It was such a strange encounter, full of contradictions. She answered the door with a lovely smile, then quickly closed it. Then opened it again with that lovely smile and made a friendly comment, then immediately slashed at him. There are those who will suggest that this is a textbook example of why mental health counselors and not cops should be sent to do these checks. But that just means that defenseless mental health counselors will get attacked. So they'd have to go with cops anyway, and the results would likely be the same. Anybody who has an easy answer hasn't thought it through.
This is interesting. There's an implied formula we all have indicating whether it's "allowable" to mourn the loss of someone killed while "doing a bad thing." We don't all have exactly the same formula, but we all have a sense of it.
The inputs to the formula are "how bad was the thing they did" and "how crazy were they while doing it?" Ms. Wilson was clearly in the grips of a psychotic break and she injured but did not kill Mr. Liu. I think (and you Yassine clearly agree) this allows space to grieve her death. Had she killed Mr. Liu or had she been more rational, say, with a stated plan to kill cops, then her sympathy score goes down.
People responded on Twitter comparing Mr. Wilson to Ted Kaczynski, implying we wouldn't allow Harvard to mourn Prof. Kaczynski's death, but that's because he (a) killed a number of people and maimed several more and (b) wasn't outwardly crazy enough. So the comparison doesn't really work given Wilson's score compared to Kaczynski's.
Our legal system enshrines this "crazy enough" notion into "not guilty by reason of insanity" even. As if we are capable enough to discern someone's mental health based on a handful of examples. Now that is truly crazy. :)
I really appreciate how you systemized this into a formula! The Twitter responses were inane and not worth my time but yes, there's different inputs to consider when deciding when grief is "ok". It's also possible to compartmentalize. The interrogation of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz included a visit from his half-brother Zachary who was just absolutely crushed at the horrors Cruz caused. There's a moment where Zachary asks to hug Nikolas, and Nikolas finally drops the "I'm criminally insane" act and just bawls uncontrollably. I can hold space for a modicum of sympathy for those involved in that moment, including the absolute dipshit that Nikolas is.
I appreciate what you're trying to do here, I really do. Not many people are motivated to say anything about this kind of ugliness when it's directed toward people with severe mental illness, and it's been especially unfashionable lately to seem "soft" on insanity. It's commendable that you were motivated to write this at all. And you've done a good job of putting your reader in the head of a loved one of someone like Sydney.
But endorsing the idea that someone who is having a psychotic episode has experienced a variant of death and been transformed into an unrecognizable monster is still a radical failure of empathy. I feel like this is maybe coming from a desire to concede some rhetoric to the side of people who think that Sydney doesn't even deserve empathy, to show you aren't eliding anything about the gravity of the situation?
Or maybe something more common: I think the people who know and love people with psychosis understandably struggle to empathize with them or even comprehend their behavior when they have severe symptoms. I think our mental imputation of personhood and subjectivity requires the presence of capacities that can be so dysregulated in psychosis (like goal-directed behavior, something that we know can cause people to misperceive subjectivity in, like, polygons and blocks of wood) that they stop working for this and other outlier cases. I assume this is where we get the expression "the lights are on but nobody's home." But having been on the inside of one of those states, I'm sorry to say that subjectivity is pretty much intact. To the person experiencing the disturbed state, the saying has it backward--you're still home, but the power has gone out, the doors are locked from outside, and you've running out of food. When I had my first psychotic episode, some of my family members said things along these lines, "she's not herself, she's a different person, it's like she's not in there, it's almost like she died." And while this does reflect a love of the person as they understand them and grief at what is perceived to be an absence, it's very upsetting to hear when you're still trapped in the house!
