If someone calls 9-1-1 and say “My son is acting strange, he’s outside in his boxers in the freezing cold waving a broom around and he won’t come in no matter what I say, and I’m worried because he has serious mental health issues,” or “My husband is threatening suicide, I’m very worried,” they aren’t sending…

Batons are deadly force. And any department that places Tasers lower on the continuum of force than other deadly force implements is torturing people. Any department that uses them as a “pain compliance device” is in violation of the Geneva Convention and the US Constitution:

This is not “business as usual”; these cases led to public outcry and inquests, with applied recommendations for changing protocols, in order to reduce the chance of police shooting the mentally ill.

You have no basis from which to conclude that every time the police shoot a mentally ill person, that their use of lethal force was justified.

She gets kicked hard, and often.

You’re missing the option where cops use their training to become a positive force for de-escalation.

it puts far to more weight on risks to police than it does risks to people who are in medical distress and cannot respond rationally.

You talk about “someone who cannot even understand” what I’m saying due to their mental disturbance, and yet you think the “best” cops can do is “give someone the opportunity to de-escalate themselves”. That’s some contradictory bullshit right there.

That is how police force doctrine works. Tasers aren’t appropriately used as compliance mechanisms - that’s torture and it’s illegal. Tasers are less-lethal options, but because they’re an application of debilitating force against the assailant, they’re justified only by the same conditions that would justify other…

You have no basis from which to conclude that every incident involving a mentally ill person has a “level of mental derangement” that reached “such a level that their interaction with police necessitates lethal force,” they are are completely “not in control of their faculties,” or that “by definition they can’t be…

You’re right it saved his life, because it’s worth noting that the only situations that justify taser use are the situations where lethal force is also justified - i.e. police aren’t allowed to use a taser until it’s the only alternative to their firearm.

Sometimes we are talking about a guy with a knife in a crowded area (or in a shared family home with innocent people nearby.) Sometimes we’re talking about a guy with a gun in a crowded area. In fact, we’re talking about that in 90% of these shootings:

So lethal force is never justified against the mentally ill, under any circumstances? Sane people are the only ones police should be allowed to shoot?

But the training includes the use of deadly force where necessary. There’s no magic “training” whereby police can de-escalate every conceivable situation involving the mentally disturbed, however “intense” and “rigorous” you make it, you can’t train officers to have Jedi mind control.

People got distressed and distraught all the time, and I had to talk them down. With my words.

The use of lethal force might very well be the best, level-headed response to someone who is otherwise a danger to innocent people. The onus on police officers is not merely to protect the safety of the single mentally ill person in front of them - it’s to protect everyone, including themselves.

But police are supposed to be proactive in making sure that’s the exception, not the rule.

It doesn’t strike me as unreasonable that a substantial number of people who would force officers to escalate to deadly force by refusing to follow instructions, threatening others, refusing to disarm, making furtive or sudden movements, and so on would be mentally disturbed in some way.

A child would be under 13. Anyone 18 or older is an adult. “Children under 21” doesn’t really make any sense, and it’s seriously infantilizing when you use this construction to refer to black people.

Surely you can understand the impulse to minimize the culpability of the person you care about the most, right? I agree that, in the most balanced and rational view, both of them share responsibility for their actions. But that sort of situation isn’t typically one where people are in their most balanced and rational…