Discussion for article #237445
Given the intersection of mental illness and criminality, and the fact that several of these recent police shootings of unarmed people have involved mental illness, it makes a lot of sense to raise the visibility of mental health issues within policing â both to guard against police suicides and McKinley-style freakouts, and to sensitize cops to mental illness as a cause of erratic or criminal behavior, thereby making them more likely to view the mentally ill young man of color behaving strangely less as a threat than as a sick young man in need of help.
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Corporal Casebolt responded to the pool party after dealing with two different suicide calls earlier that day,
And ? In which case he should have been pulled from attending the pool party ?
Unfortunately , he used the wrong â tactics â on the pool party . NO EXCUSE .
Surely he wasnât the only cop who dealt with those 2 suicide calls. He and his lawyer are just making excuses for his Rambo like behavior, barrel roll and all, since he never expected to be filmed.
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Once again making the point that the entire culture of policing in the US needs to change.
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Training and Good SupervisionâŚ
~OGD~
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Officer"canât wait to shoot a ni**er" was in heaven, he was the man 
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Yes, stress is a problem. Thatâs certainly true. But what is so unusually stressful (for a cop) about a suicide, unless it involved a friend or relative? Were either of the suicides a personal threat to the cop? Iâd think that having to face a criminal making a direct threat to the cop would be far more stressful. Cops are expected to deal with such things as a predictable part of their job. Are cops such wimps, compared to soldiers in a combat zone, who face (and witness) death constantly? What if soldiers broke down like that when one of their buddies got shot, would that be an excuse for them freaking out?
Poor widdle boy. He should have just gone home and cried to his mommy.
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Seriously? I can only hope that watching a man shoot himself in the head would be stressful for ANYONE, whether they knew the person or not.
The article states up front that this isnât an excuse for the behavior, but uses it as a jumping off point for looking at how to help avoid more of this crap in the future. If paying attention to stress/mental health is one of a multitude of small ways that might together keep cops from shooting/beating people, then I suport it wholeheartedly.
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Stress does not account for the way this officer went after black kids and ignored white kids. Stress also does not explain why white officers shoot fleeing black men in the back or shoot a black kid with a BB gun while at the same time politely asking a gun toting white guy to be careful with his weapon.
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Is this the first time people have discovered that being a cop is stressful? Surely a competent P. D. would be doing their best to train for dealing with it. But no amount of training can be adequate for every single case. Training costs money. If not enough is being spent on it, the money should be taken from somewhere else in the P. D. budget, like all the expensive war toys theyâre buying.
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And this is why military and paramilitary organizations have troubling high rates of suicide, domestic violence, substance abuse and so forth.
(Also noting that there is this thing called PTSD, and that it is diagnosed in a whole lot of soldiers who spend tours in combat. And that most soldiers have relatively short combat careers, as opposed to the expectation that police will spend 20-40 years in their jobs.)
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I think any police officer (and probably anyone else) who witnessed a shooting of any kind that results in the death of a person should be required to take the rest of the day off. Itâs not normal to see people getting their heads blown off. It shouldnât be treated as such. We need to move the window on what is considered to be stuff you should just be able to take. The problem with expecting the police to just take it is that police then tend to be drawn from the ranks who can just take stuff like that â which requires a certain ability to dehumanize those around them.
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This is such an appropriate article.
It was easy to jump on the initial case (and rightly so) but only being able to listen to and think about the other side leads to improvement.
Isnât that what we liberals pride ourselves on.
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The entire point of the article is that there is NOT adequate attention paid to these issues. Yes, money SHOULD be moved from other places. And this does not excuse the officerâs behavior at all. Being a racist/jerk/overreacting as*hole is the baseline, but perhaps if there are some safeguards in place, we might end up reducing the number of them that reach for weapons or turn to violence. There are much larger systemic problems that need to change, but if in the mean time we can reduce the likelihood of further harm, to me that seems like a good thing.
Also - in general, everyone deserves good mental health care and supporting a culture where that is acknowledged, particularly among people who get to carry weapons, seems like a good thing.
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Acknowledging that job stress can be a factor in behavior is not just a problem within police culture but in society at large.
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Iâve read both articles that Seth Stoughten has now written about this incident for TPM. I agree with most of his comments. But here is the thing that really jumps out at me: He clearly did a poor job of watching the video and perceiving reality.
In his first article, he wrote that after the officer told the group of girls to leave (not the first time BTW), Dajerria Becton âdid exactly thatâ and that âCorporal Casebolt stopped herâ. How can Stoughten get this so wrong?
Dajerria began walking away, but turned around and began walking back toward the officer, yelling what sounded like âIâm calling my Mamaâ. A tall young man attempted to stop her as she walked back, but she continued.
I donât like the way the officer behaved, but if Dajerria were my daughter I would have to scold her sternly and point out the fact that it is exceedingly foolish, and just plain wrong, to disobey law enforcement. Itâs also wrong, on many levels, to be yelling at them. Thatâs begging to be arrested.
Nor is it presented as an âexcuseâ. Tell me, which is preferable?
a)to punish offenders, or
b)for them to never offend in the first place
?
We are each of us responsible for our own actions. Nobodyâs saying weâre not. But there are contributing factors that we can often fail to recognize, that leave us in an impaired condition that we also fail to recognize. Terrible thing about the brain: The only tool you have to tell when your brainâs not working right is the brain thatâs not working right. You cannot help but have your ability to recognize your impairment impaired - because youâre impaired!
Thus, any systemic changes we can make to either a)make the impairment easier to catch and address, or b)minimize the potential for that impairment to turn into a crisis or a tragedy, we owe ourselves at least the willingness to look at. And that means identifying causes of the impairment, and the factors that contribute to it not being recognized.
Simply shouting âNO EXCUSEâ is like looking at a group of homeless people and shouting âGET A JOBâ - it might let you indulge your sense of self-righteous outrage, but it does absolutely nothing to address the problem itself. Think of it like AIDS - AIDS doesnât kill you, it just makes otherwise manageable infections able to kill you.
Similarly, systemic failures that lead to a cop being placed under severe mental strain prior to feeling obligated to enter a situation that (have you ever been near a public pool?) almost certainly has a lot of screaming and noise in the background, individuals he feels are being difficult, and sudden, unpredictable movements (like the one kid skidding toward the cop as he tried to come to a stop on the grass)? The systemic failures donât put a bikini-clad 14-year-old face down in the grass and kneel on her back or pull a gun on two unarmed boys, but they sure make it easier for the stressed cop to do it.
Not an excuse. Not even close. But a contributing factor, just the same. And we canât address these contributing factors, we cannot even begin to limit them or their effects, until we acknowledge them. Failure to do so because weâre too busy indulging our wounded sense of outrage, 10 days out from the incident?
Shall I shout âno excuseâ, or are you getting the drift here?
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Iâm glad to see Dajerria Bectonâs name being used. So far sheâs been the 14-15 year old with a cop holding her down. I said in an earlier thread that it was the naivete of these children and how to think about police that lead this child and others to act impulsively and provoke this copâs inappropriate behavior. If she and her mom had that talk it likely will not happen again.
She turned around to get her bag, saying she needed to call her mother - that was her way home. Was she âyelling atâ him, or âcalling toâ him? Thatâs entirely in the ear of the listener. Sheâs 14, she needed to call home, and the other cops were reasonable.
Itâs not âfoolishâ of her to think heâd have allowed her to get her bag, and her phone, so she could do what she was told to do - what she was trying to do.
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