Thoughts on police brutality and self defense, from someone who's been in inpatient psych

[untonuggan]

I have been reading the news of how freaked out cops feel about 12 year olds and, let's be brutally honest, people of color and people with mental illnesses (or gods forbid, both). Here's the thing: I've been in inpatient psych unit(s), and they can't use guns or tasers there. A good unit can deescalate a situation so they don't need to use force most of the time, and when they do it's effective and doesn't cause injury. Why is this so hard for cops?

If you are in one of the better places and are having Intense Feelz, here are the kinds of strategies people will use: talking to you about coping skills; asking you to stay where the nurses can see you; asking you to go to your room til you can calm down; offering you PRN meds for your specific issue; offering exercise equipment or walking around the unit to burn off energy; etc.

If none of that works and things escalate to where you're yelling at staff or other patients (especially if there's cursing) or acting violent/agitated and you won't calm down, then the unobtrusive small quiet staffer who stands around chatting and also happens to do a martial art will come up near you, give you an additional warning...and then use that martial art to flip you on the floor. Literally I have not even seen how this guy does it. Just talking, then person is pinned to the floor.

Then several nurses administer a shot that will knock someone out in about 30 seconds, and after that they either put you under 1-1 supervision in your room while you sleep it off or in the infamous padded room which is euphemistically called the "Quiet Room." (When someone is awake and needs to be in there, it is the opposite of quiet.)

And as for whether or not psych staffers are more or less "at risk" than cops: all the furniture in psych units is designed to be hard to weaponize (against yourself or others), but I'm pretty sure it's hard to go into work every day and wonder if someone's going to take out all their Intense Feelz on YOU today, or if you just get to chat to people who are going through a rough patch. But people do, and in a good unit, mostly no one even has to use force. There's definitely no guns, or even tazers.

(For those worried about the less good places and what they do: in my experience, they usually just jump to the Quiet Room much too often because they're understaffed and can't dedicate the time to helping people before they hit peak threat.)

Comments

[pipisafoat]

content note/warning:
This comment is largely me playing devil's advocate, I suppose; looking at it as "Why IS it so hard for cops? There must be a reason, so I will postulate what that reason could be." This also includes talk of violence and such. And unnecessary Dumbledore grumps. Avoid if necessary.




1. Lack of training. Cops are not taught these deescalation techniques. They're taught to subdue and use force. Cops are also not taught (enough? properly?) diversity things, which promotes the issue most (usually white male) cops have with minorities of various types.

2. Lack of staffing/funding/time. It comes down to funding in the end. If there isn't enough money to hire enough cops, your job as a cop becomes harder. You have to be ready to leave a relatively minor thing, and leave it resolved, to respond to a larger crime in progress at a moment's notice. The fastest way to prevent a potential crisis is to remove the person who may cause the crisis, so they (as with less good places, who probably face the same lacks in funding and staffing) jump straight to force and subduing.

3. Cops don't have access to PRN meds and shouldn't. I think that's a given. People who are not medical professionals should not provide medical advice or medicine. This goes doubly for people who work in any sort of public service and doubly again for those people on the clock, as the police station is then liable for anything that happens as a result of a cop giving someone a drug.

4. Cops don't have exercise equipment to give away, and the options like walking around go back to funding and staffing and time.

5. Stay where the nurses can see you - this is under the assumption that the nurses are capable of dealing with the situation or calling for assistance that will arrive in time to prevent crisis. Cops don't know every person they meet with an issue or those around them. They don't have the option of leaving the crisis-person with a trained professional most of the time, and they can't guarantee a quick response time to another call for help.

6. Asking you to go to your place until you calm down - this one is probably used by at least some cops but it can feel like an empty gesture, and they don't know if you'll just come back out but this time with a weapon as soon as they drive away. And being as it's sort of their job to protect innocent people, they take the Dumbledore route and set up the crisis-person to go take an unforgivable curse to the chest so the bystanders have a greater chance at survival.

7. Also, in inpatient psych, you're not likely to have someone steal a car and become dangerous on a larger scale. That's entirely possible in The General World.


My conclusion is that cops need more funding, and that funding needs to be channeled to more training and more staffing, not more weaponry. Give cops surplus military supplies and they take on the military mentality with it and end up escalating nothing into a major crisis. Give cops surplus crisis management training, and hopefully they'll take on that mentality and deescalate a potentially dangerous situation into nothing.

important discussion

[meowdate]

Thank you both for engaging with this difficult topic.

Shira "Holcene/Human Era" Destinie
11 August, 12015 HE