Monday, January 12

Tag: disabilities

People With Disabilities Ignored By Governments
FINANCIAL HEALTH

People With Disabilities Ignored By Governments

People with disabilities are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change but are “systematically ignored” by governments around the world, a new report shows. No countries include disabled people in their greenhouse gas reduction plans and few even provide for their needs when planning to adapt to the increasing effects of the climate crisis. Even after widespread failures to account for people with disabilities around Hurricane Katrina, disabled people had to sue New York City to ensure emergency shelters and evacuation facilities would be accessible after the city failed to do so around Hurricane Sandy. (The Guardian) Nexus Media News
To stop police shootings of people with mental health disabilities, I asked them what cops – and everyone – could do to help
MENTAL HEALTH

To stop police shootings of people with mental health disabilities, I asked them what cops – and everyone – could do to help

When Joe Prude called the police on his brother, he was asking for help: Daniel Prude, who suffered from mental health problems, had run almost naked out of his Rochester, New York, house into the snow. When officers arrived, new video footage shows, the March 23 encounter quickly turned violent, and Prude died from asphyxiation under a hood officers had put over his head. Two years prior, in 2018, Shukri Ali Said of Georgia also wound up dead after leaving her house during a mental health crisis on April 23, 2018. Police, called in to help, found Said standing at an intersection holding a knife. Officers shot her five times in the neck and chest, killing her. That same month, in New York, officers answered a 911 call about a black man waving something that looked like a gun. In fact, it...
To stop police shootings of people with mental health disabilities, I asked them what cops – and everyone – could do to help
MENTAL HEALTH

To stop police shootings of people with mental health disabilities, I asked them what cops – and everyone – could do to help

After Shukri Ali Said left her house during a mental health crisis on April 23, 2018, her sister called 911 for help. Police found Said standing at an intersection holding a knife. Officers shot her five times in the neck and chest, killing her. That same month, in New York, officers answered a 911 call about a black man waving something that looked like a gun. In fact, it was a pipe. But when Saheed Vassell, a 34-year-old father with mental illness who was well known in his Brooklyn community, pointed it at police, they shot him dead. Vassell and Said are among the hundreds of people with intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses in the United States killed by police every year. According to The Washington Post, 142 of the 752 people shot by police so far in 2019 have had a mental i...