Abstract

Excerpted From: Melda Gurakar, Race, Disability, and Police Misconduct: A Discrit Approach to Privacy Law and the Killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey, 124 Columbia Law Review Forum 221 (December 2, 2024) (117 Footnotes) (Full Document)

On March 9, 2024, police officers killed Ryan Gainer, a Black teenager with autism, in his own home after his family called 911 for help. Gainer's family reported that he was experiencing a disability-related behavioral crisis, breaking things at home and hitting his sister, though she was unharmed. The family later called, saying that Gainer had calmed down and help was no longer needed. Still, within seconds of arriving, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's deputies shot and killed Gainer, who was holding a gardening hoe. The police body camera footage shows a deputy immediately firing as Gainer appears to run toward him.

This tragic death parallels another in Illinois just months later, where police fatally shot Sonya Massey, a thirty-six-year-old Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis in her home. Despite her mother's urgent plea to the 911 dispatcher for noncombative officers, police arrived and killed Massey within minutes. After weeks of seeking mental health support, officers shot Massey when she needed help the most.

These cases are not isolated. They reflect the broader, systemic issue of a shoot-first mentality in law enforcement, particularly when dealing with the Black community. But these incidents also highlight a critical, yet often overlooked and unacknowledged, issue: the violation of the privacy rights of disabled individuals of color within their own homes. Scholars frequently tout privacy as a fundamental civil right, yet its protections and benefits are unequally distributed, especially for marginalized groups like disabled people of color. Despite the universal promises of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the physical and decisional privacy of disabled individuals of color is too often breached by those meant to protect them.

This Comment advocates for an intersectional approach to privacy law, grounded in Critical Disability Studies (DisCrit), to highlight and address the compounded physical privacy harms disabled people of color face during police interactions. By applying DisCrit, this Comment reveals how the intersections of race and disability lead to physical and decisional privacy violations routinely overlooked within the traditional legal framework. The central thesis of this Comment is that the current privacy law framework in the United States fails to protect the rights of marginalized individuals, especially racial minorities and disabled people. Through a DisCrit lens, this Comment demonstrates that these groups experience significant breaches of their privacy rights with limited avenues for recourse. Consequently, this Comment calls for urgent reform of privacy law to explicitly account for the intersections of race and disability, ultimately proposing an abolitionist approach to reshape the privacy law framework.

Part I underscores the need to integrate a DisCrit perspective into privacy law, arguing that the current framework inadequately protects racial minorities and disabled people. This Part begins with an overview of privacy law, then examines its shortcomings through two key lenses: an evidentiary lens, which exposes pervasive privacy violations against disabled Black and Brown people, and a theoretical lens, which critiques the ableist and racist foundations of privacy law. The Part concludes by introducing DisCrit as a critical framework for reimagining privacy law to ensure more inclusive protections. Part II applies DisCrit to two case studies--the recent killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey--surfacing how privacy law in the United States systematically fails to protect the privacy rights of individuals who are disabled, racial minorities, or both, and argues that these two killings were not mere mistakes by law enforcement but are indicative of a privacy law framework that inherently excludes disabled people of color. Lastly, Part III argues for a privacy law regime that explicitly accounts for the intersections of race and disability, advocating for the systemic upheaval of the current privacy law framework and proposing an abolitionist approach to comprehensive reform.

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This Comment has argued that privacy violations against disabled people of color are not anomalies arising from insufficient training or the misconduct of a small number of officers. By applying DisCrit, this Comment shows that these violations are systemic, embedded within an ableist and racist privacy regime that inherently devalues the privacy of marginalized individuals. By exposing the deep-rooted intersections of race and disability, DisCrit reveals that the killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey embody fundamental flaws in the current privacy regime.

The analysis presented in this Comment strengthens the call for the abolition of the existing privacy law regime, urging for comprehensive reform. Only by dismantling the current system's ableist and racist underpinnings can we envision a future privacy regime that genuinely protects individuals like Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey. The path forward requires not merely reform but a radical reimagining of privacy law--one that is abolitionist and that centers the experiences of disabled people of color and ensures their privacy rights are recognized and upheld.

J.D. Candidate 2025, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.