Half of police kills are "mentally disabled"

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I think you're asking the wrong question... how about are the crimes committed by "mentally disabled" people worthy of a death sentence?

When they attack other people.

The sad truth is that some don't have families,or families that care enough to do something.

Then the families (if they exist) dump their unwanted mentally disabled kin on the streets, and try to forget about them until they're shot by the cops. Then they cry and scream about their "precious loved one" and try to sue the cops and the government for huge sums of money.

If there is any kind of conspiracy against the mentally disabled, it begins within their own families.

For those without families ... I wonder how many people here would volunteer to take in a homeless person and try to rehabilitate that person? How many people on this website would go to that much trouble and expense?

If the government "should" do anything at all, it would be to round up the homeless, sort the workables from the unworkables, and put the workables to work caring for the unworkables.

Do we really want to go back to the old system in which they were institutionalized?

http://www.inclusionbc.org/our-priority ... stitutions

Last edited by BTDT on 15 Mar 2016, 8:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yes. The current "system" leads to homelessness and violent death, while the old system puts people in housing, suppresses violence and leads to a sedated death.

I should clarify: I don't think this is a "conspiracy" like you'd see in a James Bond movie. I do think that there is a tendency in American society to abandon the poor and vulnerable, and for cops to view themselves as an occupying army ruling over a hostile populace. The Iraq dynamic is a good one-some of these cops served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and bring that mentality home. So, you have cops who view every encounter in the Iraq lens, as dealing with a hostile populace who could kill them at any second, so they kill first. As for the families of the mentally ill helping, many times the mentally ill reject their own families, or the families get tired of pushing the rock uphill and give up. The institutions were awful places, but now we see the alternative. I personally think that this is an indirect culling, but that's my opinion.

While it's easy to point at problems, what about offering solutions?

Even "the lesser of two evils" (institutionalizing) is better than abandoning mentally disabled people to the streets to fend for themselves.

I agree that a family that never cared enough to try and help their own is ethically in the wrong to sue the police after they dumped their family on the streets like a stray animal.If you watched the vid I posted the solution is some sort of halfway housing.Even better if it's financed by donations and staffed with volunteers.Somehwere there is support like making sure people take their meds,get therapy,job training.
Of course if someone mentally ill is out stabbing people on the street the cops should shoot.But sometimes they get too heavy handed.
There is nothing wrong with being institutionalized if the place treats the patients like humans beings.Not like warehoused goods.

Does that not imply then that we have mentally ill people on both sides of the equation? Sorta throws Fnord's argument out the window & in fact reframes the entire problem if the police who are most likely to shoot are themselves suffering from mental illness...

Last edited by Edenthiel on 15 Mar 2016, 1:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As critical as I am of law enforcement at times, there are times when a person has to be shot in order to be stopped. If a person has mental issues it stands to reason that they might not respond to commands or threats and the situation may be past non-lethal alternatives to subdue. Claiming that it's all a conspiracy to cull out the mentally handicapped via police intervention is borderline trolling by definition.

I started a poll related to this topic: viewtopic.php?t=308145

I too doubt that it is a concerted but hidden effort to exterminate people with mental illnesses.

But that's also a bit like saying that the Flint, MI water situation wasn't racist.

Prejudice can be so systemic, it can be so embedded in hegemony that from within it almost cannot be recognized as being intentional.

The USA as a nation - both government and society - has developed some deep, dark pockets of systemic prejudice against people with mental illnesses. It's not overt, though. It manifests as a prejudice toward the wealthy, the powerful, the politically & socially skilled - which by exclusion therefore is strongly biased against those who do not fit that category. Such as many who suffer from mental illnesses. Enough privilege, though, and someone can buy their way out of it. Which makes it all the more disturbing.

That's just it, most of the times mentally disabled people don't attack other people...

http://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_violence.php

I just read your poll, and I can see your concern about this topic is much more genuine than I'd assumed; I'd read "keep them off the streets" as to just lock them up and throw away the keys. As the article suggests, there are a lot of misgivings about the Mentally Disabled and ostracising them, even more from society, is not the answer. I've got my own problems, and even though I may act erratically from time-to-time--I don't think excluding me by suggesting that "half of all crimes" are committed by mentally ill people, and therefore they maybe a threat to others, is true... there are facts to back this up:

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/ ... crime.aspx

Unless a person is a 5050 or 5150 the government has no right to take away their liberty. Especially not for "behaving oddly" and certainly not with police officers making the call.

The solution, I feel, is to have mental health specialists that go out with the officers any time a call involves mental illness. Solutions involving guns should be a last resort, just behind tasers. Police Officers are trained, it would seem, to escalate a situation as quickly as possible so that it may be resolved as quickly as possible.

In the end, as a society we are going to have to decide mental health issues are *real* and then deal with them in real ways - meaning, spend money on them wherever they intersect with our infrastructure.

Again, how will the police know in advance that the person they are going to encounter is mentally ill?

A 911 call reporting "... a crazy person shouting obscenities"? New York City's police department would be run ragged.

I don't know what Section 5050 is, but ...