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".
Television and in some movies. don't under estimate the influence that has on some who want to harm themselves but lack the conviction to do themselves in without harming others.
The idea that cops are trigger happy is ignorant, if that were even remotely true the number of shootings and deaths by cop would be so high as to not warrant news stories. As in, it would be common place. Fortunately we are far from it being commonplace that shootings and even weapon discharges by cops are news worthy.
Yes we have bad cops just like we have bad actors in many other occupations. The difference is that we don't put people in other occupations in harms way on a day to day basis. that isn't to say being a cop is the most hazardous job you can have, work place deaths are higher for many other fields. We also cannot say that cops cause an unreasonable number of deaths by their actions, if anything we need to account for all the deaths they prevent by their training and mere presence.
Okay, I'm all for trying to reduce how often police preemptively escalate by entering homes with guns drawn, but cops shouldn't be blamed for trying to save their own lives.
Suicide by cop often involves drawing a gun on said cop. You don't need to be trigger happy or unaccountable to shoot someone who's pretending to try to shoot you.
The steady militarization of police forces, a general acceptance / normalization of gun usage in the United States, an internal culture that prioritizes solidarity over accountability, a complete and utter failure to train officers in de-escalation or crisis management, and the blanket use of police as front-line responders for situations that would better be handled by medical / social work crews?
I know four police officers. One works a desk job now, one just moved to work a crime free affluent New England town.
As for the other two on the street. In the last two years, one had a shotgun pointed at his face from three feet away by an angry drunk man carrying two guns and four hundred rounds of ammo. (Nobody ended up hurt.)
The other spent a month in the hospital after being shot, two other officers with him were also shot and wounded, and a fourth officer there killed.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t officers or even entire departments that are too trigger happy, but that many places in the US fundamentaly require armed officers ready to shoot someone to stay alive.
The typical playbook for Suicide by Cop involves involves attempting a deadly attack on a police officer. In a world with perfect police in which police officers only used deadly force when threatened with deadly force, this would still result the attacker being shot.
So while there are real problems with policing in America, I don’t see the popularity of suicide by cop being the result of trigger happy police shooting innocent people.
> I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
I don't think this is really relevant, because "suicide by cop" is a great reason why police should not take the lead in responding to suicide threats. You never hear about "suicide by paramedic" or "suicide by social worker."
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.
Your description of the facts in the article is sloppy. Law enforcement seized more than burglars stole. Throw in other theft crimes and crime wins.
And if you take out the Madoff case (a $1.7 billion case of law enforcement run amuck if there ever was one...), seizures didn't even top out burglaries.
Of course now someone can shrilly denounce me for defending asset forfeiture, but that isn't my point.
> "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.
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.
I believe the police would be the ones to bust a door and check on someone thought to be in immediate danger over here in the UK, too. The difference being that they wouldn't be going in guns drawn as if they were conducting a military raid.
Yeah, that sounds right. The crucial difference is that police encounters in the UK hardly ever result in death.
Edit to add: it's not just that the police are much less likely to shoot someone, but that people know the police won't shoot them and therefore they're less likely to react in stupid and/or dangerous ways.
>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.
In Australia a large amount of police work is conducting welfare checks - suicide threats, people not showing up for work for a few days, distant family concerned about an elderly relative, health support workers who are concerned their mentally ill patient hasn't taken their medication, people who show erratic behaviour at a bank or government welfare office after talking to staff.
Especially in country areas where they are limited Ambulance/Paramedic resources, police are more often than not the ones conducting checks and will be first responders.
If paramedics are concerned about safety on a particular job (weapons mentioned on call, previous history of violence), they will wait for police to make the area safe before attending to a patient.
If paramedics are unable to gain entry to a property, police are required to be the ones to force entry.
Also if paramedics require to take someone involuntarily to hospital for mental health evaluation they require police presence to "arrest" someone under the Mental Health Act to allow them to be taken against their will due to health concerns.
Due to large amounts of mental health work with police, on most shifts police will have a specialised unit (car) on duty in each area which has a combination of a police officer and specialist mental health worker / psychologist. They focus on any jobs relating to mentally ill and can conduct assessments without having to wait for an ambulance to be available.
There are a lot more police on shift than ambulances, and ambulances are often tied up for hours at hospitals doing transfers of patients, so police can and should be the ones dealing with welfare of the general public. They have a very close relationship with health workers.
Police will NEVER undertake a welfare check with guns drawn, even if forcing entry to a property. When arresting someone under the Mental Health Act police will not draw their guns. Guns are a last resort only.
> Here in the UK, the police would not routinely attend an ambulance call-out for someone experiencing suicidal thoughts unless there was specific intelligence
This is incorrect. UK police routinely attend for people who are mentally ill because they've been called there by family or neighbours.
