Tone Deaf: Deaf Austinites say police can't seem to listen to reason

[deafgal001]

Esther Valdez is deaf.

That explains some, but not all, of what happened to her on June 16, 2009. In the simplest terms, the 24-year-old found herself in trouble with the Austin Police Department – booked into jail for resisting arrest, a charge punishable by up to a year in jail – because she could not hear Officer Steven Willis yelling at her to stop as she walked along a North Austin sidewalk with her girlfriend, Ceci Bermudez.

It was just before 6pm on a hot June evening when trouble found Valdez, who has been deaf since birth; she can detect some sounds with the help of a hearing aid, but its battery was not working on June 16. Valdez and Bermudez, who is hearing, were walking to the grocery store from their apartment. Rush hour traffic buzzed by in both directions along Metric Boulevard as they walked south along the sidewalk, but the two women barely noticed because they were engaged in an intense, personal conversation carried on in sign language.

Their intensity apparently caught Wil*lis' attention as he rolled up on the women in his patrol car. According to his report of the incident, he first saw the pair roughly a half-hour earlier, as he drove to get gas. "I observed that the two were walking but it seemed that they were having a heated discussion as I observed them emoting with their hands while speaking to one another," he wrote. As he drove back in the opposite direction along that same route, Willis again saw the two women. But now, he wrote in his report, the two were actually fighting: "This time I observed that they were physically struggling with one another," he wrote. "I saw them both pulling and grabbing at each other's arms. I saw that they had gone from talking to a physical disturbance."

According to Willis, the women spotted him when he made a U-turn in his car to come up behind them. They immediately stopped fighting and just "stood there facing each other," he wrote. When he got out of his car and headed toward them, they "began walking away from me at a fast pace." He yelled for them to stop, but they didn't; Willis had to run, he wrote, to catch up with them and "had to grab Valdez by her arm in order to get them to stop." Although he notes that Bermudez "immediately" told him that Valdez is "hearing impaired," that apparently did not affect how he proceeded. "I saw that Valdez had a hearing aid," he wrote, "and could in fact carry on a conversation with me."

Willis also decided that what he'd seen of their conversation had nothing to do with Val*dez's inability to hear. "Bermudez and Valdez were not using sign when I saw them arguing and were not using sign to communicate with me," he wrote. How he arrived at that conclusion isn't clear.

Willis' report lays out the basics of the rest of the encounter, as he perceived it. Bermudez was hearing, he noted, so there was no reason that she didn't stop walking when told; Valdez supposedly told him not to touch her and that the pair didn't have to stop if they didn't want to. Willis asked the couple what was happening, and they told him they were just talking and walking. He told them he saw them "grabbing" each other, which Bermudez denied. While he was talking with Bermudez, Valdez began texting her mother on her cell phone; Willis took the phone, put it down, and continued talking to Bermudez. Valdez picked up her phone and started walking away; Willis yelled at her to stop, but she kept walking. He told her to put her hands behind her back so he could cuff her; she didn't comply and tried to pull away from him. He wrestled Valdez to the sidewalk. According to Willis, Bermudez began "pulling at my hands and arms" to get him off Valdez. Eventually a second officer, Teressa Graves, arrived on the scene, and the officers arrested both Valdez and Bermudez and sequestered them in separate police cars, eventually taking both to the Downtown jail.

On its face, the encounter might appear mundane, even routine: Cop stops to check welfare of couple; couple is belligerent; cop tries to subdue them, and they fight; couple goes to jail.

.....(more: Tone Deaf: Deaf Austinites say police can't seem to listen to reason Austin News - AustinChronicle.com )

 

[Dixie]

2+2=5??

We are getting mostly the officer's account and not much of the girl's account. But something doesn't quite add up about the story in my opinion.

To me, it would be obvious that the two were using ASL and not fighting, and two had he watched long enough he might have noted that they were play fighting and goofing off like so many young girls do.

But the girls also could have stopped and they could have said wait, we were not fighting we were using ASL. But of course they were scared out of their wits and couldn't think straight, likely.

Maybe miscommunication or the lack of it altogether contributed to the situation escalating.

I have a feeling a judge will see this as ridiculous and throw it out and tell the officer to piss off and don't intervene until called or it is obviously dangerous. IE - one girl is smashing the other girl's head on the sidewalk.