Vancouver Police Dept. wrote an open letter to the B.C. Ministry of Health a few years ago stating that the province needed mental health professionals to deal with a lot of the activity in the Downtown East Side because the larger number of police service calls are not regarding crimes, they are for mental health issues. VPD has a mental health police squad that deals with this stuff but they can only cover so many calls across the city in a shift.
Training, vests and batons work well together in knife incidents. A light tap across the knuckles with a hard object like the tip of an extendable baton will cause almost anyone to drop what’s in their hand. A big swing isn’t needed and the attacker won’t even realize what’s happened until they’ve flinched their grip open and withdrawn their hand as a protective reflex.
2 Likes
