> "The problem, mental health experts say, is that police should not be the ones to check on suicidal people in the first place."
This is a very uninformed statement. For 911 and/or police calls, there is an extensively well-established (to put it mildly) precedent that the safety of an area must be secured by police before medical personnel are even allowed on scene. There are very good reasons for this-- you don't want to have your primary emergency medical responders taken out by a delusional shooter when other emergencies will be coming up soon that require them, all too often for matters of life & death.
> " 'The moral of this story is don’t call the cops,' Cassandra said. “If you know someone who is having a mental health crisis, call a friend, a trusted neighbor, or someone close by who can safely intervene. Keep the number to a volunteer emergency medical service in your city or neighborhood that can be called directly"
This I agree with. For people familiar with the situation and person/people involved (if they exist), a much more appropriate response can be conducted. There are numerous accounts of these situations leading to the arrest of the individual in crisis, which of course can make things much, much worse for them. I know someone it happened to.
>This is a very uninformed statement. For 911 and/or police calls, there is an extensively well-established (to put it mildly) precedent that the safety of an area must be secured by police before medical personnel are even allowed on scene.
Here in the UK, the police would not routinely attend an ambulance call-out for someone experiencing suicidal thoughts unless there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient might present a credible threat to an ambulance crew. Most British police officers are not permitted to carry firearms; armed officers would only be deployed to a mental health crisis if there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient was armed and posed an immediate threat to life. All armed officers have specialist training, including crisis management and conflict de-escalation.
In 2017, six people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales. Since 1990, the average number of fatal police shootings was 2.46 per year.
Re "uninformed", I think it's more a question of whose interest is at stake. For the health of the suicidal person (which I assume is the angle the mental health experts are coming from) it's very dangerous for the first contact to be armed police because there's a large risk that they'll be shot.
It could also be true that it's safer for the police, bystanders, and even those mental health experts themselves, for the first contact to be armed police.
But that scenario is just another one to add to the US gun control debate. Generally speaking, this stuff hardly ever occurs in other countries. It's a special US thing.
"...there is an extensively well-established (to put it mildly) precedent that the safety of an area must be secured by police before medical personnel are even allowed on scene"
This kind of thinking is uniquely American. On my drive to work I heard a third tier college promoting their "anti-terrorism" major. We are marinating in an ambient paranoia, where every police response is an armed response, and every "first responder" response has a police element to it. That's not good. The expense entailed by American paranoia is part of why our ranking in things that matter to quality of life for people of modest means are mediocre.
That's a very vague anecdote. If someone affected by mental illness is prepared to harm themselves or others in the process, including "mass shooters", then police being prepared to respond in a way that minimizes overall harm may be appropriate. Saying it "played a role" in 25% of a number of killings, could easily include a set of completely unrelated types of situations and mental illnesses. It also doesn't begin to describe how many lives may have been saved in each of those situations, or countless others that didn't involve "killings". Finally, do you have any idea how many deaths, people we can reasonably call "terrorists", are responsible for throughout the world? Including conflicts throughout the middle east with nearly daily bombings? Or are you only counting a few high-profile incidents in the United States?
I would be surprised if terrorists killed more people. That isn't to say that terrorism should be taken lightly because they could get "lucky" and kill lots of people. While a scary issue, due to the proximity of the US (minus local terrorists like the alt-right groups) we are largely shielded from it. Hell drunk drivers kill passengers and those in other vehicles every year far more than terrorism has minus in 2001.
I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
I'm very confident that every one of those police officers lives with that horror every single day. While I completely agree that mental health should be treated better and have more options available; you can never know if the person just wants to harm themselves or take the officer down too.
Yes, I think that's fair. Not just legally speaking, but socially -- the police feel they have to assume anybody they interact with might be armed, and therefore that they need a preemptive armed response, just because of the prevalent gun ownership and gun culture.
> is it fair to say things are this way due to no gun control?
