Itâs extremely unlikely that with any three randomly selected people, one of them would have shot the schizophrenic teenager to death. With rare exceptions, the way any three randomly selected people would handle the situation would have begun with trying to talk him down, and if absolutely necessary, physically restraining him.
And I frequently see ordinary people dealing with strangers who have mental health issues. Itâs a routine part of working class urban life. They almost always handle those situations better than I see police handle them.
My partner used to work in mental health services. Her clients often came into conflict with the police, and the police nearly always handled situations badly. Police, in general, had little training in how to handle people in mental health crises, and generally handled situations insensitively and were excessively quick to resort to physical force, and so further traumatized already traumatized people and made it more difficult for social workers to win their trust.
A few weeks ago, I was waiting on a street corner at a busy intersection, when I saw a minor car accident â no apparent injuries, but one car was disabled. At first, there was a lot of confusion among the drivers, and I thought, âFor once, it would really help to have a cop around.â However, within a few minutes, people had self-organized: a few people had pulled over and got out of their cars to help, and so the driver of the disabled car, a passenger, and another person were pushing the car to a side street away from traffic, as another two people used coats as flags to direct traffic around them.
Years ago, I was in a car accident on the freeway. When we discovered that we were still alive, and that the car still ran, we pulled off the freeway, and got out of the car and stood around for a few minutes, trying to sort out what had happened and what to do. A couple of cars came by on the side road where we had pulled off, and the drivers stopped and asked if we were all right and if we needed any help. After a while, a CHP officer pulled up. He gruffly asked for the driverâs license, then said he was going to go back and check if weâd damaged any state property. That was all, and we never heard from him again. Eventually, we found a place to park the car, and managed to make our way to meet up with friends for a political tabling. Every single person we talked to that day, to whom we mentioned that weâd been in a car accident, asked how we were feeling, and almost every one asked if we were experiencing headaches, dizziness, or nausea, out of concern for the possiblity that we had experienced head injuries without being aware of it. But not the CHP officer, who couldnât spend 30 seconds on expressing sympathy, checking if we were injured, or looking at our car.
As far as I can make out, what specialized training and skills police possess are mostly intended as checks on their proclivities to abuse their authority and use excessive force. Apparently, that training is not enough. And I believe that the real problem is the social role of police, and that the very concept that law enforcement must be the business of technical specialists is anti-democratic.