Section 135 and 136 of the mental health act (and the equivalent in Scotland) are police powers to detain someone and take them to a place of safety.
But this just strengthens your point: despite this routine use of police for people in mental distress we still manage to avoid killing many people, and when it happens we spend considerable effort to change procedures and policy to stop it happening again. (See the reduction in prone restraint for one example).
"...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.
Oh, I couldn't agree more. The whole culture of police behavior in the U.S. would benefit from a dramatic overhaul, especially with regard to mental health issues. I'm only describing how the system currently operates, and some arguments I've heard from first responders about why it's done this way. I never realized until now that all countries don't operate this way, it's food for thought.
Someone close to me had armed police bust into their house and haul them off in handcuffs because they confessed to violent thoughts in an email to a fellow support group member whose facilitator freaked out over it. I think they were put on a psych hold and handcuffed to a hospital bed. It absolutely devastated them and permanently damaged much of their progress.
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.
Like so many other situations, I think this can be cast as a Prisoner's Dilemma. :)
All else being equal, whether or not other people have guns, you'll be safer if you have a gun. But that apparently rational argument leads to everybody having guns, which is much less safe for everybody.
But there's an extra twist -- you are actually not safer with a gun all else being equal, because you or your loved ones could be killed by that gun through accident, suicide, etc.
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.
"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.""
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.
> Police entered the home a potentially highly mentally ill, dishonorably discharged, felon veteran, once convicted of violating the Espionage Act, after she publicly threatened to commit suicide. They had their weapons drawn, because it was unknown if she was armed.
It's literally the perfect way to do this. The large number of people account for each other. And since police murders in the US are so common, people would glaze right over the headline. An assassination with no witnesses would stir up more questions.
What else would you call it? If someone calls a SWAT team to an address to scare someone, and the police enter and kill the person even if they are unarmed and innocent, what else it if not murder?
First, when one human kills another human, it's either a legally justified killing or murder. The majority of policy killings are justified and not murder. So that's "what else" anyone who understand the law and the English language would call it...unless you're just trying to stir things up with rhetoric. In that case you'd just use whatever word generates the most outrage ignoring the fact that you've used the word wrong.
As to your second question, I would call that murder. I would absolutely blame the person who called in the swatting, and depending on what happened I would blame the police.
Every police shooting has different circumstances. You can't lump them into one bucket and pass judgement.
There are very few instances of police murdering someone. I never claimed it doesn't happen, but "And since police murders in the US are so common" is just outright incorrect.
Police murdering Chelsea Manning would raise lots of suspicions considering her history. A lot of police are conservative, and a lot of conservatives are mad the last president commuted her sentence.
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...
It's not a "concept" for many years now. And not "might be possible". It's known as swatting and people have been killed already: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting
Why do we let the insane roam free? Perhaps if the insane were properly secured, they wouldn’t be getting shot by the police when they have an episode?
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.
You get locked up. If, sometime in the future, a cure for schizophrenia is developed, out you go. But otherwise, you’re just a ticking timebomb until that day where you go off the meds and explode.
No, what the parent is getting at is, you should say "I get locked up." You personally, whether you think you're schizophrenic or not. Are you happy with this situation? If you think you're sane, how do you prove it and how do you get out?
This isn't an abstract question. Locking healthy people up in asylums is something that has happened many times in history.
I can't tell if you're a troll or you just show an utter lack of empathy. Which ironically is a symptom of sociopathy and would warrant a lockup according to your views.
> But otherwise, you’re just a ticking timebomb until that day where you go off the meds and explode.
You're linking mental illness to violence, but we know that's wrong. Mental ill health does not predict violent behaviour.
Violence is common. Mental illness is common. Some violent people also happen to have mental illness, but there's little evidence that mental illness causes violence, and if it does it's in a small number of people.
Detention on psychiatric grounds was a widespread repression tactic in the Soviet Union and continues to be used in "democratic" Russia. To prevent such abuses, any deprivation of liberty must be justified by a clear and immediate threat to life and subject to stringent safeguards and oversight.
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.
Being insane should be stigmatized. It causes tremendous negative effects for the rest of society. There is no cure for mental illness. Instead, we medicate and bide our time until they decide to go off their and disrupt life for the rest of us.
Please stop trolling with this. And if you're honestly not trolling, it would be good to read up a little on mental illness.
Stigma is a useless tool for solving problems. Dangerously mentally ill people may pose a risk to others, but any caring society should focus on managing that risk and making sure that people receive appropriate safeguarding and treatment. An attitude of "mental illness is a personal failing" helps literally nobody.
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.
Except that in UK if someone calls the police to go and check on someone, they won't even have a gun on them. They will knock, enter and leave, without having a gun drawn or even on their person. They will have a baton or a taser, but not a gun. The only situation when a gun would be released for use is if the caller identified the situation as dangerous. But a "wellness" check on someone? Absolutely not.
