Vox has an article about Daniel Prude dying after being restrained in police custody. The title and subtitle give you a sense of the topic:
The killing of Daniel Prude, explainedA police killing in Rochester, New York, has resurfaced questions about the use of force against people with mental illness.
For over a decade COTTonLINE has argued that doing away with mental hospitals was a mistake. The rationale for doing this was effectively: Freedom is important. You have a right to be crazy, so long as your craziness doesn’t harm others. If you choose, you can go live under a bridge and self-medicate with street drugs.
If you harm others or property, you become a law enforcement problem and the police will restrain you. Nobody asked the police if that was okay or if they were equipped to deal with the insane.
We moved the insane from mental hospitals to jails and prisons. Effectively, from places which tried to manage the patients with anti-psychotic drugs and therapy to places which utilize coercion of various sorts to limit out-of-control inmate behavior.
Coercion doesn’t work perfectly on the not sane, too many such are killed by fellow inmates who can’t handle being hassled by the irrational in tight quarters where avoiding the erratic individual isn’t possible. And some are brutalized by police whose inevitable mantra is, and largely has to be, “I control this situation, you will do as I say or else.”
The deaths in Milwaukee, Kenosha, and Rochester all look to be the results of turning over to the police the management of people either biologically or chemically insane. We need to bring back the guys in white coats with their apocryphal butterfly nets. Or we need to train some police to be part-time psychiatric techs, much as we've trained some fire fighters to double as EMTs.
