One week into Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month, this story hit my news feed yesterday:
Autistic Child Wanders Off, Mom Calls 911, Is Accused of Neglect
Here's the selection from the news report:
911 dispatchers received a call around 8:15 p.m. Thursday about a child standing on the corner of Northwest Radial Highway and Hamilton Street. The child had been there about 10 minutes with no adults nearby, according to a police report.
The child was unable to tell police where he lived or the names of his parents.
At 8:33 p.m., 911 received another call from a woman reporting her 4-year-old autistic son was missing.
According to the police report, officers went to the woman's home. She said her son had left the house without her knowledge and she went looking for him.
...
When the mother failed to find her son, she returned home and called 911.
The 31-year-old mother was cited on suspicion of child neglect.
The blog post (very sympathetic to the frantic mom) was illustrated with this photo:
My radar "pinged" at that -- and I'll tell you all about it after the jump.
So here's the thing.
Last week, I had a terrifying experience myself. I was home with my sweet ten-year-old daughter, who happens to be on the autism spectrum and speaks very few words, during her spring break. At one point she went upstairs while I was downstairs, and when I followed a couple minutes later, I was greeted by a back door swinging wide open, and no sign of my girl.
I made a quick sweep of the back yard, hollering her name (though she's not likely to answer to it), and then went back in and dialed 911 with trembling fingers. The next half hour was a sick blur for me, during which my gut was screaming at me to be out searching for my precious child, but I couldn't do that because I had to stay put and be command-central for the city cops, and the neighbors who joined in the search, and the sheriff's deputy who was en-route with the tracking equipment to be able to home in on the device that my daughter wears for just this reason. We didn't get the chance to test the tracking, though -- she showed back up on her own at the same door she'd departed from, with rosy cheeks and dirt under her nails and no way of telling me where she'd been.
The officer with whom I'd been command-central-ing had been maintaining the professional demeanor (competent, down to business, etc.) until her return. But then in our home, that facade dropped as he told me that he was a parent too, and joined me in sheer parental relief that my daughter was home and safe. I was grateful for both the competence and the commiseration, but found myself wondering afterwards -- what would the interaction have been like had I not been white and middle class and in the kind of neighborhood I live in? The deep racial divides in my city have been brutally re-exposed recently with the police-shooting of young Tony Robinson -- unarmed and black -- placing us squarely into the pain of Ferguson and Milwaukee and NYC and now South Carolina, God help us.
So when I read the story of the mama who called 911 to find her defenseless child, autistic and alone in another white-bread Midwestern city, searched quite a bit longer on her own than I did before calling 911, and wound up with a citation on suspicion of child-neglect... I wondered whether there might be another obvious difference. I wondered indeed.
And guess what? I clicked through to the original news report and...
Sorry for the poor image-quality -- they've replaced the photo with video on the KETV Omaha page, so I had to screen-grab and blow it up from an archived thumbnail on Yahoo. But there it is. Mama and child are black.
Damn it.
I can only imagine what that must have been like, on top of the frantic searching for her defenseless baby, to have to make the horrible calculation -- if I call 911, I risk criminal suspicion -- but if I don't call 911 they'll get me for that too -- and every minute I search and don't find on my own is another minute that the cops could have been looking -- but what if they don't even believe me -- oh my baby, where's my baby, he has no traffic safety sense, he loves water -- and on, and on.
All this in context of the fact that a black mama is just simply going to start out with a different calculation about involving law-enforcement than a white mama is -- there's a great first-hand explanation in this recent Politico piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones:
A Letter from Black America: Yes, We Fear the Police. Here's Why.
The story on the KETV-Omaha page has been updated in more than just taking down the photo, since I first saw it. There's been this added from the mom:
"We need to be aware of the challenges and aspects (that) people with autism face, and how to deal with them. I don't feel being issued a ticket helped me."
And after that poignant understatement, there's this from the police:
Omaha police won't discuss specifics, but told KETV NewsWatch 7 that the circumstances warranted a citation. More details will be released when Watson appears in court May 6.
Of course the police have reasons for their actions. But we see things like this:
Everything Police Said About Unarmed Man’s Death Before Video Surfaced Was a Lie
And I gotta say -- my heart is still with the mama, maybe even more so.
A mother of a "wandering" autistic child should be able to call for help without having to calculate the criminal charges. FULL STOP.
Thank you for reading. The floor is yours, with one additional request. If you are considering starting a discussion in the comments about "person-first" language, please read "Why I Dislike Person-First Language" by Jim Sinclair, who identifies as autistic -- and then consider whether the topic might be more appropriate for a separate diary.