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Reactions to the West Yorks Police “oops” are not uniformly admiring.
Replies are turned off, as they were on yesterday’s now-memory-holed “there’s more to it than you know” – which at least one person points out is silly because quote tweets can’t be turned off so why admit you want us to shut up without being able to shut us up?
Why does my eye immediately latch onto “neurodiversity” and start twitching? Oh, right, because that kind of soft language, which reframes a disability or handicap as purely neutral or even positive, allows wrongdoing to be obscured and minimized. Rather than wrongfully arresting a disabled child, there was an instance of involuntary incarceration involving an inappropriate interjection from a neurodivergent individual in relation to incitement of homophobic violation of public order.
(Apologies to George Carlin.)
Nailed it.
Why drag this girl into a squad car and throw her in a cell for 20 hours if you’re not going to charge her? Because the process IS the punishment. As they like to say, “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.”
But this particular exercise of an all-too-common practice may have generated more heat than the WYP can handle…
Hoping so.
Here is a fantastic example of the issue that a lot of Normies – including the police – are much more comfortable with the “Self-Diagnosed” “I’m so very quirky and speshul!” version of autism and other conditions, the kind of thing that is something to put into a social media bio, that gives the individual the right to interrupt and condesplain about “As a Neurodiverse person…”
You know, the kind of thing that doesn’t actually make day-to-day life particularly difficult. The kind of thing that can provide quite a nice living as a “Diversity Consultant” if you’re from the right background, once you age-out of being obnoxious on the internet (or should have done, anyway).
Most people aren’t comfortable at all with the reality. They seem to have no interest in understanding someone who genuinely thinks differently from the Normies, doesn’t fully comprehend their social rules, and is behaving perfectly logically in response to the situation they are in, it’s just that they are operating by different standards to that of the Normie World – which is confusing, overwhelming, and frequently terrifying.
A lot of people aren’t comfortable with genuine difference. This includes the Police, who should bloody well know better, and yet they keep refusing to do so. It can only be deliberate at this point.
The fact that they were only called to *get a vulnerable child home safely*, and this is how they chose to behave, is utterly disgraceful. They *knew* that she was autistic from the start. Their training should cover that autistic individuals may well behave differently from what the officers might expect, but they are generally not being “difficult” or “non-compliant” on purpose – many of us have to carry information cards to that effect (which, unfortunately, a lot of officers ignore, because they think they know everything, as if half an hour of powerpoint slides gives them greater knowledge than a lifetime of living with the conditions in question).
This is especially egregious given repeated recent reports regarding their institutional behaviour towards female victims and witnesses, along with previous reminders about their failures towards disabled people generally, and autistic individuals specifically.#
This is the organisation that actually wonders why disabled women and girls especially (and their loved ones) *do not trust the police* to maintain even a minimum standard of professionalism. So now, there are a whole lot of people and their families who know that they shouldn’t call the police to help them in any way if they or their vulnerable loved-one needs help, or goes missing. Or worse, if they’re a victim of an actual crime, which is pretty common, because if there’s one thing predators of all sorts really like, it’s a vulnerable victim. Not to mention the rise in crimes committed against disabled victims *because* of their disabilities. It’s so much easier to take your frustration out on someone less likely to put up a fight, you see. Many don’t bother reporting it, because we know that the police don’t care. They keep demonstrating it.
Great job there! That’ll free up loads of time to look for “offensive” tweets! Such a fantastic display of public service!
Perhaps if they’d spent a little more time on the actual practical policing stuff, rather than the latest obsessions of middle management (and extremely-online activists), they might have managed to do their job. Maybe the basic humanity of disabled people was skipped over for a trendier, more exciting training session, again. The police generally might have considerable amends to make regarding their previous behaviour towards Gay, Lesbian and Bi individuals, but what the hell was this about? Apparently, some animals really are more equal than others.
A basic understanding of the law is, in fact, required in order to be a police officer. The law as it actually is, not as certain officers would evidently like it to be (and this force has been told about this problem before).
As has already been pointed out, it’s not actually a “Public Order” offense if it does not take place in public – it says so right there in the text (specifically that the offence does not apply in a private dwelling). I’m still slightly confused, given the amount of genuine abuse that gets directed at officers by the various people they have to deal with, as to how there was anything actually offensive here in the first place.
Why totally overreact to *that*, of all things? From a *vulnerable child*?
(I’ve had similar observations from students, and it’s often either entirely neutral – “you look like this other person I know”, or even a slightly complicated compliment – “you look like this person I really like”. Surely Occam’s Razor could be applied here? That’s probably too logical, isn’t it?)
# There was an incident a few years ago – with a different force, I think, but still – where an autistic man was physically restrained, thrown to the ground resulting in injury, then sat on by several officers for some time. His “offence”? He just wanted to get back to his house, and so he went around an officer that was restricting access to a particular street. He told them he was a resident, but they were unhappy about him being unable to read their minds, apparently. He kept telling them that he was Autistic, and he needed to get home, but they’d already decided that he was a “problem”, which had to be “dealt with”. The force was made to apologise, which they eventually did, possibly after legal threats had to be made. No “lessons” appear to have been “learned” here.
Also the incident of the autistic young man slapped with a Hate Crime label for asking a fairly innocent question in a (admittedly rather awkward) manner which a particularly sensitive Normie police officer found “sooo offensive” – then maybe this isn’t the career for them, given the abuse I’ve heard directed at officers who are just trying to stop some idiot injuring himself.
It’s always amazing how officers can have so much patience with an adult male who is clearly intoxicated and causing serious damage (and inevitably screaming abuse and obscenities at all and sundry), but what they flip out over is one autistic child. Almost like girls are held to a different standard. Or are easier to bully. One of those.
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