It's more than just this attributional failure, though, because the dementias can be just as or more disruptive to legible behavior, and cause aggression and violence at substantial rates. But nobody calls grandpa crazed or homicidal when he tries to defend himself with a kitchen knife because he's hallucinating and thinks soldiers are coming to kill him again. Grandpa is just easier to empathize with, universally understood to be in a state of debility, and more readily disarmed. When somebody with sepsis has delirium and attacks a nurse, nobody is tempted to called them a monster, even a temporary one. And test your intuitions against somebody who doesn't have an underlying mental illness but experiences psychosis due to steroid treatment or anti-NMDR encephalitis. Is it harder to call them monstrous than someone who has a chronic condition like schizophrenia, with such a meaning-saturated label?
The symptoms that are most associated with violence in psychosis are command hallucinations (audible voices telling you what to do that you can't stop), the sense that your mind is being overtaken by external forces, and the belief that people are trying to hurt you. Violence in psychosis is also associated with confusion and impaired cognition. Sydney was almost certainly struggling to understand what was happening to her. She very likely believed the officer was trying to hurt her. It's possible that she was hearing actual voices telling her to protect herself, to get a knife. We can accept that this is a very dangerous situation that requires intercession for the benefit of her and others, without calling her a monster or implying that in a sense she was already kind of dead.
It's also just not the case that a neighbor or mental health worker turning up at her door is likely to have likely been treated the same way. Law enforcement officers can be terrifying to people with psychosis because a) they are highly salient symbols of power and authority, b) they can figure into the content of paranoid delusions, and c) they have guns and power to kill you, and if you can't help yourself from acting too erratic they legitimately might. Violence in psychosis is typically motivated by extreme fear, and cops can be paranoia-inducing even for sane people. Someone turning up in ordinary clothes and behaving as a peer rather than an authority figure is not as likely to illicit a defensive response. This is not to say there is no danger or imply that anyone can stroll up and be of service to someone having a psychotic break as long as they're nice. It's to say that it's important to understand the context of violence in psychosis if you want to lessen the risk to everyone involved, which is a meaningful goal and the kind of thing I currently do for a living, with a different population.
I'm afraid I can't bring myself to watch the video, and I'm not going to weigh in on the decisions of the officer involved. But no matter what Sydney did, she wasn't a monster. And what does labeling her one accomplish, besides making it easier to justify hurting her? If it was necessary to kill her, then it was necessary to kill a human being, and it would have been necessary to kill anyone who behaved like that regardless the cause. I appreciate you pointing out that Sydney was a person with a life and people who loved her before her presumptive psychosis. I just needed to say that she remained a person until the moment of her death.
What a beautiful and insightful comment, thank you so much for writing it.
I used 'monster' not to denounce her whole being, but simply to convey her particular state at some particular time. I would use that same label to describe the same temporary state anyone else finds themselves in, including grandpa or the delirious patient. I don't actually doubt that their actions "made sense" to them at the time, because I've dealt with many people during psychosis and have always been amazed by how much their logic faculties remain intact, even when their perceptions are deprecated.
For example, I had a client who was constantly having delusional manic episodes that would prompt her to physically assault random people on the street. But from her perspective, her shapeshifting warlock husband was sending assassins to kill her. If you accept that premise, her actions are perfectly reasonable! I even asked her how she knew the shapeshifter was her husband, and she said "I immediately recognized the wrinkles around his eyes" which floored me.
It's true that no one can predict whether Sydney would've been as homicidal towards a neighbor, but by the same token you also can't assume that police officers are particularly triggering. The problem with psychosis is that perception is skewed in an unpredictable direction, and it's not something that you can calibrate against by using some sort of standard template. Maybe badges and uniforms are triggering or maybe they're not, but either way you still need an armed agent as a default response to guard against the potential for violence.
>cops approached every call like a Time Crisis arcade session
Do you specify *arcade* session because the Time Crisis 3 playstation port introduces a rescue mission mode in which you are penalized for shooting innocent people and therefore one must approach a Time Crisis console session with more restraint than an arcade session? Very specific simile.
More seriously, the attention that this case received reminds me of the decade old SSC post that references Ferguson.
This sort of incident tends to act as a stand-in for all police shootings, including ones that aren't nearly as justifiable. Maybe it could be called a form of synecdoche?
