This goes both ways. When the cops have a video, they should not release it immediately, not until everyone who may have witnessed the events gives testimony.
Witnesses lie all the time, especially if they have a relationship to the victim, either through family ties or perceived community ties. It is no surprise at all when witnesses lie. Some witnesses never even see the events in question. Some people default to the position that the cops are lying. Maybe, maybe not. But âwitnessesâ are no more reliable, and arguably less reliable.
Sorry, but you canât just gloss over âbesides the gunsâ. Guns are the primary reason why police encounters have become so dangerous. The police have a reasonable expectation that during the course of the day, they will encounter someone who is armed. This ups the ante tremendously.
Why not make them mental health providers? Somebody has to do it. The Churches wonât. They are too busy counting money and buying Biz Jets for Jesus. Ronald Reagan shut down most mental health facilities and we donât fund those that remain.
I live in Palm Beach,area, the community Donald Trump called the richest in the nation, and we have mentally ill people sleeping on benches down by the inner coastal. They arenât encountering nurses or orderlies when they are rousted every morning. Nor are they interacting with mental health professionals when they asked to move along in front of the Breakers.
What we really shouldnât be doing is having the police patrolling the streets in armored personnel carriers like the Army.
The fingers of African-Americans are dangerous weapons for cops. If youâre Black and have fingers do not point them.
Right, with audio to match.
The guns always work, why not the cameras?
Not just the mentally ill but the mentally ill have probably got about the same odds as a black man when dealing with the neo-trigger happy cops.
This dude was aiming a finger at them.
His sister called for help and they went into the standard action-Jackson death as only option uni-mode.
I always wonder why the cops just have to get right up on people then claim that they were in a do or die situation.
When they crowd people, then they make every movement seem more like an attack.
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And they shouldnât be. But they are because thatâs what happens when state legislators look at mental health care as a piggy bank to be raided every time budgets get tight. Which they do. Every single time. And then they never put the money back but, instead, use the new reduced budget as the baseline from which funding gets cut next time.
And they do that because they know the mentally ill donât vote, their families are too busy managing their mentally ill relative, too full of despair and just too focused on making it through the day to create a meaningful advocacy group with real political clout. And thus theres no political price to pay for the cuts, as long as we can turn untrained cops loose on the ones who make nuisances of themselves or otherwise hurt the delicate sensibilities of taxpayers by being conspicuously visible.
No, cops donât want to do it. And yet, have you ever, ever, ever heard of a police chief, a police commissioner or a police union official calling for an increase in mental health care funding?
Oh, bull. Violent crime is down, way, way down from its peak in the 1990s. Police killed in the line of duty has been on a thirty year decline. And yet, police training, police doctrine and police attitudes are based on the way things were, and, indeed, on a perception of the world thatâs more like the original Robocop movie than anything the overwhelming majority of them will ever see.
There are bad precincts and areas where more caution (though not necessarily more aggression) is due and warranted. Training and treating every single cop as if their beat was in that precinct is madness that leads to madness.
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âWhy not make them mental health providers?ââŚIn general, I donât believe that the police possess the intellect to be good at it. Iâm sure you can do a lot to make them more sensitive to the issue. I just think that it takes a higher level of intellect than they generally possess. Just my opinion.
Itâs not like they are doing, full spectrum healthcare. If they encounter an ill patient/person on the street, it lasts what, 15 minutes or a half hour. That isnât the nation or their district asking them to be âhealthcareâ professionals.
Lack of mental training or healthcare expertise is not the green light to shoot with deadly intentions. This in fact, is lack of training.
It isnât that hard to understand, donât kill first. We existed that way for many, many years.
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How condescending of you.
I might have been a little harsh. Police officers trained to administer mental health first aid might be able to soothe situations without resorting to violence. Nobody is asking that every policeman be a trained psychiatrist or even psychologist. They need to know how to deal with mental issues because in real life they are called on to deal with mental health issues every time they venture out of the police station
Condescending?..Yeah. Thatâs me. I actually donât disagree with you that the police should be better trained in dealing with the mentally ill, and all sorts of other volatile situations. But I donât think that the police can compensate for a broken mental health care system. In a perfect world, what I believe is that police should actually be âprofessionalsâ. They are often referred to as âprofessionalsâ, but that is erroneous. The police should be required to complete a rigorous multi-year curriculum, and they should then be licensed and insured to perform the job. Of course, you would have to pay them a professionalâs salary, and that is never going to happen.
My daughter-in-law is a math teacher with a Masters. I have to agree, paying a public employee a professional salary is never going to happen.