I am a EMT and I have had a number of mentally ill patients where the police had to use force or threat of force to subdue the patient or compel him to go to the hospital.
I have nothing but praise for our local police department in the cases I have seen. They have been patient, firm, low-key, and professional, and have always managed to defuse the situation rather than escalate it. Even when the country SWAT came in, they spent four hours talking down a patient with a knife. There are very good police departments in the country, and good police officers and I count us very fortunate to have them here.
But I read about other places where things like this happen and I shiver.
A few years back my boss and her husband were killed by their schizophrenic son. He had been violent in the past and they could not get him committed for more than a very short time to stabilize him, and then he was out and unstable again. I don’t know if something like a stun gun always on their persons would have helped but it would have given them a chance.
My nephew is a paramedic for the city of New Orleans. I have heard graphic detail of more horror stories than I could have ever imagined. He has been bitten(requiring AIDS tests and innoculations), spat upon, puked on and wrestled with. He’s a big guy and he is expected to ‘help’ people who fight him. There are mental patients galore who are like wild people. Restraints don’t always work. Just last year a teen mental patient was being transported to a medical appointment, and he was put in a ‘regular’ car, so as not to make him ‘feel different’. He jumped out of the car on the interstate and was hit and killed by a truck. I guess he ‘felt normal’ right up till impact, and that’s what matters.
New Orleans is full of mental patients, add 24 hour booze to the mix and calls like this are normal here. The cops and EMT’s are acting as psychiatric workers. It’s hard to have pity and patience when viscious, biting,kicking out-of-control people can fight off three big men. There should be a way to restrain them that protects the law officers and medical personnel. A net gun that can trap and immobilize wild animals comes to mind.They could then be scooped up, screaming and kicking in the net, to be plopped in a secure vehicle. Hand to hand with a mental patient NEVER ends well, and it should be unnecessary.
These mental patients are being protected by a society they are damaging. Your boss and his wife are dead...where is the son now? Institutionalized or being ‘cared for’ by some foster family? If he had been in a professionally controlled environment, his parents wouldn’t be dead. Same for the Newton shooter. To protect HIS rights, all those children are dead.
If I had a child I knew to be dangerous to myself or others, I WOULD find a facility, or-at the very least- make a room in my home into one! Restraints are better than death-theirs or mine.
These things happen because too many parents, and others, think that TREATING schizophrenics normally will MAKE them normal. They are self-deluded, right up to the time the individual is killing them, or they see the violence needed to stop them.