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philip964 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 09, 2020 10:48 am https://www.foxnews.com/media/minneapol ... ee-society

Fox News take on it.

Police Free Society.

I spoke at length with an African American officer one time who patrolled my neighborhood. He had recently come from patrolling Acres Homes in Houston. He was concerned he was losing his edge, as nothing happened in my neighborhood. He said in Acres Homes it was non-stop. He said they would get a call and while driving to that call they would pass other felonies in progress. To me if there were no police it would adversely affect neighborhoods of color the most.

I guess the City Fire Department Ambulance Service would need to get larger.

A body is organic, so it would have to go in the trash not recycling.

So I may be the old man out on this but there is a nugget of truth in one of her statements.

She replied: "We've looked at every reason that folks call 911. Why are people in Minneapolis calling for help? And we're starting to pair what's the right response to those calls. In the short term that helps our police officers focus on the work that they're trained to do, while we have a better response to people who have a mental health crisis or a physical health crisis.”

One of the recent Sheriffs in Denton County said that he ran the biggest mental heal facility in the county. I agree with him 100% on that. He also said that society waits for mentally ill people to break the law and then throws them in jail. I agree with that, too. But here comes the problem. Mental healthcare in this country is a disaster. Nothing good in mental health treatment happens quickly and dispensing the medications which are supposed to treat mental health problems is a lot more art than science. For those who are correctly diagnosed with mental problems, there is no long term way to help them deal with those problems. I would bet that the average officer in the street would welcome the opportunity to deal with only the "sane" criminals. The water really gets muddy when you try to separate those with underlying mental issues - bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. from drug induced mental conditions because there are a lot of people with the underlying problems who self-medicate with street drugs. From observing a family member who had no street drug involvement at all try to work the the mental health treatment system, I can say that the success rate was right up there with the weather forecasters.

Dealing with mental health is a laudable goal. Doing that is not mutually exclusive of having a police department. While mental illness problems are rampant, they are far from being the only problems. People get a simplistic view of a complex problem and think that they have all he answers. They don't even understand the questions that they don't have the answers to.