I was thinking of "Toxoplasma", and predict that this case won't go viral precisely for that reason. The only kind of person who could look at the body cam footage above and not immediately conclude "good kill" is a radical leftist who wants to abolish policing as a concept, and who will having nothing to contribute to the conversation beyond the usual inane and unhelpful suggestions ("umm why didn't he shoot her in the leg??? why didn't he shoot the knife out of her hand??" etc.).
As soon as I read that she had earned a mental health first aid certification, I was pretty sure she had a serious mental health condition. It’s very common for people who are affected by mental illness to seek out resources like that.
A lot of people suspect suicide by cop, and I bet the officer did too and that may be part of the reason he hesitated.
I feel for the officer and for her family and friends. It’s a brutal situation for everyone.
One thing not considered here is that in an environment where the vast majority of the population (and therefore the vast majority of the police) aren’t all armed this would not have happened. If this were the UK the police officer would have had a night stick or a taser.
I can't stress how much people seriously underestimate the damage a single knife stab can accomplish, it's almost like video game logic of knives causing less damage points than guns.
If you want a real-life example of how UK police handle these situations, realize that it takes dozens of cops with riot shields to subdue one knife-wielding guy on an open street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFaPooJBDSg
Knife wounds are no joke. My guess is most of the people who would make ignorant comments about knives are also people who, if they were in that police officer’s position, would freeze in catatonic fear. Being in close quarters with someone who is homicidal and wielding a sharp object is very scary.
In December 2020 in Ireland, a young man with a history of serious mental illness was having a mental health episode, during which he assaulted a sales assistant in a grocery shop. The police were called and the young man led them on a merry chase through the surrounding suburbs for several hours, repeatedly slashing at them with the knife he was carrying. Almost all police officers in Ireland don't carry guns, but I think they realised early on that deadly force might be necessary and called an armed response unit. Nonetheless, they made every effort to subdue him non-lethally, repeatedly deploying tasers and pepper spray to no effect. It was only when the young man attempted to enter his family home (his family had taken out a restraining order on him because of his violent and erratic behaviour) that the guards decided they had no choice but to shoot the young man to protect his family, and did so.
Even in countries in which almost no civilians OR police officers carry guns, tragic incidents like this one can and do occur from time to time.
"LAPD officers fired Tasers just over 1,100 times last year, according to a department report published last month. The devices had the desired outcome — causing someone to submit to arrest — only 53 percent of the time."
"Some people have tugged the metal probes from their bodies, rendering the device useless. Mental illness or drug use can also influence how a person reacts to the shock."
"Experts said there are a variety of factors that can influence whether a Taser works as desired. Baggy clothing or sudden movement can rip the wires away. The drive-stun mode may not have the same effect on some people, particularly those who are under the influence of drugs or who are mentally ill."
I mean, the officer HAD to check that she was alright (FSVO 'alright'). This means potentially going in and checking that she doesn't have a loaded gun or handfuls of pills or... A wellness check includes many facets. Even if the officer wasn't worried about being subsequently sued for not following procedure, he probably honestly thought that she didn't seem 'ok' despite her protestations and wanted to just talk to her to confirm she really was OK. I would hope that all police officers and neighbors and family would do the same.
No it would not have, the mainstream media didn’t even cover this story much. Shooting like this happen everyday and no one even protest. You right wingers are so dramatic
Of course the corporate press--nothing "mainstream" about them--didnt cover this story. The second the body cam footage was shown it would have destroyed the narrative they would try to push. Which, to my point, would not have happened without Elon purchasing Twitter--the body cam footage would have been banned under some pretext or another.
Body can footage is usually sealed by judges protect the cops, it’s liberals who pushed for bodycam footages to be released in most cases like the Macdonald case in Chicago, they sealed the footage to protect the cop
He did nothing wrong, but unless there was other information provided that raised the likelihood that she might harm someone else, it does seem like "someone is worried about you" is insufficient for a police officer to be forced to keep on badgering someone in their own home, when they pose no threat and clearly just wanted the officer to bugger off
On the other hand, if the police had declined the counselor's request for them to make a wellness check and Wilson had killed herself, that would have been cited as proof positive that American police officers don't care about mentally ill black women. It's a lose-lose situation.
