our son. Arnaldo sat beside Charles Kinsey, his trusted aid, helpless while Kinsey was lying on his back with his hands up, shot, with Miami police surrounding both men 50 feet away.

Our son Mustafa has so many similarities to Arnaldo that several people who know our family and have seen Mustafa in person remarked on how much Arnaldo looked like an older version of our son. Like Arnaldo, Mustafa is labeled Hispanic in ethnicity, has an equally lengthy name and heritage, carries the same disability labels although my son carries additional labels to nonspeaking autism and the added stigma of reactions to his name, given in honor of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Mustafa's father's grandfather. My son's skin is a tan hue that when combined with his curly hair makes it clear he is not what is considered "white" particularly when he is beside me, his Black, Hispanic, Indigenous mother. Like Arnaldo, he loves toy trucks, cars, and construction vehicles. Like Arnaldo, if a series of sirens sounded around him, and men 50 feet away began to shout at him, he would sit where he was, and hold to one of the objects that never leaves his hand because they provide him sensory calm in a world of violent, changing sensory overloads. Mustafa is Arnaldo's peer. Arnaldo's traumatic event, is Mustafa's dilemma, a potentially disastrous event I have fought to find a way to avert since February 27, 2009, the day I was told my son disappeared from the most restricted public school environment.

That story still hurts, and I've already spoken of it in bits and pieces like the essay "Afterlife ." Suffice it to say that amber alerts weren't created for missing autistic children. And no amount of police training prevents police who want to believe they need to shoot your disabled son or daughter from taking aim and firing.  If the chew tube in your daughter's hand looks like a knife to them, police will shoot to kill first and apologize later even when equipped with tasers and training certificates in autism and disability awareness.

Mustafa's dilemma should not exist. His choices should not be to either never be active in his own community or become a target by wanting to participate in it. People ask, as more autistic males of color like Arnaldo Soto and Tario Anderson are traumatized and more Black autistic young men like Paul Childs die, what can be done. I have been researching the same question since I learned brothers Lance and Ronald Madison  were shot for sport on Danziger bridge while Lance was trying to walk Ronald safely out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Those police officers, who pleaded guilty and were convicted of killing Ronald Madison, had their convictions overturned and were later released.

Arnaldo Rios Soto ©Miami Herald

The answer to Mustafa's dilemma is not to retaliate against innocent police officers or paint all police as evil. Nor is it to erase these continuing catastrophic events in the name of preserving the public image of law enforcement while these deaths and traumatic events continue to escalate.  But the answer does lie in understanding that it is the solemn duty of law enforcement to lead the reform of a culture that does not hold racist, ableist, and corrupt officers accountable for the mounting deaths and injuries of those vulnerable citizens they engage while on or off duty. I keep waiting for them to step up and disavow coverups and punish those who do wrong. Being a police officer does not and should not equal an exemption from the rule of law. Police leadership in other places has shown that proper police culture builds community trust, reduces risks to both vulnerable citizens and law enforcement officers while decreasing crime. Yet disabled victims, in particular, continue to be blamed for their own deaths, and lack of compliance or erratic behavior are always put forth as the evidence justifying the executions. What Arnaldo witnessed, what we all learned witnessing Charles Kinsey's shooting is very basic to my position that law enforcement autism awareness training alone is failing:

1. Complete compliance and appropriate behavior make no difference to outcomes. 
2. Lack of community training and the resentment of witnessing neurodivergent people included in communities was directly responsible for Charles Kinsey's shooting and similar catastrophic encounters but is being ignored in the lessons learned of each of these deadly events, 
3. The trigger that sets the stage for the catastrophes is inaccurate or deliberately false 911 calls using three code words: black, male, and weapon. All other parts of the call, words like suicidal, or 'toy' before 'gun,' don't matter. 

Why have organizational toolkits, rhetoric, photo ops with powerful lawmakers and law enforcement authorities, autism parents who are law enforcement officers training fellow police, and parents with autistic adult offspring rushing to don the "autism expert trainer" mantle failed to stem the tide of harm washing over disabled people of color?

A. Everyone has skewed the root cause of the problem. Because the problem is misdefined everyone addresses the wrong areas to solve it. Everyone wants to make the solution a need to train police. Catastrophic encounters with police are an outcome symptomatic of the problem, not the problem itself. What people and organizations are doing is very much like seeing people dying in car accidents because of a manufacturing problem that causes brake failure and blaming it on the car's driver. Elaborate solutions are found for improving driving ability, knowing drivers are not the root issue. Cameras record trip data, engines won't start without seat belts, but the problem is the faulty brakes on certain cars, and everyone wonders, as those selling flawed solutions profit by them, why people continue to die. Neurodivergent people cannot continue to be the drivers blamed for the damaged system that is causing their deaths and traumatizing them.