This is a good point. I think it’s difficult to argue that gun control doesn’t save lives in these situations or even overall. But then your options for armed resistance against the state are quite limited, which is the entire purpose of the second amendment anyways. It literally has nothing to do with hunting or sport.
>But then your options for armed resistance against the state are quite limited, which is the entire purpose of the second amendment anyways.
That oft-cited point becomes less valid when one considers that armed revolutions can occur and have occurred without an explicit right of gun ownership having being granted by the state beforehand.
I think your options for armed resistance against the state are going to be quite limited by the fact that they have cruise missiles and you have a 9mm.
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.
Yes, I think you're right that the police attitude (and the way that makes the public respond) is a big part of the problem.
This discussion always makes me think of Robert Peel's principles of "policing by consent", amazingly forward-looking given that they were drawn up in the early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
The UK doesn't follow these principles perfectly (for example, there are still tensions between the police and racial minorities) but they're mostly in the right ballpark. It seems from news reports that most US police forces don't even try -- the police see themselves more as being in conflict with the community.
"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.
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.
Over-the-top, drama seeking narcissist posts some crazy shit on the internet, including pictures of her looking down on a street as though she's about to jump to her death, gets the attention she sought and then cries foul?
>“If Chelsea had been home when these cops arrived with guns drawn, she would be dead.”
Barf.
The sooner the world forgets this particular person, the better.
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?
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.
> “If Chelsea had been home when these cops arrived with guns drawn, she would be dead.”
That statement is a little over the top. That isn't to say I agree or disagree with the guns being drawn but the article makes it sound somewhat like when a cop has their gun drawn someone is going to get shot which isn't the case.
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.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadCan we say that police officers kill more people than terrorists do?
Though I tentatively agree with the rest of your comment, the original comparison was to stats only in America.
I wonder how many police officer killings are due to "suicide by cop".
September 11 2001 terrorist attacks: 2,996 dead.[1]
Here's some data for the previous few years[2], and 2016:
In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.[3]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...
2. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
3 . https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
That wouldn't even be a thing if they weren't so trigger happy and unaccountable. How did it ever even get to be a thing?
The idea that cops are trigger happy is ignorant, if that were even remotely true the number of shootings and deaths by cop would be so high as to not warrant news stories. As in, it would be common place. Fortunately we are far from it being commonplace that shootings and even weapon discharges by cops are news worthy.
Yes we have bad cops just like we have bad actors in many other occupations. The difference is that we don't put people in other occupations in harms way on a day to day basis. that isn't to say being a cop is the most hazardous job you can have, work place deaths are higher for many other fields. We also cannot say that cops cause an unreasonable number of deaths by their actions, if anything we need to account for all the deaths they prevent by their training and mere presence.
Suicide by cop often involves drawing a gun on said cop. You don't need to be trigger happy or unaccountable to shoot someone who's pretending to try to shoot you.
In the rest of the developed world police seem to be pretty good at it without slaying unarmed people left and right.
In various other countries they cannot draw their guns or even carry them.
Just like bodyguards protecting their customers, they are paid to protect citizens - even by risking their lives - that's why they get paid.
As for the other two on the street. In the last two years, one had a shotgun pointed at his face from three feet away by an angry drunk man carrying two guns and four hundred rounds of ammo. (Nobody ended up hurt.)
The other spent a month in the hospital after being shot, two other officers with him were also shot and wounded, and a fourth officer there killed.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t officers or even entire departments that are too trigger happy, but that many places in the US fundamentaly require armed officers ready to shoot someone to stay alive.
The typical playbook for Suicide by Cop involves involves attempting a deadly attack on a police officer. In a world with perfect police in which police officers only used deadly force when threatened with deadly force, this would still result the attacker being shot.
So while there are real problems with policing in America, I don’t see the popularity of suicide by cop being the result of trigger happy police shooting innocent people.
I don't think this is really relevant, because "suicide by cop" is a great reason why police should not take the lead in responding to suicide threats. You never hear about "suicide by paramedic" or "suicide by social worker."
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.
It is absurd to leave out the fact that many of these killings were intentionally initiated by suicidal mentally ill people.
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-...
And if you take out the Madoff case (a $1.7 billion case of law enforcement run amuck if there ever was one...), seizures didn't even top out burglaries.
Of course now someone can shrilly denounce me for defending asset forfeiture, but that isn't my point.
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.
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.
Edit to add: it's not just that the police are much less likely to shoot someone, but that people know the police won't shoot them and therefore they're less likely to react in stupid and/or dangerous ways.
Sending US police into a situation where guns probably aren't needed increases the risk a lot.
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
No, it's not. https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
Especially in country areas where they are limited Ambulance/Paramedic resources, police are more often than not the ones conducting checks and will be first responders.