The shooting was obviously justified (and should have happened a few steps earlier, as evidenced by the fact that the officer still almost got stabbed after the first two shots), but I'm not convinced that they did *everything* right. After he got confirmation that Sydney was alive, why continue bothering her after she's made it clear that she doesn't want the police there? Knocking again wasn't helping her in any way.
Checking that they're alive is absolutely not enough for a mental health wellness check. And failing to conduct one of those is one of the few areas where a police officer can be successfully sued for not doing their job.
The officer may have been correctly following procedure, and if so my complaint is with the procedure. I don't think the police should have the right to enter people's homes and interrogate them without due process just because someone else called for a "wellness check". A lot of mental health issues that manifest in people acting erratic don't make them a danger to others, so I don't see the problem with just leaving them alone after they express that they don't want help from the police.
I think you're distorting what happened a bit. It's not like the cop tried to break down her door or demanded to be let in.
I think there are a *lot* of cases where the police officer / social worker insisting a bit and sticking around for five minutes can make the difference between "patient gets an emergency session with a psychiatrist" and "patient is found dead in their living room after committing suicide".
I appreciate the position you have expressed here but wonder about the context in which you've expressed it.
Do you believe Sydney was not a not a danger to anyone until the wellness check or that despite it being 100% valid in this particular case it still shouldn't be done or... something else?
It happens with greater frequency here than any other OECD country besides Colombia and Mexico, both of which are currently in open warfare against drug cartels (with both sides heavily funded by the U.S., fwiw). Not sure if those are the peer nations we want to be in company with.
Sorry that the Onion headline I repurposed for this topic was only true in the most relevant sense rather than in every sense, don’t know what I was thinking
The Onion headline is literally true in reference to mass school shootings, as they really do only regularly happen in the US. It is not true at all in the case of police shootings. I also don't know what you mean by "in the most relevant sense" - "OECD nations" is a more "relevant" meaning of the word "country" than "all sovereign nations"? Okay.
I admit to not having much evidence here, but I doubt that there is a total absence of these types of incidents in countries like Brazil or the Philippines, where cops kill around 6 times as many people annually as US cops do (and that's total, not per capita).
People with mental illness are as likely to commit a crime/violent crime as often as the general public. The reality is that they are more inclined to hurt themselves as opposed to others. That said, it seems to me that such an individual was on meds to help her cope. Begs the question if she was on these meds and/or were they effective? Sad outcome all the way around. Pax
It's actually the case that people with certain mental illnesses are at a higher risk of violence, although substance abuse is a stronger predictor that tends to get neglected in these discussions. Even with ~5X risk, the upper end of what you see when specific symptoms are present, the baseline risk is still very low (because very very few interactions are violent) when interacting with people with psychosis. You could maaaaaybe equate the absolute rates if you're rounding aggressively but it's not accurate to say there's no association.
I imagine a postmortem would determine whether or not she was on her meds at the time of her death. As for whether they were effective, I think the video speaks for itself.
It was such a strange encounter, full of contradictions. She answered the door with a lovely smile, then quickly closed it. Then opened it again with that lovely smile and made a friendly comment, then immediately slashed at him. There are those who will suggest that this is a textbook example of why mental health counselors and not cops should be sent to do these checks. But that just means that defenseless mental health counselors will get attacked. So they'd have to go with cops anyway, and the results would likely be the same. Anybody who has an easy answer hasn't thought it through.
Slap-drone?
This is excellent. I wish I had written it.
You honor me
This is interesting. There's an implied formula we all have indicating whether it's "allowable" to mourn the loss of someone killed while "doing a bad thing." We don't all have exactly the same formula, but we all have a sense of it.
