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Is Sitting While Autistic a Crime?
Law-enforcement officials often misinterpret the language and behavior of people on the autism spectrum, with serious consequences. One activist hopes to change that.

Newsweek
by Claudia Kalb
July 08, 2010

In late May, Clifford Grevemberg had a traumatic encounter with the police. Grevemberg, 18, was standing outside the Rock House Bar and Grill in Tybee Island, Ga., waiting for his brother to pick up some cheeseburgers when he was approached by officers, Tasered, and arrested for disorderly conduct. A police-department report posted by the Savannah Morning News says Grevemberg was “staggering back and forth and appeared to be either intoxicated or on something.” By the time his brother came out of the restaurant, Grevemberg was handcuffed and bleeding with a broken tooth. Only then did police receive the critical information they’d been missing: Clifford Grevemberg is autistic.

Stafford County woman confronts issues of race, autism after son's arrest
By Theresa Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 11, 2010

This much is not debated: 18-year-old Reginald Cornelius Latson was sitting outside a library in Stafford County, waiting for it to open. To someone, he looked suspicious.

The confrontation with police that followed probably would not have attracted much notice if the teen's mother, Lisa Alexander, hadn't launched an Internet campaign linking her son's arrest to two social flash points: autism and racial profiling.

"What she has done has absolutely blown my mind," said Mark Bell, a civil rights consultant in Atlanta who has seen other parents stand up for their kids, but "I have not seen one person with the tenacity that she has."

By tenacity, he means Alexander's campaign for attention to her son's case. The effort has spread to Facebook, Twitter and an online petition that has collected more than 1,500 signatures. Some supporters are parents of autistic children like Latson, who was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome in eighth grade, and others are African Americans drawn to the story of a black teenager who was arrested after an encounter with a police officer in a majority-white county.

Together, Alexander says, the two groups are doing what she couldn't have done alone: They've turned a case into a cause.

"I'm not a helpless person and so I have to do what I have to do to save my son's life," said Alexander, a defense contractor who served in the military for 11 years. "I'm so afraid he's going to be damaged beyond repair." story continues at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/10/AR2010071002633.html