Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Sure, I agree with that over the long-term. In the short term though, you still have these social ills that are causing problems and chaos, and policing is the way to deal with them. It's distasteful, and I see that side, but you can't stop these things by standing there and saying "hey, I'm on your side and advocating for housing, rehabilitation and treatment programs, so can you just stop this rampage?!"
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I'm about to go to bed so don't have time to really dive into the subject too much, but tldr is it still wouldn't be some kind of kid glove approach like that. These teams would still have peace officers and/or police backup with them if things go sideways. But say there was someone having a mental health crisis. Right now, for the most part, the police response would be isolate/contain the threat, then stop the threat. This takes a lot of manpower, and results in way too many injuries to police, public, and suspects alike. Non-lethal weapons are just too unreliable, then the suspect attacks the police and ends up shot.
Whereas a community assistance team actually trained in how to approach things like that would be able to read and react to the situation better. That type of de-escalation, talking to and negotiating with someone that may or may not even be on the same metaphorical planet as you, is a very different and specialized skillset. One could (and should) argue that that's just something that all police officers should be good at anyway, but it's simply too tall of an order. It's already hard enough recruiting and maintaining a smart police service that's large enough to be effective without just being full of morons, juice monkeys and adrenaline junkies (Yeah yeah, save the acab jokes people, I know someone is already thinking "lol dats wut they r anyway, amirite?'). If being a trained psychologist was an actual pre-requisite
on top of everything else they have to be good at, we'd have like, 50 cops in town (number out of my ass, don't take that one to heart). Yet right now
all the cops we do have are expected to do it anyway, despite no real training or expertise in it. Just look at the Latjor Tuel shooting in Calgary, I believe the police were absolutely justified in the shooting, and overall did a good job in that situation. But it's still an absolute shame it even got to that point and there wasn't anyone trained in how to better deal with that situation
It's not like we're talking about a drastic reduction in cops here either, simply using some of their budget to fund such a thing, with the argument being that it balances out because it would also reduce their workload.
It's a large and complicated subject, and can kinda be boiled down to how, especially in North America, we take a very jack-of-all-trades view to emergency services (Like how firefighters spend maybe 5% of the day fighting fires, yet are always busy). In general I like it, but there are just certain things that should be specialized, mental health I'd say is definitely one of them
This is only loosely relevant to this thread anyway, so I apologize. Not like such a thing is super relevant to someone stealing, definitely didn't mean to de-rail things too hard, was just responding to another defund the police comment from someone that doesn't understand what it actually means