[ID: a thread of 13 tweets by "Gabi” (@/golemgabi) that reads:
It’s already been said, but the emergency ‘plan’ for disabled kids is to let us die. Not even in active shooter scenarios, but also fires. My most poignant example happened when I was in the AAPD intern class of 2019 and campus cops left us for an hour during a 3am fire alarm 🧵
The fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, and 20 disabled kids are on the 3rd floor. We all work together to evacuate, and a group of us with mobility issues go to the stair landing. That’s the plan always — go to the hopefully fire insulated stairway and wait for help
Second part of the plan: call the cops and report your location. We do, and the operator is extremely rude to us, telling us to just walk down the stairs. My friend takes the phone and has to yell “I’m in a wheelchair and can’t just walk down.” The operator hangs up on us.
30 mins pass, we see about 600 kids evacuate past us and then it’s eerily quiet (except the ongoing alarm of course). We still don’t know if it’s a real fire or not, and at this point begin making plans to help each other down (literally by butt scooting step by step)
The first cop shows just as my friend is about to abandon her wheelchair, 45 mins in. Doesn’t make eye contact with us, says into his walkie talkie “There’s a group of cripples stuck on the 3rd floor landing.” Then he WALKS AWAY down the stairs and leaves us there as we yell.
This is always the point that sticks with me. The advice is stay in place and the cops will evacuate you — but they are incompetent, underprepared, and ableist. He left us in what we thought was a burning building and couldn’t even be bothered to look in our eyes.
We panic after he leaves. Call the operator again, who asks “how do you expect one cop to evacuate 5 kids and one wheelchair” and hangs up again. Panic some more. I get the strength to leave the insulated stairway and try to determine if this is a false alarm or not.
Once in the hallway I find a cop who yells at me for not evacuating. I say that me and 5 other disabled kids have been in the stairs for over an hour, and she is surprised. This cop confirms it’s a false alarm, and says we can go back to our rooms.
So after ~2 hours of terror inside the stairs, we get to go back to our rooms and huddle (while the fire alarm is still blaring). Can’t emphasize enough that this is Sensory Hell for several of us, causing physical pain for me and I’m sure others. This continues for 30-45 mins.
A higher up cop comes to talk to us once the alarm is over — says he will file a report on the guy who left us in the stairs (spoiler alert: he did not). We also file a complaint (spoiler alert: it was ‘lost in the system’). The whole barrel is rotten.
This happened at @/GWtweets. I spent the next year of my life as a student advocating for emergency safety with disabled kids in mind. The higher ups I met with (cops, deans, VPs) had never even heard of a stair evacuation chair before I came knocking. They still don’t have them.
The cop who called us cripples and left us to die to my knowledge still works there and was never disciplined. After I followed up several times I learned that due to a “tech issue,” campus PD lost all complaints from before Fall 2019.
Not sure how to end this thread. This event was extremely traumatizing, even though there was never a real fire, because it showed so clearly that the ‘safety plans’ are shit and the cops clear disregard for the lives of disabled people.
We keep each other safe.
