Friday, September 13, 2019

Needless shooting shows why cops shouldn't be first response to mental health calls

In the wake of the City of Austin funding an alternative approach to mental-health first response featuring mental-health clinicians taking the lead instead of cops, video has emerged from Corpus Christi of a police officer gunning down a mentally ill man wielding a metal pipe at point blank range. The victim didn't die, thankfully, but this was unnecessary:

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

In rural areas it takes long enough as it is for police or deputies to respond to a call. Can you imagine what the response time will be if country folk have to wait on some crisis intervention specialist to respond?

Steph said...

You have got to be kidding. So if your mentally ill family member was doing the same thing, you'd want them gunned down???

Gunny Thompson said...

Anon 08.13: Let me get this right, if your comments were not intended as tongue-in-cheek,are you alleging that county administrators are incapable of effective management of their resources?? If that is the case, what constructive solutions would you suggest to resolve those conditions?? Just asking??

Oil Lease said...

I am rural. I don't fear anything but a badge and the thing wearing it.

A friend was being chased by his mentally ill GF with a 5.5" Buck knife. I could have killed her....legally since her attention was turned to me.

It was easy for a sane person to make the choice to not kill someone who would kill you. I punched her and knocked her down and took the knife. There is an average of 3.5 people killed by cops everyday.

I've seen countless outright murders by them on people who hadn't even committed a crime but they took offense to. They have become a murderous lot.

I was looking at a history of psychedelics yesterday starting more than 6000 years ago. Everyone involved in making same without govt. approval(I forgot where it said you could control what people imbibed in the Constitution). The incarceration rates became horrendous AFTER 2000. The entire country changed then and not for the better. I can't count the times I've heard one say "The law is what I say it is".

There's one thing that's hard to stomach though, that flat-out murders of innocent people have the cops walk away and never face charges. They want people to believe their job is really dangerous but unlike the work I do, trucking, they're not even in the top ten.

BarkGrowlBite said...

Oil Lease, the next time you are being robbed, beaten or threatened with a deadly weapon, please do not call for those murderous cops ... call for a social worker to come and rescue your worthless ass.

Anonymous said...

Or, you know, cops could stop killing so many people. But your right BGB if they wont knock it off he better not call them... hes liable to get shot.

Anonymous said...

I have said this before...bark would defend dirty cops even if they were caught on camera throwing a baby into a wood chipper

BarkGrowlBite said...

Anon 7:51, you don't know me. I do not defend dirty cops. The problem with you and many other followers of Grits is that you consider all cops to be dirty.

I've got news for you. There are more than 800,000 law enforcement officers in the US. I doubt that more than five percent of them are dirty. Those that are dirty deserve to be punished by the law. The overwhelming number of police shootings are justified, even the controversial ones. Daily media reports obviously leave your clueless mind believing all that cops do is shoot people. The majority of those 800,000 LEOs have probably never drawn their guns while on duty.

When Oil Lease says, "I've seen countless outright murders by them on people who hadn't even committed a crime but they took offense to. They have become a murderous lot," you know he is telling a damn lie! Anyone who believes Oil Lease must still believe in the Tooth Fairy.

The trouble with Grits for Breakfast is that it attracts police haters like fly paper attracts flies. And those police haters stick to Grits like those flies stick to fly paper.

bob walsh said...

I would like to point out that, strictly speaking a cop can ALWAYS decide to not shoot. That decision could easily result in other people, including the cop, being seriously injured or killed but you can always just let what is happening keep happening. That being said we pay cops to act on our behalf and to make reasonable judgments, often with very little time or information in situations where if they don't act bad things can also happen. There is no legal or moral requirement that those decisions always be right, given that they will be reviewed in minute detail by people who were not there at the time, who are sitting in a comfortable environment under relatively stress-free conditions second-guessing EVERY action. The notion that almost all cops are out there looking to kill somebody out of boredom is absurd. In addition, a mentally ill or intoxication person can kill you just as dead as somebody who is not impaired. Pretending otherwise is ignoring the situation by trying to wish it away.

Anonymous said...

Bob Walsh..yet another clueless person that would defend a cop caught on video throwing a baby into a wood chipper

Anonymous said...

BarkGrowlBite, I doubt even close to 5% of cops nationally qualify as dirty but if you include those who are inept, or lazy, or unsuited for the role, the numbers would jump. From past discussions on this website where Grits or someone would link FBI stats, I've learned that of those 3.5 deaths per day mentioned by self-professed criminologist/trucker Oil Lease, most of those deaths were legally justified under existing laws because they involve someone using a weapon trying to hurt another person, someone committing a felony, or someone posing a threat to another that refuses to obey the cop's orders. In almost all cases, the cop's use of force is therefore legally justified even if morally questionable.

It doesn't make one a cop hater to question whether there might be better, less deadly, ways for cops to handle at least some of these encounters. Bypassing the legality of the specific deaths, why not adopt a best-practices or at least a better-practices approach such as sending a social worker to deal with those who are likely mentally ill? Will they be as successful as crime fighting truckers at disarming armed lunatics? Maybe not but then, truckers aren't generally looked at as role models by the bulk of the population in the first place, especially those in the oil industry who are more likely to have lengthy criminal records than the rest of us, and such a move would open the doors for a different kind of social welfare agent than we've seen in the past.

Given the narrative here, I'm sure a great many social workers would jump at the chance to disarm a metal pipe wielding person using all the skills they developed in college, just let the cops stand by for the times it doesn't work as planned. But seriously, developing a better way to handle such events should be a priority even if it will only help a small percentage of the time. I don't expect cops to display foolish movie grade heroics like the trucker/keyboard warrior above but expecting cops to take more time to figure out a better way doesn't seem too far fetched, does it?

Anonymous said...

You are wasting your time anonymous 7:34. You can't reform Nazis and bark and his buddy have been goose stepping long before most of us were born.

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