The antis may claim the police are the “Only Ones” who can carry guns…but they really want to disarm them all.
Baltimore Police have shot 10 people this year — eight of them fatally — leading some to question whether police are properly equipped to handle calls involving the mentally ill.
Only one of those shot was carrying a firearm, and several shooting incidents arose from calls to police about a disturbance involving someone with a mental illness. Relatives of some of those killed criticized police tactics, saying they shouldn’t have lost loved ones after calling police to defuse situations that had ended peacefully in the past.
“They need better training with mental cases,” said Candace Church, 29, whose brother David Yim was shot in April. “They’re treating mental patients like criminals, and they’re not criminals.”
The most recent shooting occurred Saturday, when a 63-year-old man was killed by officers who had been called to the 1600 block of W. Lexington St. to investigate a 911 call for a burglary.
Neighbors and friends said the victim, Rudolph Bell, was a homeless veteran who had recently emerged from a Veterans Affairs program and was affectionately known around the neighborhood as “Mr. Rudy.” But police said he attacked an officer with a knife or bottle, cutting the officer on the face and narrowly missing his eye…..At least three of the people shot by police this year were not reported to have had any weapon at all. Five were reported to have had a knife or “edged object,” while one drove at an officer. Only Devonte Bowman, 31, who was fatally shot July 14 in Northwest Baltimore, was reported to have had a gun…..Marcella Holloman said her son, Maurice Johnson, took medication for bipolar disorder but hadn’t had an episode in several years. Family members called police May 19 after Johnson got upset at a children’s birthday party at their Northeast Baltimore home and began throwing things. She watched as police fatally shot him during a struggle that sent an officer crashing through a glass table….n 2010, 10 people were shot by officers, two fatally. At least six of the victims had firearms, according to the records. Of the others, one victim was a child struck by an errant bullet when an officer fired at an aggressive pit bull; another officer shot at a moving vehicle; and a third victim was shot when a man advanced on him with a burglary tool.
This article reads like “Baltimore Police are Trigger Happy and Poorly Trained”, but most of the stories cited cops were in immediate danger of severe or life-threatening injury. This is one of those anti-rights magical thinking. That somehow you ONLY need a gun to protect from others with guns. This is why some people think George Zimmerman is guilty of murder. Because somehow getting your head bashed against the pavement isn’t a deadly threat!
Yeah, so here’s another reason to shame those cops who stand up for the Anti-rights lobby groups. They think they’re safe, but they really aren’t!
Clayton Cramer has done more then a few posts on this issue. If people want the mentally ill handled by trained people, then those mentally ill people who are a threat need to be in a hospital/institution.
Sorry to be cold about it but if the average cop who has training in conflict resolution can not handle a mentally ill person; then the average citizen who has less training is at greater risk.
As for as not treating the mentally ill like criminals; when they do criminal acts, guess what?
I really am not going to stop and analyze whether the guy about to pound on me is in complete control of his faculties– at that point it doesn’t matter to me. I expect the cops to do the same.
Yup. Just as we don’t expect a street cop to be fully trained up on how to deal with an overly protective dog like an animal control specialist, and we don’t expect Cletus the Park Groundskeeper to be fully up on caring for alligators, and we don’t expect our tax accountant to be fully up on handling a domestic dispute, we cannot expect our cops to be cops AND act like trained psych orderlies with someone about whom they have no good past information.
If your loved ones are crazy in a way that is likely to lead them to a violent confrontation with police, they really need to be institutionalized. The cop DOES NOT know that Uncle Joe will be OK if you just let him finish screaming and stomping your way — he’s gonna drop “the crazed perp”. Which is all you can expect of him, given the data he has when he meets crazy Uncle Joe in the alleyway on Saturday night.
But we DO expect politicians (90% of which are lawyers who never passed a bar, or worked for a practice) to be experts in our daily lives.
That always gets me scratching my head. Aikin is on the Committee for Science, Space and Aeronautics (well he does have an engineering degree I guess) , and Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Climate Science!