I don't think so. Maryland isn't the most restrictive state when it comes to firearm policy[1], but it's a long distance from "no gun control." I'm also not certain that the chance of armed encounters is terribly high in Bethesda, though I'm uncertain if those crime statistics are recorded or what terms I should use to search for them. To give a comparison, the homicide rate per capita (which I suspect would correlate to some extent with police interaction with armed individuals) in Montgomery County (where Bethesda is) was 1.4/100,000 in 2016 [2]. For Australia at large, the rate is 1.0/100,000 [3], so pretty comparable. These police officers don't seem to operate in an area that is notably more dangerous/violent than Australia.
I do, however, think the issue is cultural. Many police officers in the US seem to perceive that they are in danger 24/7, and this effects how they interact with people on a daily basis. There is a preference for an overwhelming show of force even when it's absolutely uncalled for. This probably contributes to a feedback loop that causes the general population and the police to trust each other less and be more confrontational. And I don't seem to be alone in identifying this as a problem; if you search for problems with police culture in the US, you will find a large body of criticism for the default behavior of police officers.
What you describe as no gun control, which I assume is the 2nd Amendment and in many states is far, far away from no gun control, is specifically set up to allow citizens to defend themselves from the exact type of organized gang the police have set up. The citizens need guns to protect themselves from the police first and foremost. If Americans didn't have guns, we'd be in a police state much worse than anyone can imagine and the police and government would kill and hurt way more people than they currently do. We would not be in a state similar to many European democracies that have strict gun control but in a state of constant persecution. So yes, if you want to put it that way, things are the way they are because of loose gun control laws. But the way things are is a billion times better than what it would be if we were subjected to the tyranny of police and government without the deterrent of guns. In other words, we only exist as a pseudo free society because of guns and removing them will remove any semblance of freedom there is left. Either that or we go for full on gun control where police and law enforcement organizations in general don't carry guns either, but I simply don't see that as a realistic solution given police and government attitudes and inclination to serve themselves at the expense of the people.
"Forget your years of combat experience, shoot first ask questions later, that's our policy."
U.S. Police have more of a free hand to shoot civilians than U.S. Military have to shoot people in war. The U.S. is not a Mad Max war zone... although that's the narrative police seem to want to cultivate because it makes it easier to justify their aggressive tactics and the civilian body count.
Police entering someone’s home are going to have to be prepared even if there was a very low chance of encountering someone with a gun. If you’re going into a house and you don’t know where someone is, pretty much any kind of lethal weapon is going to be a serious risk. If they weren’t risking being shot, they’d be risking being stabbed.
Apart from sending state officials to help the suicidal people to once and for all accomplish their spontaneous wish created by a brain malfunction? Maybe check how other countries do this, where less people get shot by police for whatever reason (in which I don't take sides, the cops are only the last elements in a much longer chain and have to deal with everything that went wrong long before as the "solution of last resort - by force").
I also find it fascinating that responses seen in other comments sound completely reasonable (and are reasonable, given the chosen perspective) when they justify that what happened is exactly what had to happen (cops may be called to dangerous places, and it's a fact that that happens to them all the time). Yet, when looking at it from a different, much farther away perspective from a country where I would expect such police behavior only in very few extreme cases (and only carried out by special police forces, of which there are not many), it does not seem reasonable at all. Again, I understand the cops, I might act just like them if I had to live their life. So something other than police tactics may be a causal reason, because if cops actually are in danger routinely than their measures make sense.
So she got swatted. Let's call it what it is. She got swatted because some assholes decided to call the cops on her. Those assholes' intentions are irrelevant. If you call the cops on someone in America, you should expect the police to show up with guns and possibly shoot that person. That's what they do; that's mostly all they do. As a society, we've decided that the police should show up in many situations where they are not needed, like medical emergencies, and have also decided to give them the right to murder with impunity and without consequences (see qualified immunity). This is what happens when you give a bunch of bullies who barely graduated high school guns and power: complete abuse of that power leading to hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths a year; not to mention all the non-lethal violence they also cause being essentially the largest gang in the nation.