The inputs to the formula are "how bad was the thing they did" and "how crazy were they while doing it?" Ms. Wilson was clearly in the grips of a psychotic break and she injured but did not kill Mr. Liu. I think (and you Yassine clearly agree) this allows space to grieve her death. Had she killed Mr. Liu or had she been more rational, say, with a stated plan to kill cops, then her sympathy score goes down.
People responded on Twitter comparing Mr. Wilson to Ted Kaczynski, implying we wouldn't allow Harvard to mourn Prof. Kaczynski's death, but that's because he (a) killed a number of people and maimed several more and (b) wasn't outwardly crazy enough. So the comparison doesn't really work given Wilson's score compared to Kaczynski's.
Our legal system enshrines this "crazy enough" notion into "not guilty by reason of insanity" even. As if we are capable enough to discern someone's mental health based on a handful of examples. Now that is truly crazy. :)
I really appreciate how you systemized this into a formula! The Twitter responses were inane and not worth my time but yes, there's different inputs to consider when deciding when grief is "ok". It's also possible to compartmentalize. The interrogation of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz included a visit from his half-brother Zachary who was just absolutely crushed at the horrors Cruz caused. There's a moment where Zachary asks to hug Nikolas, and Nikolas finally drops the "I'm criminally insane" act and just bawls uncontrollably. I can hold space for a modicum of sympathy for those involved in that moment, including the absolute dipshit that Nikolas is.
I appreciate what you're trying to do here, I really do. Not many people are motivated to say anything about this kind of ugliness when it's directed toward people with severe mental illness, and it's been especially unfashionable lately to seem "soft" on insanity. It's commendable that you were motivated to write this at all. And you've done a good job of putting your reader in the head of a loved one of someone like Sydney.
But endorsing the idea that someone who is having a psychotic episode has experienced a variant of death and been transformed into an unrecognizable monster is still a radical failure of empathy. I feel like this is maybe coming from a desire to concede some rhetoric to the side of people who think that Sydney doesn't even deserve empathy, to show you aren't eliding anything about the gravity of the situation?
Or maybe something more common: I think the people who know and love people with psychosis understandably struggle to empathize with them or even comprehend their behavior when they have severe symptoms. I think our mental imputation of personhood and subjectivity requires the presence of capacities that can be so dysregulated in psychosis (like goal-directed behavior, something that we know can cause people to misperceive subjectivity in, like, polygons and blocks of wood) that they stop working for this and other outlier cases. I assume this is where we get the expression "the lights are on but nobody's home." But having been on the inside of one of those states, I'm sorry to say that subjectivity is pretty much intact. To the person experiencing the disturbed state, the saying has it backward--you're still home, but the power has gone out, the doors are locked from outside, and you've running out of food. When I had my first psychotic episode, some of my family members said things along these lines, "she's not herself, she's a different person, it's like she's not in there, it's almost like she died." And while this does reflect a love of the person as they understand them and grief at what is perceived to be an absence, it's very upsetting to hear when you're still trapped in the house!
It's more than just this attributional failure, though, because the dementias can be just as or more disruptive to legible behavior, and cause aggression and violence at substantial rates. But nobody calls grandpa crazed or homicidal when he tries to defend himself with a kitchen knife because he's hallucinating and thinks soldiers are coming to kill him again. Grandpa is just easier to empathize with, universally understood to be in a state of debility, and more readily disarmed. When somebody with sepsis has delirium and attacks a nurse, nobody is tempted to called them a monster, even a temporary one. And test your intuitions against somebody who doesn't have an underlying mental illness but experiences psychosis due to steroid treatment or anti-NMDR encephalitis. Is it harder to call them monstrous than someone who has a chronic condition like schizophrenia, with such a meaning-saturated label?
The symptoms that are most associated with violence in psychosis are command hallucinations (audible voices telling you what to do that you can't stop), the sense that your mind is being overtaken by external forces, and the belief that people are trying to hurt you. Violence in psychosis is also associated with confusion and impaired cognition. Sydney was almost certainly struggling to understand what was happening to her. She very likely believed the officer was trying to hurt her. It's possible that she was hearing actual voices telling her to protect herself, to get a knife. We can accept that this is a very dangerous situation that requires intercession for the benefit of her and others, without calling her a monster or implying that in a sense she was already kind of dead.