Danziger Bridge, where Ronald Madison and his brother were shot by
New Orleans Police during a shooting spree after Hurricane Katrina
©CNN

Policing is a community effort. Therefore, the primary route to defining the root cause of catastrophic encounters with law enforcement does not begin at what happens when a police officer meets a nonspeaking autistic person. It begins with asking questions like why, if everyone in Arnaldo's group home was known to the community, a citizen of that community would make a false report to 911 that would deploy armed police to an area where there was no gunman. It continues with why the caller isn't being charged with filing a false police report. Because the community knows the group home, and they know the route taken by group home clients and their care providers when walking. So when we look at each of these incidents, the root cause begins with why police were summoned in the first place, what information they were given, and whether the situation required police, guns, and violent endings.

While everyone is lining up to train police departments, no one is training communities to understand and accept neurodivergent community members. Policing is community dependent. Yet no one builds any community to support and include vulnerable community members. Oh everyone has something to say about this, but most never address this because again, we defined the wrong problem, and we are continuing to train police while our people continue to die and become traumatized.

Life qualitatively improves for everyone when communities act to truly include and support neurodivergent people .   The city of Matsudo, near Tokyo, has built a dementia inclusive community and saved dozens of lives and police resources in the process. Their approach is a potential global model for rebooting communities who must learn to include neurodivergent citizens as  the rights to autonomy and community living become as commonplace as they are just.

B. Correctly define the root problem, then make workable multidisciplinary solutions at the community and legislative levels. Having now accurately defined catastrophic encounters with police as the end result of the problem and not the problem itself, let's try to state the actual problem clearly. The problem is that communities are uneducated and unaware of how to deal with neurodivergent members exercising their right to active inclusion. Uneducated and unaware communities mean public entities like schools and public access areas as well as those public servants charged with administrating and maintaining them. Structural ableism then intersects with structural racism (and in our son's case, structural Islamophobia) and the toxic result is Mustafa's dilemma. I've stated multidisciplinary solutions in prior articles and interviews. Those proposals include suggested programs to help build peer-run respite centers for those with a psychiatric disability to recover from moments of crises and receive training in interdependence and supports to help them navigate their community. Or hold training sessions for small businesses and community public servants that help make public spaces safe for autistic people to interact with the public with acceptance and understanding.

C. Don't erase disabled AAC using, activists of color from being the voices of their own experience. There is an appropriation of neurodivergent voices in advocacy that is just heartbreaking. It is one of the residual tragedies of these events is that those who speak out about them with experience, cultural knowledge, and authority are erased while those who have privilege but no true grasp of what it means to live with Mustafa's dilemma set themselves up as experts and are bolstered, sometimes even provided with grants, to authoritatively discuss issues of racism or ableism without discussing the convergence of racism, ableism, and things like Islamophobia, Transphobia, or structural intolerance of psychiatric disability they cannot begin to understand quite simply because they are not POC who are disabled, AAC users, and survivors of such police encounters. So people who are like my son continue to die while others appropriate the voices of activists who can represent him because they are ASL users, nonspeaking, AAC using disabled adult activists who understand intersectionality and the impact on community barriers to inclusion.

Mustafa's dilemma, with its critical high-risk factor of nonverbal communication not being acknowledged by law enforcement officers engaging nonspeaking people, is not addressed sufficiently by disability rights activists who have verbal speech privilege. Its most recent disastrous result was the death of Daniel Harris, an unarmed Deaf community member shot by a police officer while trying to sign to him during a traffic stop.

I consider this an escalation, happening because the deaths of POC by police in general, and nonspeaking disabled Black people, in particular, were allowed to continue without accountability and with misguided calls for law enforcement training rather than reform of a militarized police culture  even in instances where videos clearly show excessive use of deadly force against unarmed people who were subdued, compliant, restrained, or otherwise unable to inflict harm.

