On Thursday, August 18, a 29-year-old deaf man in Charlotte, North Carolina, was shot and killed by a state trooper. This man, Daniel Harris, reportedly was caught speeding but did not hear the sirens of the police car requesting he pull over. After Harris parked and got out of his car, the officer shot him—just a few feet from his home. Now his death has become front-page news around the world, which has trained its eye on the United States following numerous highly publicized deaths of civilians at the hands of law enforcement. And, as Harris's case shows, African-Americans aren’t the only marginalized group that's had fatal run-ins with members of the police. In fact, many deaf and hard-of-hearing people have had deadly encounters with cops, many of which were the result of miscommunication or inability to understand each other.

When I first read about what happened to Harris, it hit me on a personal level. Like Daniel Harris, I use American Sign Language as my native language. I’m a CODA, Child of Deaf Adults, and while I am able to hear, I consider the Deaf community my family and my home. Our community is small, and it is tight-knit. Within a few hours of learning about Harris’s death, I already discovered that my parents had some friends who knew him and his family.

Simply existing as a deaf person in America can be a nerve-wracking experience.

Even as a child, I was constantly aware of the dangers our community faced. It seems like everyone has a story about the time their signs were mistaken for aggression against a child or an unwanted advance on a woman. There are not-infrequent killings of deaf people who are mistakenly believed to be throwing gang signs. In 2010, Seattle police shot and killed John T. Williams, a deaf Native American man who “did not obey” their command to drop what he was holding and put his hands up—because he couldn’t hear them, of course. The officer who killed Williams resigned from the force before he could be fired, but he did not face any criminal charges. In 2014, a deaf man named Edward P. Miller was shot by a Florida sheriff’s deputy after apparently shouting too loudly during an argument with an employee of a towing company; many deaf people are unable to regulate their voices.

Simply existing as a deaf person in America can be a nerve-wracking experience. Even the way that the media has covered Harris’s death shows how much our culture as a whole still doesn’t understand about deaf people. New York Daily News columnist Shaun King, who was one of the first mainstream reporters to pick up Harris’s story, initially called Harris’s family members “hearing impaired.” The Daily Mail, who also used the term hearing impaired, ran the story on its homepage (the internet equivalent of putting up a billboard) but referred to Harris as “deaf and mute.” Both of those terms are considered offensive by the deaf community. (King changed “hearing impaired” to “deaf” the day after his column first ran; “mute” has been removed from the original headline but still appears in the story’s URL.) Although many people think “hearing impaired” sounds more tactful or polite, most people simply use the descriptors “deaf” or “hard of hearing” to describe themselves. “Deaf and mute,” which has echoes of the thankfully-gone “deaf and dumb,” inaccurately conflates not being able to talk with not being able to hear. It may not seem like a huge difference, but the terminology is important. Another critical distinction that not everyone may know: sign languages vary from country to country (for example, American Sign Language and British Sign Language are hugely different and use different alphabets), and while it may seem faster to say that Daniel Harris was “using sign language,” it’s more accurate to say that he was communicating—or attempting to—in ASL.

The very same people who don’t know that Braille and ASL are wildly different languages may be the ones pulling deaf people over for speeding.

Harris’s death, as well as those of the deaf individuals before him, make it abundantly clear that things need to change. It isn’t just about use of the right adjectives—although those are certainly welcome. Many people around the world are uneducated to the point of ignorance about the deaf community, but not all of them have guns and the authority to use them. Law enforcement officials need more training about how to interact with deaf individuals, but they aren’t the only ones. It may seem silly or harmless when yet another person asks me if I know Braille, but these basic misunderstandings hint at much more significant issues beneath. The very same people who don’t know that Braille and ASL are wildly different languages may be the ones pulling deaf people over for speeding.