Truthfully? Police should not have to deal with people with that kind of problems. But the issues is that a workforce of Social Workers and “experts” will last only a very short time. Not only the obvious point of they are not trained to subdue the criminally insane, but they are also not legally protected from being sued up their asses if the mental health patient suffers injury or anybody near him.
Social Workers are NOT protected under Warren v District of Columbia or Castle Rock v Gonzales. They are not covered under No Duty To Protect. Them and the County will be very much liable for anything that happens.
The first time a social worker ends up wearing orange on her way to prison or having he life destroyed by a 8 figure lawsuit, every single feel-good-defund-the-police program will disappear for lack of employees. And then the cops to the call will come back, and if they are smart, they will say no.
And maybe this time, a real solution for Mental Health can finally get started.
When I was a paramedic, I responded to many mental health calls. We used to subdue them with Haldol, soft restraints, and spit masks. Even with cop assistance, it sometimes took 8 or more of us to hold down a violent patient.
I always laugh when people say, “There were four cops there. Four cops can’t control one person?” The reason this is funny, is that they obviously have never tried to do it themselves.
Imagine this: You are trying to control a smallish woman who is naked, but covered in her own blood, feces, and vomit because she is coming down from whatever drugs she took, and has been running face first into the wall of the 7-11 for the past fifteen minutes. She is slick with perspiration and as hard to hold onto as a greased pig. All the while, you are trying not to get bitten or scratched, because you don’t want the infection that will follow getting cut open while covered in the patient’s bodily emissions. Oh- and you have to make sure that she doesn’t get hurt, either.
Try it once, and you will have an all new perspective on what it takes to control a mental health patient.
Another Paramedic here. My big worry is that there aren’t enough social workers/etc so the vast majority of these mental health calls are just going to get dumped on EMS anyway.. even more so than they have been already.
Fire based EMS is going to *LOVE* this too.
That and they somehow expect the police to restrain people like that WITHOUT ANY RISK OF INJURY to the person. It is physically impossible (and I suspect most of them are well aware of this, and are intentionally demanding the impossible as a catalyst for the implosion of the system). There are thousands of police who respond to calls for assistance with hundreds of mentally ill or intoxicated persons, often unstable and a danger to themselves and others. 99.9% of the time they manage to restrain the person and deal with the situation without more than the usual problems. One time out of many, there is a failure and the person is injured or even killed, which is a potential in ANY case where a person is totally out of their mind and they are forced to put them into restraints. They put a hood on the head, as the book says, to protect themselves from potentially disease-ridden saliva and bodily fluids, and from equally dangerous and disgusting bites, and the one guy ends up dying from a combination of the hood and his own inebriated state, and the idiots riot and scream like the police were daily going around and beating and strangling peaceful, innocent mentally deranged people. They seem to think that we can somehow train all of the 50,000 police officers in the country to not only be proficient in every aspect of police work, able to make the right decision and identify targets correctly 100% of the time in a split second, along with the long, long list of other things police need to know how to do, but now they need to be professional-grade experts in the restaint and and handling of deranged and dangerous people. Even in controlled environments like mental hospitals, with unarmed patients and plenty of resources around them, patients are sometimes injured. Yet the police need to be able to deal with EVERY single situation without fail, without mistake. They actually want to make police criminally liable, as if you’re going to get ANYONE stupid enough to take a job that requires you to put yourself into dangerous and unpredictable situations with the full knowledge that a single mistake will mean your financial ruin, at the very least, if not actually being thrown in prison. Most people will say “screw that, I’ll go and stock shelves for Walmart instead; they don’t pay well enough for that”. So what, we raise police wages to $200K a year plus benefits to encourage them to take the risk? That plus the added costs of training police in what would have to amount to a doctorate degree in police work before they are allowed to become active officers. That’s what it would take to gain even close to the required level of perfection they demand. Why not put all officers through 8 years of training? We can make it just like med school, require a degree and a life-dedication to the career, and pay them all doctor’s wages. We;ll just tax the rich even more to pay for it, no problem.