D. Create annual, cross-disability, online actions to demand transformative change . I have never seen an annual event that flash-blogs awareness and calls to reform action about the deaths and harm of non-white autistic adults and children in catastrophic encounters with law enforcement. Why is that? I can tell you, dear readers, that one reason is squarely based upon who is dominating the autism conversation in our country. Affluent, white, parents who can keep their own divergent offspring from harm don't see this as an issue until a victim is white or affluent. Excessive use of force against disabled people cannot only matter when the victims are white. Activist across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic divides should be shouting about injustice as loudly for disabled nonwhite people as we do for white disabled victims. Only this persistent spotlighting by an entire community makes an issue important enough to force lifesaving nationwide legislative change.

We need a noninstitutional,  community-based infrastructure that can respond to disability and mental health related crises without doing harm to the clients needing supports. This is one answer that arises from the accurately defined problem. Change must be multidisciplinary to dismantle structural ableism and racism.

 Multidisciplinary change combines community partners at both the grassroots and federal levels who do not normally collaborate to find real solutions to the properly defined problem and lobby together for funding to support those solutions. Things like having our most radical Black Disabled activists be part of task forces with their state and local police chiefs, disabled disability and mental health activists, and families to reduce violence against autistic and other intersected neurodivergent people of color.

When I say 'radical disabled activists of color,' I don't mean privileged by way of beginning in poverty and leaving it through education or success - I mean people who are still trying to navigate disability in inaccessible poverty ridden, over-policed communities, are known and respected in those communities for their grassroots activism, and continue to know first hand what Mustafa's dilemma looks like because they actually live it on a daily basis.

We individual activists can also start the inclusive community conversation with our own towns and city councils, our own local governments. What national organizations should be doing is presenting this case rather than rushing to stand in line at the police training queue. The less police have to respond to inaccurate 911 calls about neurodivergent people, the less chance of catastrophic encounters. It isn't really their job, you see, to manage disabled people in crisis. It is the responsibility of our entire community to embrace our people. The sooner we cease allowing community ignorance and ableism to keep our loved ones from living as everyone has the right to in this society, the sooner everyone can be part of bringing Mustafa's dilemma to an end.


-------------------------------------
References:
Dementia Inclusive Communities in Japan Part of National Plan
http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-japan-offers-dementia-awareness-courses-to-city-workers/
The Death of Daniel Harris
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-shoots-kills-unarmed-deaf-mute-man/
The Tasering and Arrest of Tario Anderson
http://www.wyff4.com/news/greenville-family-file-complaint-after-autistic-adult-son-is-shocked-with-taser-arrested/30415354
http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2015/01/catastrophic-encounters-with-police.html
On the Shooting Death of Paul Childs
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0714/p01s02-ussc.html
On The Shooting of Autistic Ronald Madison and others on the Danziger Bridge
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/us/new-orleans-danziger-bridge-plea-deal/
The Shooting of Charles Kinsey in front of nonspeaking autistic client Arnaldo Rios Soto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT7HcbEo9WM

Why Autism Training for Law Enforcement Doesn't Work

Add A black T-shirt with white lettering on the front that reads:
[This Ain’t / Yo Mama’s / Civil Rights / Movement].
The sleeves and bottom edge of fabric have been cut off.
The back of the shirt has white lettering that reads:
[Hands Up United]. Collection of the Smithsonian
 National Museum of African American History
 and Culture, Gift of Rahiel Tesfamariam

In the aftermath of events in Ferguson, many Black autism moms are giving voice to their fears for their sons. NPR published an article about the Autism Society of Los Angeles teaming with the Los Angeles police department sponsoring a training seminar organized by autism mother and special education teacher Emily Iland for autistics, to teach them about dealing with Law enforcement and to familiarize law enforcement officers with autism and also aired it on a broadcast which you can reach here.    

Now I need to explain that the Denver police officer who shot 15-year-old Black autistic teen Paul Childs III,  had not only received autism training but knew Paul personally and had returned him home just a few days before when Paul had experienced a severe seizure and wandered off, disoriented. Paul trusted the police officer who shot him to death in front of his mother.

Stephon Watts was shot by a Calumet City police officer who had also received autism training. The police officer had arrived at the scene with his partner and ample backup knew Stephon and was fully aware that Stephon was not a threat. The officer who shot Stephon Watts, his partner and other officers on the scene also had tasers. No one bothered to use them. So much for autism training. I learned this painful lesson firsthand when despite my efforts in first responder training in Maryland, Robert "Ethan" Saylor, a young man with Down Syndrome was killed by off duty policemen refusing to listen when told he had a behavioral protocol in place and his mother was on the way. Only after this death did people take this issue seriously. 

