Procedural neuronormativity: police procedure and the limits of disability recognition

Police violence against disabled people is often framed as a problem of officer recognition: officers fail to identify disability and therefore need better training. This Current Issues article argues that this frame leaves a deeper procedural problem intact. It advances the concept of procedural neuronormativity: the encoding of neurotypical compliance—rapid verbal response, controlled movement, regulated affect, and legible submission—into police use-of-force routines as the operational definition of safety. Using the killing of Ryan Gainer, a fifteen-year-old Black autistic teenager, as its point of departure, the article argues that police procedure can convert disabled distress into non-compliance, non-compliance into threat, and threat into justification for force. Disability studies has the analytic tools to name this mechanism, but doing so requires shifting attention from officer recognition to the procedural scripts through which disabled and racialized bodies are made dangerous.