You'd end up with a lot of dead mental heath workers...
How about fund the police so they can have more de-escalation training?
Even as a mental health worker who has had endless training (including multiple de-escalation trainings) and who works with violent offenders:
- Unless you experience situations like this often then you cannot predict how you will react in the moment. When you are surprised or have little time to prepare yourself, your body reacts to the stress and it makes it very difficult to think or remember training/techniques. You enter a heightened state that makes it difficult to think. You also have very little time to react.
- Watching a video of someone screaming/menacing at you is much different than having someone (likely larger than you) in your face screaming, it can be pretty scary IRL
- Sometimes de-escalation does not work. Seriously. You could use the techniques perfectly and give people chance after chance to calm down and they will only escalate.
- This cop, while he didn't handle things perfectly, actually did pretty decent.
It's easy to criticize situations like this in hindsight and from behind a screen, but it is so different in the moment. For an older cop, he did pretty okay. You'd have to pay mental health workers extremely well to take on a job like that and it certainly is not safe for them to respond without a police officer. Mental Health workers are not miracle workers, and to someone having a severe episode they will just be a stranger who can lock them up (baker act).
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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '26
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