Americans need to learn that the police are not their friends and teach their children that. Police will not save you when there is a real threat. Police will stand back, hidden, away from danger just like they did in so many school shootings. They do not give a fuck about you, your kids, or your safety. They do not give a fuck about your life or anyone's life other than theirs (something they constantly talk about on every single cop show ever, in case you doubt this claim). I truly cannot think of a single positive thing police do in our society or any reason to call them, ever. Not one.
The police are trained to go in first and clear the situation. The problem isn't that you should be afraid to call the police for suicide concerns, it's what happens next.
Our system has completely failed the the suicidal, mentally ill, etc. You have almost no legitimate options for help. I recently heard of a story of someone who was put in jail when they threatened their own life. It's not the police's fault though, they have no options to them.
It is clear in the article that the police were not accompanied by any medical personnel. The police were the only people sent to the scene.
I would argue that you should not be calling the police unless you are literally in fear for your life. Bringing the police, guns drawn, into your home or where ever you may be is only going to increase the chances of a gun being fired.
In my opinion, this article highlights the reality that the police do, in fact, approach everything from a robbery to a reported suicide to a loudly barking dog in exactly the same way: guns drawn.
"A Victorian police officer has told a jury he punched a teenager in the face as hard as he could, in line with his training, after the boy hit him on the forearm."
"Police officers have been accused of using Tasers to inflict pain to gain compliance, a report by the police watchdog says. Concerns are also raised about the use of Tasers on suspects already in custody, in the findings by the Independent Police Complaints Commission."
"IPCC commissioner James Dipple-Johnstone said: "When used in this way it is purely a means of pain compliance. Yet in several of the cases we reviewed, where it was used for the purpose of gaining compliance, it had the opposite effect, stimulating further resistance.""
I see no problem here. She did make posts that appeared to be threatening suicide. Police are typically the first ones who can get to the scene. Their job is to save lives, and this was a legitimate exercise of that job. People are trying to make this political, about gun control, or some conspiracy, and I think that’s wrong.
It sounds like you object to Ms. Manning's publicity seeking, which is a position that I can understand, regardless of whether I agree with it.
Separated from the question of how the incident gained enough attention to appear on Hacker News, how do you feel about the police response in this incident? Or does your distaste for Ms. Manning prevent you from considering it dispassionately?
Among other reasons, there is a stigma against mental illness in the US, which prefers to see it as a moral failing correlated with class or race than a disease like any other, which makes funding treatment for mental illness politically more difficult to justify than bigger prisons and more heavily armed police.
Psychiatric drugs are too profitable, and sanitariums threatens the constant invention and sale of expensive psychiatric drugs.
Although in my opinion nobody should ever be involuntarily committed. They should have to commit a crime, and there should be special prisons for the mentally ill. Otherwise consent of the patient or a legal guardian should be required. It’s sort of a slippery slope to allow people to be declared insane by the state and locked away with little or no physical evidence.
Interesting concept. Murder by cop. Get someone killed by sending the police to their place. Might actually be possible in the current way police deal with these kinds of situations...
[+] [-] slfnflctd|7 years ago|reply
This is a very uninformed statement. For 911 and/or police calls, there is an extensively well-established (to put it mildly) precedent that the safety of an area must be secured by police before medical personnel are even allowed on scene. There are very good reasons for this-- you don't want to have your primary emergency medical responders taken out by a delusional shooter when other emergencies will be coming up soon that require them, all too often for matters of life & death.
> " 'The moral of this story is don’t call the cops,' Cassandra said. “If you know someone who is having a mental health crisis, call a friend, a trusted neighbor, or someone close by who can safely intervene. Keep the number to a volunteer emergency medical service in your city or neighborhood that can be called directly"
This I agree with. For people familiar with the situation and person/people involved (if they exist), a much more appropriate response can be conducted. There are numerous accounts of these situations leading to the arrest of the individual in crisis, which of course can make things much, much worse for them. I know someone it happened to.
