NYC pilot tries mental health responders in place of police

Deep structural problems.

Suicide rates are a separate issue.

When I was a when I was maybe 15 I was on the roof of a building when someone reported a visible gun. With 15 minutes my friends and I were surrounded by police and questioned as they looked for the gun. They did find the person about 10 minutes later.

I also had a kid in my school shoot himself in the leg by accident because he thought he'd be cool and tuck it in his pants. The closest I ever come to an active shooting.

I stick by my statement that guns are extremely rare in NYC. They are not non-existent, but they aren't at all common place.

The nypd downplaying crimes is a significant real issue, that is true. But that only fuels the the thesis that what is proposed may work here.

I grew up right outside of NYC, spent A LOT of time there. I then lived in NYC for about 8 years. I never saw, heard of or experienced what you described. Nor have I ever communicated with anyone that shared a similar experience.

Can you be more specific about what 'neighborhoods' you refer to?

In the UK for example, the normal beat police do not have guns. If they approach a situation where they feel in danger, they're trained to back off and call for either more backup or an armed response. Turns out most of the time whatever the issue is will still be there when backup arrives. On the other hand, if it's a simple issue, they can just deal with it and there's a much smaller chance someone gets shot.

But to answer your question directly, there are tons of simple things you can do, from body language to tone. They aren't really a mystery to figure out either. Start with empathy and asking how you can help.

Like I mentioned above, Patrick Skinner distills this succinctly with "how would I solve this problem without my badge and my gun?" and in particular, using the example of if your next door neighbor asked you for help with some minor crisis.

Treat your neighbor that lives rough the same way and it's amazing the difference in reaction you get.

Assuming violence is necessary from the start becomes a self fulfilling thing.

As for active shooter situations, guidelines now call for the first responding officer to immediately move in and attempt to stop the shooter by any means necessary. They aren't supposed to wait for a SWAT team to respond. It's ridiculous to propose separate use of force rules for them.

This doesn't mean cops should be making a habit of having high speed shootouts on freeway; nobody wants that. It means the rules need to allow reasonable leeway for people to do what they think is appropriate in the unique situations they encounter. Blanket bans enacted by people reasoning about generalized scenarios are not a good idea. Those sort of absolute rules are too simplistic to be good for anything other than pandering to crowds.

are you saying police need to pull people over for minor infractions because a) this is a good way of catching people with serious warrants, or b) police need to pull over people for minor violations anyway and they need a gun in case the person turns out to be a violent criminal?

in the case of a), I think this is the kind of fishing expedition bs that makes it hard for people to trust the police. the idea that they are not just going to ticket you for the thing they actually saw you do, but also make the most of the opportunity to look for anything else you've done / are doing wrong seems needlessly antagonistic. I would also question how much more effective this is than compiling a list of the fugitive's vehicles, known associates' vehicles, stolen vehicles, etc. and just checking the license plate reader against it.

in the case of b), this is kinda my point. if there's a meaningful chance that the officer or the offender ends up dead in a traffic stop, this should probably increase the threshold for what kind of offense justifies a stop. a broken brake light isn't worth dying over for either party. just take a picture/video and send a ticket to the owner of the vehicle.

in the case of an officer responding to a call, they no longer have the initiative to decide whether an interaction needs to take place. in this case, I think it is much more justifiable for the officer to be armed.

But no one is proposing that at all. The proposal is to send well-trained but unarmed people to these situations. You are the one who is claiming that by not having lethal weapons, they will be ill-equipped. This is an opinion that is generally not borne out by the data -- in the general case, guns don't make situations safer, they make them even more dangerous. The idea that the best and only way to handle every potentially dangerous situation is by involving lethal weapons is one that seems uniquely American. Most other countries in the world have drastically fewer guns, and drastically stricter restrictions on their use, both in the general population as well as in law enforcement, and have fewer rather than more gun deaths. For example, another comment in this thread mentions that in England, officers carry only non-lethal devices, and call in a SWAT equivalent in the rare cases where one is needed.

And all of this is ignoring the reason that this pilot is being run in the first place -- that we know that there is a huge problem in the United States with police officers shooting and killing people who were in fact not trying to kill them. By concentrating entirely on the potential safety of police officers, you are discounting the value of the lives of those who are killed by these officers because the officers are not, and probably cannot be (in the same way that police officers cannot generally be trained as EMTs), properly trained to handle acute but non-dangerous cases of mental illness. This pilot is a data-backed attempt to fight against the idea that it's always better to go in guns-blazing just on the off chance that someone may be actively trying to harm you, because that approach leads to a large amount of totally unnecessary civilian deaths. I'm also certain the well-trained unit of mental health first-responders understand the risks that they'd be taking, just like police officers do.

> you better be willing to go out and take those calls before you send someone else out to do it. That, to me, is honorable. Anything else is fake virtue signaling while playing with someone else's life.

> think a leader must include this as one of his or her guiding principles: I will never ask you to do something I am not willing to do myself (or have not done myself)

I'm genuinely curious how you imagine this "honorable" approach playing out in reality. Obviously, it's not possible for everyone to have done everything, so in the general case, we're talking about being "willing" to do something, rather than actually having done it (unless you would have ex-police officers legislate all laws related to the police, ex-firefighters legislate everything related to firefighting, ex-bartenders legislate anything related to bars, etc, which I hope you recognize is more than a little ridiculous given the variety of human experience and thus the size of the legislative body that would be required to follow this approach). Right now, you're applying this principle to responding to 911 calls. Would you then also require that everyone involved in any police-related legislation be appropriately trained to actually go and respond to these calls (as police officers are, and as the mental health responders would be)? Given police-related legislation is only one of many legislative topics, would you apply that same principle to legislation involving EMTs and firefighters -- only those who go through training to physically fight fires themselves or go out on ambulances should be able to propose and enact laws related to these activities? How could one possibly have the time to appropriately train in all potential professions? As for a more loose definition of "willing", I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a politician who would publicly say they weren't willing to (e.g.) fight fires, but I'm sure that's not what you actually mean.

I think this is a fallacy. You can think about, discuss, research, study, and enact programs, rules, and regulations about a certain area even without having first-hand experience in that area -- that is a basic principle of human society. You should certainly inform yourself (through aforementioned research and studies) of the knowledge that rests with those who do have first-hand experience, but given that we know that systemic issues and bias exist in pretty much any field, and that those who are closest to that field are most likely to be influenced by both these and personal anecdotal "evidence", I would steer clear from basing your decisions entirely on their opinions, rather than taking these opinions as part of a more holistic view.