Reginald "Neli" Latson was trained in how to manage a police encounter. His behavior was entirely correct. Unfortunately, no one taught Neli how to handle an individual policeman who was off duty and refused to believe Neli was not a threat. In 2013 Neli threatened self-harm because of what was happening to him at the group home where he was to serve out a 20-year sentence and police were called. He is now facing a return to a hellish prison existence, and he doesn't know what he did wrong in the first place. Another awful wrongful call, another disastrous encounter with police, and Neli's life, which was already ruined, is doomed. Out of the media's view, Neli will be returned to an unjustly harsh prison sentence for being autistic and Black. 

No police officers involved in the two deadly shootings lost their jobs. The officer who shot Paul Childs was promoted. 

Unless this type of encounter has happened to you, you will not be able to understand what occurs. Dave Chappelle used such encounters and compared them to police encounters he witnessed between white friends and police in his stand up routines for a reason. Every one of us, nearly all people of color are at risk for this. But we don't have the additional challenge of possibly not being able to speak or behave in a "normal" manner at that moment when speech is being demanded by officers who may or may not have the best intentions towards us.  The Washington Post had a recent blog post that directly asked the question " Why do police see a person's disability as a provocation?"  Training doesn't cover attitudinal injustices. 

So why were Paul Childs and Stephon Watts shot by police who were trained to understand and deal with them knew them personally and had helped them in the past? Why did Neli Latson's "training" fail? Why do I think the Los Angeles approach won't work? First, police in whatever they perceive to be a crisis situation will always fall back on their basic training. So where autism training would require they calm and de-escalate the situation, police will not think in a counterintuitive fashion and they will escalate automatically based upon cues they are trained to react to with aggression in the academy. If they perceive rightly or wrongly that their target is holding anything they will treat the disabled person like a suspect and anyone near them like a hostage. In short, autism training is counterintuitive to police training.

The example given by NPR of the police training seminar for autistic students is typical of parent-driven training. It tries to train autistic consumers on parental and police terms while excluding them from decision-making agency in the creation of the training protocols and curriculum. This demands the autistic person, who may be overwhelmed and in a traumatized state, "behave appropriately" and recognize law enforcement is not a threat. Another issue here is that many autism-related 911 calls are sometimes misplaced or being made for the wrong reasons. These are medical or mental health crisis calls rather than calls for police backup. By misplaced, I mean the intent of the calls is not to help with crisis intervention, but to establish a record needed for other purposes.

Families should no longer be told by anyone that fast-tracking their grown male children into group homes can only happen if there is documented proof that the individual is a danger to himself or others because what follows is parents using 911 calls to establish a paper trail to justify sending their young men off to a group home. These actions often end in tragedy.

You can't train away racism or ableism. Understand that. What we need to look for are paths to reduce creating situations where these encounters take place meaning exploring solutions like a crisis team response group of medical, mental health, and autism professionals which would only include law enforcement (armed with a taser NOT a gun) if abuse of the disabled person or the threat of harm is truly imminent. All strategies need to be inclusive of autistic disability rights activists because they are both directly impacted by whatever training strategies, policies, or actions happen in their name, and they know what training and delivery methods will work best for their peers. 

I ceased pursuing a route of training law enforcement after the death of Robert Ethan Saylor, which happened a year after Maryland implemented the regulatory training solution as an alternative to the bill I asked to be introduced and tried to pass. It was a bitter pill.  I sat in a room full of stakeholders unable to fight back tears the year before, saying that the next time we all met it would be in the aftermath of a death because we had the chance to avert such a disaster in our state and we didn't fight for it enough. I don't know why it takes young people dying to drive legislative change on issues like this. But I realize now that such changes wouldn't have mattered and I was going in the wrong direction with this. We need to understand the hate against the black body, hate against disability, and base solutions that save lives on how to overcome these things. 

My son's life and the lives of too many others depend on us finding a better solution to this issue. Such a solution can only be arrived at by including his neurodivergent peers as stakeholders beyond parading them in training that does not reflect real-life fear in confrontations with law enforcement. Some policeman talking down to a room full of nearly grown neurodivergent men telling them "never touch a policeman's gun" when most autistic men who have been shot dead are shot from a distance not nearly close enough to see a policeman's gun, much less reach for it, shows the canyon divide that exists here. It is time we stop doing things about autistics without them. Stop doing things at them. We can't continue to bury our own sons. 

Peace.