Guy shouting fuck you pig while surrounded by 50 SWAT guys sounds like a mental health emergency. Can't do much about that. Ain't called first respondersfor nothing.
Sure, you can dose him up with Haldol and solve that particular emergency. What happens when he does it again next week? And the week after that?
Persistent severe mental illness is interesting in that it's a new problem. For all of human history, severe mental illness was a death sentence. Either you'd get beaten to death by your largest neighbor for acting weird, or your village would exile you and you'd starve to death in the forest.
The current compromise we've arrived at is that being crazy is not actually a crime, so you cannot be permanently imprisoned for it. So low-functioning schizophrenics cycle through mental hospitals-- they climb a lamp post and urinate on passers-by, get committed and then are put on antipsychotics, sober up, survey their surroundings and rationally conclude that inpatient mental health facilities are really awful places to be, (basically no rights or privacy, surrounded by crazy people, can't wear or handle any object that's on a very short list of approved suicide-incompatible things) and then check themselves out, which they are legally allowed to do. Then they go off their meds, (also legally allowed) and it's back to the lamp post...
This continues until they accidentally walk into traffic, or are shot by a cop. It's a miserable compromise that persists because all the alternatives are even less palatable.
It should be cheaper than prisons and more humane as well. The homeless crisis begs for this.
Just got to work out trivial details like how to not have that power be abused...
The correct answer is to legalize, tax, and regulate all drugs and to create "mental health courts" that can administer the involuntary institutionalization of those that need it.
There's obviously violent scenarios that can only be addressed with violence, but bringing that on should be a last resort.
And for that to happen we need to understand it.
And for that to happen we need to talk about it.
My point was that the comment about divisiveness between teams red and blue in this regard was divisive as well in how it was framed.
Police are granted incredible powers and have historically not had the best oversight, let alone relations with "minorities".
There are real problems and they can be addressed but that will never happen as long as we can't even agree that the "what" exists, let alone if the "how" is correct.