If paramedics are concerned about safety on a particular job (weapons mentioned on call, previous history of violence), they will wait for police to make the area safe before attending to a patient.
If paramedics are unable to gain entry to a property, police are required to be the ones to force entry.
Also if paramedics require to take someone involuntarily to hospital for mental health evaluation they require police presence to "arrest" someone under the Mental Health Act to allow them to be taken against their will due to health concerns.
Due to large amounts of mental health work with police, on most shifts police will have a specialised unit (car) on duty in each area which has a combination of a police officer and specialist mental health worker / psychologist. They focus on any jobs relating to mentally ill and can conduct assessments without having to wait for an ambulance to be available.
There are a lot more police on shift than ambulances, and ambulances are often tied up for hours at hospitals doing transfers of patients, so police can and should be the ones dealing with welfare of the general public. They have a very close relationship with health workers.
Police will NEVER undertake a welfare check with guns drawn, even if forcing entry to a property. When arresting someone under the Mental Health Act police will not draw their guns. Guns are a last resort only.
This is incorrect. UK police routinely attend for people who are mentally ill because they've been called there by family or neighbours.
Section 135 and 136 of the mental health act (and the equivalent in Scotland) are police powers to detain someone and take them to a place of safety.
But this just strengthens your point: despite this routine use of police for people in mental distress we still manage to avoid killing many people, and when it happens we spend considerable effort to change procedures and policy to stop it happening again. (See the reduction in prone restraint for one example).
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.
If your policies and precedent end with innocent people dying, then they need to be changed.
Someone close to me had armed police bust into their house and haul them off in handcuffs because they confessed to violent thoughts in an email to a fellow support group member whose facilitator freaked out over it. I think they were put on a psych hold and handcuffed to a hospital bed. It absolutely devastated them and permanently damaged much of their progress.
When your country is missing any sort of universal state "help" for your health, then what other option is there?
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.
All else being equal, whether or not other people have guns, you'll be safer if you have a gun. But that apparently rational argument leads to everybody having guns, which is much less safe for everybody.
But there's an extra twist -- you are actually not safer with a gun all else being equal, because you or your loved ones could be killed by that gun through accident, suicide, etc.
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.
Right. The problem, for a disturbingly large section of the community, is that they are afraid to call the cops for _anything_.
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.""
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.
FIFY
Also note, you used the word “murder” wrong. Perhaps you meant something else?
First, when one human kills another human, it's either a legally justified killing or murder. The majority of policy killings are justified and not murder. So that's "what else" anyone who understand the law and the English language would call it...unless you're just trying to stir things up with rhetoric. In that case you'd just use whatever word generates the most outrage ignoring the fact that you've used the word wrong.
As to your second question, I would call that murder. I would absolutely blame the person who called in the swatting, and depending on what happened I would blame the police.
Every police shooting has different circumstances. You can't lump them into one bucket and pass judgement.
There are very few instances of police murdering someone. I never claimed it doesn't happen, but "And since police murders in the US are so common" is just outright incorrect.
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.
No, what the parent is getting at is, you should say "I get locked up." You personally, whether you think you're schizophrenic or not. Are you happy with this situation? If you think you're sane, how do you prove it and how do you get out?
This isn't an abstract question. Locking healthy people up in asylums is something that has happened many times in history.
You're linking mental illness to violence, but we know that's wrong. Mental ill health does not predict violent behaviour.
Violence is common. Mental illness is common. Some violent people also happen to have mental illness, but there's little evidence that mental illness causes violence, and if it does it's in a small number of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
Stigma is a useless tool for solving problems. Dangerously mentally ill people may pose a risk to others, but any caring society should focus on managing that risk and making sure that people receive appropriate safeguarding and treatment. An attitude of "mental illness is a personal failing" helps literally nobody.
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.
That oft-cited point becomes less valid when one considers that armed revolutions can occur and have occurred without an explicit right of gun ownership having being granted by the state beforehand.
This is literally what terrorism is, though.
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
This discussion always makes me think of Robert Peel's principles of "policing by consent", amazingly forward-looking given that they were drawn up in the early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
The UK doesn't follow these principles perfectly (for example, there are still tensions between the police and racial minorities) but they're mostly in the right ballpark. It seems from news reports that most US police forces don't even try -- the police see themselves more as being in conflict with the community.
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.
>“If Chelsea had been home when these cops arrived with guns drawn, she would be dead.”
Barf.
The sooner the world forgets this particular person, the better.
One of so many war crimes committed by the united states yet again people are attacking the person who exposed them.
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.
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?
I believe approaching the incident in a discreet manner but prepared for the worst was prudent.
That statement is a little over the top. That isn't to say I agree or disagree with the guns being drawn but the article makes it sound somewhat like when a cop has their gun drawn someone is going to get shot which isn't the case.
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.
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.