[+] [-] jdietrich|7 years ago|reply
Here in the UK, the police would not routinely attend an ambulance call-out for someone experiencing suicidal thoughts unless there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient might present a credible threat to an ambulance crew. Most British police officers are not permitted to carry firearms; armed officers would only be deployed to a mental health crisis if there was specific intelligence to suggest that the patient was armed and posed an immediate threat to life. All armed officers have specialist training, including crisis management and conflict de-escalation.
In 2017, six people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales. Since 1990, the average number of fatal police shootings was 2.46 per year.
Another way is possible.
https://www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-police-custody
[+] [-] iainmerrick|7 years ago|reply
It could also be true that it's safer for the police, bystanders, and even those mental health experts themselves, for the first contact to be armed police.
But that scenario is just another one to add to the US gun control debate. Generally speaking, this stuff hardly ever occurs in other countries. It's a special US thing.
[+] [-] empath75|7 years ago|reply
If your policies and precedent end with innocent people dying, then they need to be changed.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Zigurd|7 years ago|reply
This kind of thinking is uniquely American. On my drive to work I heard a third tier college promoting their "anti-terrorism" major. We are marinating in an ambient paranoia, where every police response is an armed response, and every "first responder" response has a police element to it. That's not good. The expense entailed by American paranoia is part of why our ranking in things that matter to quality of life for people of modest means are mediocre.
[+] [-] codedokode|7 years ago|reply
Can we say that police officers kill more people than terrorists do?
[+] [-] daten|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|7 years ago|reply
In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
[+] [-] influx|7 years ago|reply
It is absurd to leave out the fact that many of these killings were intentionally initiated by suicidal mentally ill people.
[+] [-] RoyTyrell|7 years ago|reply
I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
[+] [-] IanDrake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbjustin|7 years ago|reply
I'm very confident that every one of those police officers lives with that horror every single day. While I completely agree that mental health should be treated better and have more options available; you can never know if the person just wants to harm themselves or take the officer down too.
[+] [-] jaimex2|7 years ago|reply
Every comment seems to miss what seems obvious to me.
Since the chance of armed encounters is high the Police have to respond this way to every scenario or risk getting shot.
[+] [-] iainmerrick|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeff_petersen|7 years ago|reply
I don't think so. Maryland isn't the most restrictive state when it comes to firearm policy[1], but it's a long distance from "no gun control." I'm also not certain that the chance of armed encounters is terribly high in Bethesda, though I'm uncertain if those crime statistics are recorded or what terms I should use to search for them. To give a comparison, the homicide rate per capita (which I suspect would correlate to some extent with police interaction with armed individuals) in Montgomery County (where Bethesda is) was 1.4/100,000 in 2016 [2]. For Australia at large, the rate is 1.0/100,000 [3], so pretty comparable. These police officers don't seem to operate in an area that is notably more dangerous/violent than Australia.
I do, however, think the issue is cultural. Many police officers in the US seem to perceive that they are in danger 24/7, and this effects how they interact with people on a daily basis. There is a preference for an overwhelming show of force even when it's absolutely uncalled for. This probably contributes to a feedback loop that causes the general population and the police to trust each other less and be more confrontational. And I don't seem to be alone in identifying this as a problem; if you search for problems with police culture in the US, you will find a large body of criticism for the default behavior of police officers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland
[2] https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/POL/Resources/Files/MCPD%... (Page 4)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Australia#Murder
[+] [-] mnm1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brockenstein|7 years ago|reply
It's small consolation to all the people killed by police who didn't have a weapon because the police seem to operate in a state of mortal terror.
Try this on for size: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/08/504718239/military-trained-po...
"Forget your years of combat experience, shoot first ask questions later, that's our policy."
U.S. Police have more of a free hand to shoot civilians than U.S. Military have to shoot people in war. The U.S. is not a Mad Max war zone... although that's the narrative police seem to want to cultivate because it makes it easier to justify their aggressive tactics and the civilian body count.
[+] [-] jrs95|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxehmookau|7 years ago|reply
When your country is missing any sort of universal state "help" for your health, then what other option is there?
