Steerpike

But presumably they are not armed / equipped / trained to deal with violent cases 'out in the wild'? Yes, in a hospital or 'ward' setting, perhaps, they have tools and techniques to suppress an unruly patient, but out in the streets, with someone 'running wild'? Not sure how practical that is. MAYBE - just maybe - a cooperative venture would be in order. Using the recent event as an example, obviously the police alone were ill-equipped, training / attitude wise, to deal with the situation but what if both a police team and a mental health team had shown up?

scrubbedexpat099

University of Michigan-Dearborn Apologizes After Announcing Whites Only Zoom Conference https://townhall.com/tipsheet/ellieb...rence-n2575934

Ooops

lansbury

No they are not, but neither are police trained to deal with mental health illnesses. A properly trained mental health professional should be able to deal with a violent patient, regardless of where they are. There is therefore no need for police to attend, that would solve public discontent with the police method of dealing with such incidents.

Pulaski

Unfortunately in the US that plan breaks down when you have a violent armed patient, and weapons, including firearms and knives are so readily available, I think that it has to be assumed, absent specific, reliable information, that all violent patients are armed.

scrubbedexpat091

eh Eugene's CAHOOTS responded to something like 24,000 calls, 150 required police, so no point in sending police on all of the calls, send them when needed.

Each city would need to adapt a program to fit their needs the best.

Vancouver, BC has Car 87 which should be expanded as 1 car available per shift isn't sufficient to meet the city's needs, but it's better than nothing I suppose, there is 1 police officer and 1 mental health nurse (usually a registered psychiatric nurse, but sometimes and RN) the nurse takes the lead but the police officer is there as back up if needed which is a better middle ground, and the police officers assigned to Car 87 have mental health training and other training to deal with mental health calls.

There are solutions that don't require untrained police officers to attend mental health calls, and majority of mental health calls are non-violent in nature.


There are solutions the powers that be just need to work on it.

scrubbedexpat097

Small town Texas will send you an Ambulance, police and fire truck when you call 911 because your husband is having a heart attack or you have a suspicious looking person in your back yard!. Ambulance and Fire Truck are volunteers and police come from the County Sheriff's Office as we only have part time city cops!

lansbury

Which of course is why police are sent, and a lot of the time the person asking for help lies about the situation to get a police response. The assumption you outline is a reasonable one and is why police shot people. But when the informant is lying about the violence to get police there and reiterates those lies when they arrive, it is no wonder mistakes are made.

To resolve the problem only send a mental health professional. If they are as good as they claim they can deescalate the situation, if not then the innocent patient isn't the one getting injured and a police officer doesn't get his life ruined by being hung, drawn and quartered in the press and social media.

lansbury

So there are 24,000 calls that require a medical response. The solutions is train your dispatchers to triage the calls correctly, and have the appropriate response available. That doesn't require defunding the police, it requires funding the correct level of response. If police had received extra funding when all the mental health problems were unloaded onto them, yes redistribute the funding, but no extra money was given in the first place. Want a better service pay for it.

Former Lancastrian

Stop talking sense man this is BE and we as Ex pat Brits know better. The biggest hurdle to overcome is money and what it will cost. You are correct Police forces were never funded for this type of work. Mental health issues have been around for donkeys years so it is not like its new. So who did people call in those days? Now we are a more caring society we simply over time passed these responsibilities onto the Police. Are you really suggesting that these so called experts be called at 2am in the morning to get out of bed and go and deal with these people?

Now with social media and the internet etc etc Governments of all levels are now realizing Shit we better do something about this as there have been a number of people shot to death by the people we send to deal with them. Yeah we forgot to train them and equip them with the tools needed and actually they joined the police to fight crime and arrest the bad guys etc not to become social workers and a host of other things we expect them to do. We could cut the salaries of other Govt workers and allocate those funds towards this problem but a lot of school and hospital managers/administrators won't be happy so let's DEFUND the Police.

Remember this thread is WTF America and we Brits are not used to this happening in the UK or in Canada, Australia etc. Policing in the US is completely different to the type of civilized Policing we are used to seeing and dealing with.

It is all about the money and what it will cost and the Police will continue to respond to these calls and bad things will continue to happen. If your car breaks down on the Interstate then you don't call the Police to fix it so why do you send them to incidents they are not trained to deal with? Oh yeah nobody wants to deal with that shit outside the hours of 9 to 5 and especially not on long weekends or over Xmas.

Oakvillian

but it's OK for a mental health professional to put themselves potentially in harm's way? So long, of course, as "they are as good as they claim." Because, after all,


That's good to know. Where is the funding coming from to provide proper training for these people? As I understand it, in most police acedemies the cadets are paid while attending, whereas mental health nursing school can be cripplingly expensive. Should the public purse fund mental health training, then, for these frontline staff who are going to be out there dealing with unpredictable members of the public? Is their salary also going to be met from public funds? Where's that money coming from? Perhaps - I don't know - some funds that currently go towards, for example, the purchase of armoured vehicles for police forces, might be better diverted towards provision of more community mental health services?

Look, I know you're mostly posting this to be deliberately provocative, but it really doesn't help advance the discussion. Rather the entire crux of the debate is that, for far too long, police officers have not been held accountable when they make errors of judgement. The situation wouldn't have arrived where it is today if (a) the default action of management and unions wasn't to obfuscate and prevaricate if one of their members has made an error, and/or (b) the police officers who are sent into what are certainly difficult and unenviable situations actually had adequate training in the first place to cope with what they find when they get there. If you, and other apologists for police forces, would acknowledge the inadequacies of the status quo, and engage in sensible discussion about what can be done to improve things, rather than utter idiotic "throw mental health nurses to the wolves" comments like this, the deplorable lack of confidence in all levels of police services in the US might just have a chance to improve.

On edit: But this is The Trailer Park. Perhaps this discussion would be better in TIO, where there are already several similar threads. let's not derail this from WTF-ery...

lansbury

Actually I not being provocative. Police officers would not be sent to deal with someone who is physically ill, so why should they have to deal with mental illness. If the people who are trained to deal with it are not being sent, why should we throw untrained police officers to the wolves. By the way I'm not an apologist for the police, I've seen and worked with, and investigated, really bent ones, and by the time I retired you were more likely to be reported by a colleague for something trivial, then a member of the public for something serious.

The real problem is a US police officer's mind set is that their life is at risk every time they interact with the public, it is a real fear. So in the words of Sgt Stan Jablonski at the end of roll call "Let's do it to them, before they do it to us". Little will change until that fear is no longer necessary.

lansbury

Sorry a momentary lapse on my part.

Oakvillian

...in which case I withdraw my allegation - I think we fundamentally agree. People who are trained to deal with members of the public in mental distress should be on point to deal with such issues: the problem is that there aren't enough of them, they don't have the resources they need, and there's no reliable mechanism to get them there if somebody makes a 911 call. It really shouldn't be either/or, it should be both - but that requires both the political will and the money to make it happen.

scrubbedexpat091

Is this supposed to be a conspiracy theory now the fires in California?

zzrmark

Compliments this one rather well, don't you think?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/tech/...ory/index.html

Bloody morons, don't these people have proper daytime jobs to keep themselves out of mischief?