Police knew ‘madman’ had guns before killing rampage

Better?

Sure there were abuses back then. But how is our mental health system any better these days with the millions of patients who should be in a facility but are instead left to roam the streets and terrorize society?

They knew that if they entered, there would likely be a fire fight. Maybe even one of them would be shot, perhaps killed.

So, without a dire emergency posing a clear and present danger, they did the prudent thing and left.

I get that. I do.

It’s just that this leaves a bad taste in our mouths that 5 people are now dead.

Well, lobotomies and forced sterilizations are not occurring in our current non-incarceration system.

And there aren’t “millions” who should be incarcerated. That was one of the causes of closure. It was the March of Dimes and vaccinations that really doomed the state mental institutions by pretty much ending the supply of damaged individuals that made up the bulk of the institutionalized population.

There are around 1.2 million mentally ill in US prisons, but they are there because they committed crimes, not because they are mentally ill. Locking up mentally ill persons only because they might commit a crime is a civil liberties violation.

With all that said, the US is currently squandering most of its mental health funds on bull shit “community health” programs that tend to focus on mildly mentally ill people and ignore the severely mentally ill because that is hard and scary work. Much easier to draw a nice paycheck doing group sessions with the fun and creative bi-polars than doing outreach under bridges to anti-social psychotics.

Not to mention the fraud and waste in the SSDD system.

There are no easy answers and no good solutions, but the best advice is to always have a plan if you have a crazy neighbor, because expecting government to protect you is doomed to failure.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Fact is if they had gone with a search warrant to seize the guns, it would have ended in a siege and killing the nutter.

You say that like it would have been a bad thing, it would be much more desirable than what actually happened. Sounds like there was ample evidence that this guy should have been 5150'd, but the police were too damn something too do their job and lives were ended and affected tragically.

I'm not one to usually

Yes it would have been a better ending, but the cops don’t have precognition any better than the rest of us so nobody would realize a bigger tragedy had been prevented so they would have been criticized just as harshly for being the instigators.

“Protect and Serve” is marketing, not the job.

It didn't require precognition on the police department's side, there was plenty of evidence this guy was mental unbalance and a danger to himself and others. He was a classic example of why 5150 is on the books.

I am a supporter of the Police, but not blindly, the police failed this time, period.

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