[+] [-] ItsMe000001|7 years ago|reply
I also find it fascinating that responses seen in other comments sound completely reasonable (and are reasonable, given the chosen perspective) when they justify that what happened is exactly what had to happen (cops may be called to dangerous places, and it's a fact that that happens to them all the time). Yet, when looking at it from a different, much farther away perspective from a country where I would expect such police behavior only in very few extreme cases (and only carried out by special police forces, of which there are not many), it does not seem reasonable at all. Again, I understand the cops, I might act just like them if I had to live their life. So something other than police tactics may be a causal reason, because if cops actually are in danger routinely than their measures make sense.
[+] [-] mnm1|7 years ago|reply
Americans need to learn that the police are not their friends and teach their children that. Police will not save you when there is a real threat. Police will stand back, hidden, away from danger just like they did in so many school shootings. They do not give a fuck about you, your kids, or your safety. They do not give a fuck about your life or anyone's life other than theirs (something they constantly talk about on every single cop show ever, in case you doubt this claim). I truly cannot think of a single positive thing police do in our society or any reason to call them, ever. Not one.
[+] [-] sbjustin|7 years ago|reply
Our system has completely failed the the suicidal, mentally ill, etc. You have almost no legitimate options for help. I recently heard of a story of someone who was put in jail when they threatened their own life. It's not the police's fault though, they have no options to them.
[+] [-] bigiain|7 years ago|reply
Right. The problem, for a disturbingly large section of the community, is that they are afraid to call the cops for _anything_.
[+] [-] cmiles74|7 years ago|reply
I would argue that you should not be calling the police unless you are literally in fear for your life. Bringing the police, guns drawn, into your home or where ever you may be is only going to increase the chances of a gun being fired.
In my opinion, this article highlights the reality that the police do, in fact, approach everything from a robbery to a reported suicide to a loudly barking dog in exactly the same way: guns drawn.
[+] [-] bigiain|7 years ago|reply
Yeah, so "police training". I'm perhaps a little less prepared to attribute purely positive outcomes from that.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-06/victoria-police-off...
"A Victorian police officer has told a jury he punched a teenager in the face as hard as he could, in line with his training, after the boy hit him on the forearm."
and:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/22/ipcc-concern-o...
"Police officers have been accused of using Tasers to inflict pain to gain compliance, a report by the police watchdog says. Concerns are also raised about the use of Tasers on suspects already in custody, in the findings by the Independent Police Complaints Commission."
"IPCC commissioner James Dipple-Johnstone said: "When used in this way it is purely a means of pain compliance. Yet in several of the cases we reviewed, where it was used for the purpose of gaining compliance, it had the opposite effect, stimulating further resistance.""
[+] [-] oliwarner|7 years ago|reply
This isn't indicative of a police state, it's indicative of a state where guns are too readily available to people with mental health issues.
[+] [-] Simulacra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inevitable2|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] stevespang|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] to_bpr|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mcherm|7 years ago|reply
It sounds like you object to Ms. Manning's publicity seeking, which is a position that I can understand, regardless of whether I agree with it.
Separated from the question of how the incident gained enough attention to appear on Hacker News, how do you feel about the police response in this incident? Or does your distaste for Ms. Manning prevent you from considering it dispassionately?
[+] [-] spark3k|7 years ago|reply
You're saying the appropriate action for someone assumed to be likely to harm themselves is a show of deadly force?
Brilliant. Well you have the society you want.
[+] [-] sschueller|7 years ago|reply
One of so many war crimes committed by the united states yet again people are attacking the person who exposed them.
[+] [-] fortythirteen|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] MaupitiBlue|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] krapp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs95|7 years ago|reply
Although in my opinion nobody should ever be involuntarily committed. They should have to commit a crime, and there should be special prisons for the mentally ill. Otherwise consent of the patient or a legal guardian should be required. It’s sort of a slippery slope to allow people to be declared insane by the state and locked away with little or no physical evidence.
[+] [-] milge|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs95|7 years ago|reply