Look what popped up on my radar yesterday!
It’s been an extremely busy week, with all kinds of Advocacy communications initiated by me, which appear to have rumbled the Earth below us, and rattled a few nerves, and, produced some incredibly bizarre behavior on the part of those responsible for managing and dispensing Mental Health Services at the State Level, and, their bosses at the Federal level.
And they think we’re crazy!
Anyway, yesterday I was sitting at a Starbucks at the Mall, drinking my coffee, when I noticed 2 County officers approach a man at a table, not far from me. This man was almost invisible. I hadn’t even realized he was there, until the officers approached him. But there he was, just a few feet from me, quiet and soft spoken.
The sound in the video is terrible, because of the mall music, which drenched everything around and almost muted it. But you can pick up enough to realize this is a law enforcement intervention in a man reported to the police as suicidal.
I was really impressed with the officer who handled the situation. He obviously had additional training in Mental Health, but it was his even and calm approach and empathy that resonated with me.
However, the handcuffs, at the close of this scene, are disturbing. And this is something that must change. People cannot be treated like criminals when they’ve done nothing wrong, as the officer tells the man. But I’ll have more to say about that later.
The video is 4:12 minutes.
5 replies on “Why Are Suicidal People Handcuffed By Police? Do they really think they have the energy to become violent? So why are we treated like criminals when we’ve done nothing “wrong?””
If we’re suicidal and some faggot had me handcuffed by the police, I would kill that motherfucker.
Wow! Glad I was never treated that way back in my suicidal days! While I could not hear much, and appreciate the intervention, if you will, I don’t think of this as a crime. I guess you could hear that this is why they came to him. He looks possibly Arabic…I hope that was not the reason.
It’s NOT crime. Yet, people are treated as criminals. They don’t handcuff Diabetic patients, do they, in an Emergency? This is a serious breach of ethics and barbaric, to say the least – taking troubled people who are contemplating suicide and shackling them. THAT’S the crime here.
He was Indian.
Glad he was not an Arab…I would have thought even worse. I wonder how they ended up looking for him in the first place.
What I was able to hear was that someone called the police and reported that he was suicidal. And they were there to “help” him, get him help.
There are several problems right there, however. Can you trust the person who made the call? Yes, but not always. They may have their own agenda, which is far from altruistic, but because the laws, it’s a convenient and an easy way to strip someone of their civil liberties. That has also happened.
But the most ironic thing was right before the handcuffing when the officer clearly explained that he “…hadn’t done ANYTHING wrong.” This was simply “policy,” which led to my first question, if that was the case, then why was he handcuffed?
There’s gotta be a better way.