They aren't even trying to hide it anymore. Not wanting to curb stomp some emotionally disturbed kid and/or taser the shit out of him and/or pepper spray him into a coma = being psychologically incompetent to be a police officer, in today's Soviet Amerika. And the good Sovoks cheer, because yay, it keeps the streets safe! Or they just cheer like the good plebes in George Orwell's 1984 who applaud when the newsreel shows a fighter plane strafing a boat full of Jewish refugees from Europe, and cheer as a small child is blown to pieces by bullets.
This is one scary-ass nation that I'm livin' in right now, is what I'm sayin'. And before you say "but the kid had to be beat down because he was crazy!", bull fucking shit. I've worked with emotionally disturbed kids before. If you have overwhelming force available to you and calmly explain the options, by and large you can talk'em down and get'em off to where they need to go without having to beat the crap out of'em. I mean, they're *crazy*, not *stupid*! But preferring to talk the kid down to beating the crap out of him clearly makes that policewoman unfit to be a police officer in today's Soviet Amerika. Yay, freedom. For some definition of "freedom" that looks suspiciously like stale freedom fries.
-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
Tuxy,
ReplyDeleteWhen the Police are your only tool everyone becomes a Perp...
Police Officers should not be the ones tasked with regularly dealing with people suffering from reduced capacity or mental problems. The Mental Health of members of society needs to be addressed by that society. It's a measuring stick of the level of civilization.
But, why are Police Officers in this position at all? Because rich psychopaths who control the Government have deemed spending on Mental Health facilities to be SOCIALISM! Confrontations like this are are the result of the 1% Austerity programs which directly target facilities which are best suited and staffed to help people.
You can thank Reagan. He is the one who busted down the doors of the mental institutions that helped people releasing them to the streets where the police can hassle them.
ReplyDeleteGrungy, thing is, this wasn't an "encounter" because the mentally disturbed kid wasn't doing anything to warrant an "encounter", he simply didn't want to go to the mental hospital that his parents were sending him to and the parents called the cops to help get the kid into the white-coats' ambulance. If you watch the video at the final site, the kid's just on the lawn doing nothing, completely unarmed and making no threatening moves, and suddenly two cops gang-tackle him as the lady cop is walking towards the kid. And then the lady cop is trying to pry the meatheads off the kid while saying something like, "What are you doing?!"
ReplyDeleteJerry, I think I found out where all the violent crazy disturbed people went after Reagan got rid of the mental hospital. They took the police test and became cops.
So anyhow, cops were always involved in hauling people off to mental hospitals (which is where this kid was going, and he didn't want to go there, thus the need for the coppers). Ambulance attendants simply aren't routinely tasked with putting people into ambulances who don't want to be in ambulances, and aren't so good ad doing that kind of "convincing". So this has nothing to do with Reagan anyhow, and all to do with cops whose attitude is "beat-down first, talk later."
- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
I agree. Many of our police have a very "totalitarian" attitude towards their job. Whatever happened to "serve and protect"? It's become more like "demand and brutalize".
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing you can do about anything unless you get into politics and run for office. So just go wash your Jeep.
ReplyDeleteIn Vancouver, the city police have a special unit specifically for picking up mentally ill people. Car 87 and Car 88 are literally squad cars with those numbers on 'em, one working days, one evenings (midnights are not covered) that roll with cops trained on how to handle the crazy, and also psychiatric nurses who can size up a person and decide whether to bring them in. (Lots of times it's not lunatics on the street, but families who call about someone in their home who's gone off their meds and is acting strangely.)
ReplyDeleteThat approach is not available in the rest of the province, which tends to be patrolled by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose role is a cross between what the FBI and state police would do in the U.S. Most smaller jurisdictions do not have their own police forces, unlike Police State USA. From what I've read, the Mounties are bastards, but then it's only the sexual abuse, brutality and general dumbfuckery that make the news.
As far as dealing with the mentally upset here, you've probably seen the footage of the confused, irate, non-English-speaking Polish guy getting Tasered to death at the Vancouver Airport from a few years back, eh Tux? Lawmen here are no shining lights.
We had a case on the ward last week with a large (100+ kg) physically fit and irate guy with anti-social personality disorder. Came in because he was off his meds, threatening in the community. Got thrown in the rubber room (actually a concrete cubicle) and was doing things like wetting toilet paper and throwing it on the surveillance camera like a giant spitball. He had been in the prison system before and knew how to defeat the monitoring. Four security guards were afraid to go in his room to hold him down while I gave him injections, so they were not given. The next day, he made a shank out of a plastic spoon, and had twisted towels that he pissed on in order to make weapons to hit staff with. All the while he's yelling how he's going to kill us.
Vancouver PD will only come if a patient has a weapon, so they handcuffed the guy and got his implements. But they wouldn't hold him on the bed so staff could shoot him up with zombifying meds. "That's security's job" was the response. And hospital rent-a-guards (who are usually pretty good) said "The police are there. Why should we do it? He's gonna go ape when the cuffs come off." So the guy went un-injected. He spat on a nice femals shrink the next day --nobody does that, not even the paranoid schizos! -- and following that (with no real change in behaviour) they discharged him back to the street. So even in relatively thoughtful Canada, outcomes are sometimes fucked up.
When things get even worse in the U.S., police are going to be using bullets the way they do pepper spray and Tasers now. It will be that out of control. And the same people that cheer the chemical/electroshock methods will love the bloodshed. Wake up and smell the fascism. It smells like burning flesh. It smells like VICTORY!
Mm. Speaking of 1984, I believe I've read the book at least 3 times. I tried to watch the movie version made in '84, but bleh. Have you seen it?
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