Twice, campus police have been called on Emily Merrill. Now, she speaks out. // Photo courtesy of Emily Merrill.
By Emily Merrill
It’s September 20. I’m in the computer lab, working on something for a Fairhaven ISP where I’m a little behind. I’m pretty much done with productive work, I’m mostly staring at my document, and occasionally standing up to pace through the future of the document because I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I mutter out potential lines I could write, some places I could go from here.
A cop walks in. He seems… actually quite frustrated. He walks past me. I almost sigh with relief. He turns around. I don’t remember precisely what he said, but somewhere, in a tone that clarifies he’s not frustrated at me, asks, “Can I sit down?”
I have two choices here. I can say no – In general: don’t talk to cops. But this is a situation where I understand the game enough to know I am in the most danger if I do anything “suspicious” or “unusual.” I don’t really game it out like this – I just say yes because I’m scared, but I’m right.
He gets as far as “Well, someone called, said-” when I fill in.
“I was pacing, and talking to myself, as I do.”
He goes from frustrated, and not at me, to honestly seeming upset on my behalf. This isn’t what I expect, but again, I’m not really expecting anything.
“This has happened before?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No.”
“I think I’ll just leave.”
And he does.
. . .
Alone, this would have been odd, infuriating and amusing, all wrapped up in one.
It had happened before, in a more stressful way, last winter. In this summer intersession situation, the cop is on my side, and there’s one of them. Last winter, there are two cops, and they think I’m being disruptive, though ultimately they decide that I’m just very upset about a mass shooting, and leave me be.
That one left me shaking – I had no idea what was going to happen.
According to a police log, on September 20, a suspicious person, referred to by he/him pronouns (presumably because the caller did – we didn’t talk about my gender), is “talking to himself in the computer lab.”
. . .
I am told that the Associated Students recently had mass shooting training. I am told that it made use of a kind of see something, say something ideology. I am told that my girlfriend got in a fight, and pointed out that what this meant was that people who were visibly disabled would pay the price.
This training happened on September 20. This is not why the cops were called on me, it’s the symptom, not the disease. The disease would be a vigilance culture, heightened around mass shootings, and a virulent ableism. After all, September 20 was the day Snochia Moseley walked into a Rite Aid Distribution center, and killed three other people. February 19, the other time I had the cops called on me, was only a few days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, better known as the Parkland Shooting.
In America, whenever people are thinking of violence they understand as senseless they express that by targeting those they have misattributed senseless violence to. I imagine that many other groups have experienced this. I will make no attempt to speak for such groups, but I want to acknowledge that outright before I move on to talking about me.
Talking to yourself is not a sign of being a domestic abuser, which is, aside from being a man, the most overrepresented characteristic among mass shooters. Psychiatric diagnosis is, if a factor in likelihood of engaging in a shooting, only a marginal one (5 percent of mass shootings are committed by the 4 percent of the population that is diagnosed with a mental illness), according to the Gun Violence and Mental Illness, a book written by two psychiatrists. Moreover, mentally ill people remain more likely to be victims of shootings than perpetrators.
That is to say, there’s no way this kind of vigilance will protect us, only more endanger those already disenfranchised.
. . .
I want to say that is not about my mental illness.
That’s even true. Neither my depressive lows nor my hypomanic highs have anything to do with me talking to myself. My anxiety is irrelevant. You could argue that the Lithium I take for the first part of this makes me talk to myself more because it makes it slightly harder to concentrate, but that hardly seems to be about my mental illness. This is really about my ADHD, not my mental illness.
I also don’t want to throw people who talk to themselves because they are mentally ill under the bus, though. This is about all of us who are disabled. This is about the idea that our existence in public space is suspicious, even if we are obviously students, as anyone who can log into a computer lab computer is.
This is about the fact that I feel unsafe in a WWU computer lab. I imagine that anyone who organizes themself the way I do feels the same.
This is about the fact that it is a million times more important to our futures, to making sure that we are not unable to access our world, that we can be in public places working, and learning, and growing, than anything else will ever be. Other things may be vital, but having money and a job and a future is a prerequisite to mental health services, and nothing much matters if we can’t get a job because we’re too “weird” or “scary.”
You shouldn’t call the cops on someone who’s being unusual in public because it’s rude, and mean, and it makes their day harder.
Also, you shouldn’t call the cops on someone who is being visibly disabled or mentally ill in public because there are two sets of places where we can be disabled or mentally ill:
You can see us in the classroom, or see us applying for legal aid. You can see in the computer lab, or see us applying for welfare. You can see us at your job, or see us on the street.
You shouldn’t call the cops on us when we’re visibly disabled – even if that disability is a mental illness – because we are where we belong.
Emily Merrill is a senior pursuing a double major in sociology and a Fairhaven concentration in “Writing and Representations.”
Updated 10/1 to fix a typo.