Policing disability: alliance building, police divestment and community investment

ABSTRACT

Amidst the increase in protest, activism and scholarship about police violence and repression in recent years, considerations of disability and ableism continue to be relegated to the margins. This article draws on interviews with leading disability justice advocates in Australia to shed light on the nature of police interactions with people with disability. Our analysis contributes to critical scholarship, advocacy and activism in four key ways. First, we reveal how the ubiquity of ableism in policing renders people with disability dangerous and undeserving Others. Second, we exemplify how the mutually constitutive roles of racism and ableism in policing consolidate the inseparability of the struggles for justice of racialised people and people with disability. Third, we reveal how the persistence of sexism and ableism in policing fails to protect victimised women with disability by constructing them and their experiences of violence as unbelievable subjects. Fourth, we affirm the vital importance of building alternative, community-driven approaches to safety. Our analysis underscores the necessity of attending to the interactions between racism, ableism and sexism in progressing scholarship and organising to divest funds from police and to eliminate their role in responding to unmet community care needs that they cannot and should not control.

KEYWORDS:

• Ableism
• community investment
• disability
• policing
• police divestment

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability for funding the larger research project from which this article partially draws.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Attorney-General’s Department, Australian Government.