According to an analysis by the Washington Post, police, on average, “shot and killed someone who was in mental crisis every 36 hours in the first six months of this year.” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum called it “a national crisis.” “We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change.”
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It’s not so much of a problem that police kills someone black or “mentally ill” etc. The problem is that police kills period. Look at police shootings in US vs other developed countries.
Training is good and fine, body cameras are an ok idea but in the end of the day if you can kill people for no good reason and get away with it nothing will change.-
Right you are. Certain groups get shot more often because they are more vulnerable and easy to target, but the real problem is an almost total lack of accountability. Police in England have to make a special request to sign out a firearm. They shoot almost no one – like one or two a year or less – and yet have a much lower violent crime rate than the USA. Why can’t we do that?
—- Steve
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There’s one more factor to consider: the amount of guns per capita. While it’s hard to absolve the police from the responsibility for the abuses we now all can see on tape one can’t ignore the general climate of “everyone can be armed and dangerous”. This is also something that does not exist in other countries. Police there usually don’t expect every person on the street to be bearing arms. Add to that all the other problems and you have an explosive mix that kills hundreds of people.
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There are no mentally ill, except those with dementia etc. There are people with serious life problems who are enraged, terrified, confused, delusional, and subject to all sorts of unpredictable environmental stress.
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Those with dementia suffer from neurological illness not mental illness.
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keith vidal
http://www.google.com/search?q=keith+vidal
Like a news blackout on that one. Try it . I can’t find the outcome.
Then there is this ,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/18/us/dallas-police-fatal-shooting-mentally-ill-man-video/
Two Dallas police officers have been cleared by a grand jury after fatally shooting a mentally ill man holding a screwdriver. http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Grand-Jury-Clears-Dallas-Officers-in-Fatal-Shooting-of-Mentally-Ill-Man-Armed-With-a-Screwdriver-301107521.html
How about this one ,
Man Threatens Suicide, Police Kill Him
Justin Way was in bed with a knife. His girlfriend called a non-emergency number to try to get him into a hospital. Minutes later, cops shot him dead.On May 11, Justin Way was drinking and threatening to hurt himself. His father, George Way, said his son was a recovering alcoholic and had been alcohol-free for five weeks.
“He just lost his job, and he had a setback,” he said.
Way’s live-in girlfriend, Kaitlyn Christine Lyons, said she’d caught Justin drinking a bottle of vodka, which she took away from him to pour out. She said he was drunk, lying in their bed with a large knife, saying he would hurt himself with it. She called a non-emergency number in an attempt to get her boyfriend to a local St. Augustine, Florida, hospital for help—and told them she did not feel threatened.
My brother has been Baker Acted three times because he was threatening to hurt himself so I figured that would happen with Justin,” said Lyons.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/28/man-calls-suicide-line-police-kill-him.html
30 UK Police vs man armed with machete in the street. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw
In America that man would very likely be dead.
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How could this be? Never in our history have more people been diagnosed with a “mental disorder” and prescribed psychotropic drugs. The drugs are given out like PEZ, diagnoses are available in under an hour and you know ‘Brave New Brain’ has been in print for over ten years. Anti-stigma campaigns are all the rage, along with white tee-shirts sporting black block print. I ask again, how could this be?
Are we ready for a paradigm shift yet?
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