Of course they wouldn’t agree to that either, they just want the cops to be their go-to villains. They seem to think that police officers are being granted a favor, being ALLOWED the PRIVILEGE of wearing a badge, and that we ought to be asking more from the people we grant this special dispensation. I heard a guy the other day complaining “if they want to be cops, fine, but they shouldn’t be allowed to carry GUNS”. Right, being a cop is treat enough, why should we also LET them carry guns. If they really want to be cops so bad, they can at least make do without guns, why not? Not as if the police departments weren’t already having enough trouble finding people willing to even take the job to start with. It doesn’t pay that well, and it’s nasty, thankless, dangerous job. Yet they want to make it so you not only are spat upon by other people for daring to take the job, but now you’ll be treated like any other civilian if someone gets hurt by you….in spite of the fact that it’s an officer’s JOB to go and SEEK OUT the dangerous situations and place themselves into them, whereas it’s a normal citizen’s duty to AVOID them.
Preach! My mother told me, ” You will never convince my that those police had to bear Rodney King that badly!”
I told her, as an alumnus of Da City’s EMS, “I agree, but that doesn’t mean that they were correct, nor that they were wrong. They could have been, in fact, been merciful with him with their use of force.”
It’s quite quizzical how those folks aren’t asphyxiating in those spit hoods, given the narrative.
If police are not allowed to respond to mental health crises, many of the folks having the crises will not be contained and will come up against and harm civilians. If an armed civilian knows there will be no substantial help imminent, what do you think his/her next step might be? Yeah, this concept is going to shift the mental-vs-police scenarios to mental-vs-civilians, and it’s not going to be any prettier.
Every time I hear “social worker” mentioned, the notion pops into my head that this is a major popular some decades ago for people who wanted to go to college only to party and not actually to do any real work.
Am I wrong? Is “social worker” a real job?
It’s a government job primarily focused on helping people get government benefits.
There are social workers, sure. But they would have to create a vast new field of specialized workers, most of them leftists and liberal arts majors. A social worker is someone who is basically a government employee hired for the purpose of dealing with people on behalf of the state,or to provide state services. Of course the left wants more of them. Drug and alcohol councilors are social workers. The people who go around and take people’s children away are social workers. Those who supervise children under state supervision, before they are placed into foster homes, case workers who supervise the foster homes, mental health workers who go around and deal with mentally ill people who don’t have families. What better way to stick the government’s fingers right into the social pie than to have a whole layer of “social workers” under them running around supervising and manipulating, bureaucrating, etc. Another term for them might be “Commissars”.
No problem with “social workers” responding to calls that appear to be emotional, mental, or drug-related. But keep in mind the issue isn’t who responds, but that the violent are being restrained at all.
So the “social workers” cannot carry any means of self-defense, no forms of restraint, no sedatives, nothing like narcan — they have to use their social worker training to convince the subject to calm down and deal rationally with the situation.
Police are not permitted to stand by; their presence is just a threat of force, right? No paramedics or fire department on scene for the same reason, unless there’s already reason for their presence — wounded or a fire — that they can deal with immediately. If the distraught individual is holding half a dozen wounded people hostage, no paramedics on scene until the distraught person has been calmed down — their presence is another reminder of institutionalization, of force.
Oh, and social workers are responsible for any injuries or deaths that occur during the course of their call, unless it’s the distraught person committing suicide or another person acting in self-defense.
As far as a “solution” for mental illness, I’ve always thought if the billions of dollars we spend every year on illegal aliens, arresting, prosecuting, and deporting them on the one hand and subsidizing them on the other, could be used instead for mental health research and facilities, we’d be a long way down the road to a solution. If only there were a cheap way to keep a good proportion of the illegal aliens out of the country. Any ideas?