Starbucks getting his order wrong causes convulsions.
Via USA Today:
The image of an unarmed person of color being brutalized by police has become inescapable.
For Prairie View A&M University senior Jesse Valdez, each one of those images brings overwhelming anxiety. He’s seeking a professional diagnosis for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Last year, Valdez was pinned to the floor and handcuffed by a police officer in a Houston mall. The officer pressed a taser and pushed a knee into his back. Valdez says he was slammed to the floor simply for questioning the mall’s policy on riding hoverboards inside the facility. The officer had ordered the business major off the scooter and said the student had failed to obey his command.
Valdez was ultimately found not guilty of resisting arrest, but he still can’t shake his fear of officers. Images of black motorists being killed by cops kept flashing through his mind during the altercation. For several minutes, he feared for his life. Now, he routinely experiences severe heart palpitations and panic attacks. Driving can be particularly scary. Traveling to university classes, he passes Prairie View alumna Sandra Bland’s memorial. He thought about Bland often during his arrest and its aftermath.
Valdez’s increasing anxiety points to issues seldom talked about in conversations surrounding police use of force: the psychological scars that result; and in the case of African Americans, who experience some forms of police force at a greater rate than other racial groups, the potential for collective trauma caused by seeing repeated images of brutality.
At ThinkProgress, Alex Zielinski reported the growing perception that race-based police violence is a public health issue and that reframing discourse as one of health could encourage a cultural shift.
HT: Law Officer