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It is time to recognize the similarities between systemic police violence and systems that imprison people, how race and disability intertwine, and how all congregate institutions including prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric institutions, and immigrant detention camps arise from systems designed to oppress those whom society devalues.

Covid-19 has killed over 32,750  disabled people  in substandard nursing homes in the United States, with a disparate number of those being people of color, (https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-nursing-homes-racial-disparity.html). National ADAPT is compelled to speak out against this widespread and horrifying human rights catastrophe.

ADAPT strongly denounces the ongoing human rights violations committed against disabled people in all congregate care settings, and we reject the notion that age and underlying conditions sufficiently explain the outrageously high rate of death in these institutions. The occurrence of neglect, abuse, terror, and despair that disabled people experience daily in these facilities is well documented. Yet we continue to be socially removed from our families, homes, and communities in the name of cost-effectiveness, efficiency, or worse, for the convenience and comfort of non-disabled society, and the profit of health care professionals and shareholders.

No longer will we excuse or abide the socially accepted biases that dehumanize disabled people.

No longer will we accept the tired rationalization of “where else are we going to put them” that has been used to justify sending us to die in dismal human warehouses; nor, when deaths are expedited, that they are a natural outcome of age, chronic illness, and impairment, rather than the neglect and abuse fostered by ableist social structures and attitudes.

National ADAPT and our state chapters will no longer abide callous professionals, ignorant of disability theory and rights, who exploit us for their own personal career advancement, and for the advancement of their professions and agencies. We condemn the nonchalant discussions that we must regularly endure in professional forums—discussions, without us, about what is best for us, and questions about where significantly disabled people should be warehoused without any thought to community integration—and everyday discussion that dismisses or erases the annihilation of tens of thousands of disabled people as merely a “natural process” or even beneficial to society as a whole. We equally condemn the doctors with financial interests in congregate care institutions, who sign orders sending us there, again with no consideration of home and community settings and services.  

No longer will we accept the naive and hollow promises of institutional reform, as disabled people have endured neglect and abuse in institutions for over a hundred years without significant change despite countless acts, reviews, legislation, and congressional hearings. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) recently found that 82% of American nursing homes had an infection prevention and control deficiency cited in in one or more years, with about half of these facilities having had persistent problems and having been cited across multiple years. We need more diversion from institutions of all kinds, and more affordable, accessible integrated housing in our communities.

It is time to come to terms with the reality that abuse, neglect, and death are not isolated incidents that can be addressed individually through underfunded Ombudsman programs, insincere band aids of ‘culture change,’ or through impotent state regulatory agencies that remain stuck in antiquated medical model perspectives of disability. Instead, we must admit that dehumanization is the very bedrock of institutional segregation.

There is no excuse for the disregard of our basic humanity, especially 56 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and 21 years after the United States Supreme Court Olmstead decision.  Enough is enough!

*This number does not include death tolls from states that have been negligent in reporting infections and deaths in assisted living facilities, state institutions, groups homes, or other congregate ‘care’ settings, or who have reported to CDC, but have chosen not to make their numbers public.

In the middle of a pandemic, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are not just being killed at alarming rates by COVID19, but are yet again being senselessly targeted by police, and some have been murdered.

For years, on the first day of each National ADAPT Action we hold legal and new members’ meetings. These meetings always include a reminder of police brutality toward Black, brown and indigenous people, and people from other oppressed communities.

National ADAPT condemns the recent murders of:

Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old, unarmed young man who was out jogging, and murdered by the McMichaels, who were tipped off by an off-duty police officer;

Nicolas Chavez, a 27-year-old father of 3 young children, was fatally shot after Chavez was on his knees reeling from being shot not only by sandbags but also a taser;

Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old certified EMT and first responder during the pandemic. On May 13 police forcibly entered her apartment and shot her 8 times as she slept.

Malik Williams The Police Department in Federal Way, Washington executed this man while he sat in his car. Not being able to move he was shot 86 times.

Jeremy McDole 28, parapalegic killed by Wilmington, DE police.

Saheed Vassell shot 19 times by NYC police Department. The officers jumped out and started firing without warning.He had a psychiatric disability.

Dreasjon “Sean” Reed, a 21-year-old, gunned down by Indianapolis police while he was live streaming a Facebook video; and

On May 26, George Floyd, who was murdered by suffocation while handcuffed and on the ground when a police officer kneeled with all his weight on Floyd’s neck.

We vehemently condemn and must put an end to all murders of BIPOC by police brutality.

Engaging in protest and non-violent civil disobedience is a right National ADAPT has long exercised under the First Amendment of our nation’s Constitution.
However, to protest without fear of violent reprisal, and even death, is a privilege reserved for our white siblings in the disability rights movement. Our disability rights movement owes a great deal to the Black civil rights movement that laid the groundwork for us under the spray of firehoses, the torrent of fists, and too many bullets.

We live today with a system that compounds the social and psychic damage experienced by the ancestors of Black, brown and Indigenous people, bridging the mob lynchings, and smallpox laden blankets of yesteryear into police “lynchings” of today. It is long past time for this to end!

National ADAPT, our local chapters, and our individual advocates and activists commit to the following:

We will call out as racial terrorism the acts of white people when they threaten, harass, and commit acts of violence against Black people and other people of color in public spaces.

We will not re-play, post, or amplify images, videos or depictions of Black people and other people from marginalized groups experiencing violence, because we recognize the trauma experienced by repeated exposure to these images.

We will continue to actively oppose the institutionalization of all people, and the damage done through institutionalization. Our fight includes opposing mass incarceration, the over-criminalization in the legal system, and the racial presumption of guilt that permeate the Black experience in this country and result in disproportionate numbers of BIPOC living in prisons, jails, psychiatric facilities, nursing facilities, and other institutions.

We will continue our anti-racism and equity work to lift up the experiences of multiply marginalized members of our community, to center them, their stories, and their solutions to the systemic racism and ableism we are committed to bringing to an end.
We hold ourselves and our disability rights siblings to the anti-racism work that is intrinsically linked to the fight for disability rights.

As an organization made up of committed social justice warriors, ADAPT cleaves to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the leaders of the movement we build upon in our work, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

We, the members of National ADAPT, demand the senseless murders end. We can have no justice, no peace, no freedom and no rest until we have justice for our Black and Brown and Indigenous family.

#BlackLivesMatter

#SayTheirNames

#LivesWorthyOfLife