Why Police Shouldn’t Transport People Seeking Mental Health Treatment

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From The News & Observer: “Action is urgently needed to respond to our neighbors in mental health crisis in a manner that promotes recovery and integration over entanglement with law enforcement and institutionalization. To prevent senseless deaths and untold human suffering, and to obtain better mental health outcomes, the local management entities/managed care organizations must make alternate transportation arrangements.

We must also make critically necessary investments in local, community-based mental health services that focus on preventative care, along with a comprehensive response system – including immediate access to crisis services – to avoid unnecessary, expensive inpatient care and involvement with police.

We must implement these essential steps to end the damaging pattern and practice of criminalizing people with mental health disabilities rather than providing them the treatment and care they deserve.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. That headline makes no sense. If people were “seeking” confinement in a mental hospital prisons they would line up at the door voluntarily and they wouldn’t need transport cage vans at all.

    Why do they always have to mislead like that ?

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  2. This article is giving the issue a certain spin. The two dead women can’t speak for themselves so the people who would be speaking for them put this together. What we’ve got is another lame piece of “mental health” movement propaganda pushing an agenda. They’re still out to hide the facts of the matter, that is, that what we’ve got here are not medical patients but prisoners, in many instances, unwilling prisoners.

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    • It’s worse than that, Frank. I clearly remember reading several articles about this sad incident when it happened. Both women were truly “voluntary” patients, and NOT in “crisis”, simply needing some hospital-setting “time out”. They found themselves suddenly MADE into “involuntary patients”, and just as suddenly transported. There was NO urgent need to transport them at the time. And, the *type* of secure Sheriff’s prisoner transport van used virtually guaranteed their deaths. These deaths didn’t have to happen, and shouldn’t have. At least one of the women’s deaths left 3 young children motherless…. The ONLY consolation will be a hopefully 6- or 7-figure lawsuit payout in a year or 2….

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  3. Of course if any one of us recklessly drove through high water and drowned some people we would immediately be charged a crime like criminally negligent homicide.

    But of course always different rules for them, they get a paid vacation then as usual get away with murder. Just watch. Typical low IQ authoriatians, they don’t even think the laws of physics apply to them and think vans are a match for running water.

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