This kind of thing makes me angry. But it also makes me sad, and most of all, frustrated.
For decades I’ve been hearing about new technology for detaining non-cooperative people. Nets and things like that.
Even if the police do everything right — it’s clear from the time ticker in the article that they didn’t — there is inherent risk in this mode of restraint.
Whether people are criminal, or having a mental health crisis, or cognitively disabled, or just afraid, there are many circumstances where we ought to be much better at
- de-escalation to calm people down, assure them, and try to create a voluntary compliance situation, and
- finding a way to detain people that doesn’t pose a physical or psychological risk.
And most of all, we need to train and monitor police much much better. And/or we need to acknowledge that they aren’t mental health experts and as a society we should then handle stuff like this another way. If they don’t do EMS, and they don’t put out fires, why do we expect cops to handle distressed people? They understandably go into every interaction seeing people as a potential threat, and that isn’t good common ground for helping people having an episode.