It's also just not the case that a neighbor or mental health worker turning up at her door is likely to have likely been treated the same way. Law enforcement officers can be terrifying to people with psychosis because a) they are highly salient symbols of power and authority, b) they can figure into the content of paranoid delusions, and c) they have guns and power to kill you, and if you can't help yourself from acting too erratic they legitimately might. Violence in psychosis is typically motivated by extreme fear, and cops can be paranoia-inducing even for sane people. Someone turning up in ordinary clothes and behaving as a peer rather than an authority figure is not as likely to illicit a defensive response. This is not to say there is no danger or imply that anyone can stroll up and be of service to someone having a psychotic break as long as they're nice. It's to say that it's important to understand the context of violence in psychosis if you want to lessen the risk to everyone involved, which is a meaningful goal and the kind of thing I currently do for a living, with a different population.
I'm afraid I can't bring myself to watch the video, and I'm not going to weigh in on the decisions of the officer involved. But no matter what Sydney did, she wasn't a monster. And what does labeling her one accomplish, besides making it easier to justify hurting her? If it was necessary to kill her, then it was necessary to kill a human being, and it would have been necessary to kill anyone who behaved like that regardless the cause. I appreciate you pointing out that Sydney was a person with a life and people who loved her before her presumptive psychosis. I just needed to say that she remained a person until the moment of her death.
What a beautiful and insightful comment, thank you so much for writing it.
I used 'monster' not to denounce her whole being, but simply to convey her particular state at some particular time. I would use that same label to describe the same temporary state anyone else finds themselves in, including grandpa or the delirious patient. I don't actually doubt that their actions "made sense" to them at the time, because I've dealt with many people during psychosis and have always been amazed by how much their logic faculties remain intact, even when their perceptions are deprecated.
For example, I had a client who was constantly having delusional manic episodes that would prompt her to physically assault random people on the street. But from her perspective, her shapeshifting warlock husband was sending assassins to kill her. If you accept that premise, her actions are perfectly reasonable! I even asked her how she knew the shapeshifter was her husband, and she said "I immediately recognized the wrinkles around his eyes" which floored me.
It's true that no one can predict whether Sydney would've been as homicidal towards a neighbor, but by the same token you also can't assume that police officers are particularly triggering. The problem with psychosis is that perception is skewed in an unpredictable direction, and it's not something that you can calibrate against by using some sort of standard template. Maybe badges and uniforms are triggering or maybe they're not, but either way you still need an armed agent as a default response to guard against the potential for violence.
>cops approached every call like a Time Crisis arcade session
Do you specify *arcade* session because the Time Crisis 3 playstation port introduces a rescue mission mode in which you are penalized for shooting innocent people and therefore one must approach a Time Crisis console session with more restraint than an arcade session? Very specific simile.
More seriously, the attention that this case received reminds me of the decade old SSC post that references Ferguson.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
This sort of incident tends to act as a stand-in for all police shootings, including ones that aren't nearly as justifiable. Maybe it could be called a form of synecdoche?
I was thinking of "Toxoplasma", and predict that this case won't go viral precisely for that reason. The only kind of person who could look at the body cam footage above and not immediately conclude "good kill" is a radical leftist who wants to abolish policing as a concept, and who will having nothing to contribute to the conversation beyond the usual inane and unhelpful suggestions ("umm why didn't he shoot her in the leg??? why didn't he shoot the knife out of her hand??" etc.).
I guess you're right. I haven't really seen much virality to it.
Maybe when there is a controversial case that goes viral, this will get brought up by the pro-cop side as something less controversial.
What a balanced and fair dive into a horrifically tragic event. You helped us see all sides with clarity and understanding. Thank you.
This is a great post. Need more of this sort of thing on Substack.
As soon as I read that she had earned a mental health first aid certification, I was pretty sure she had a serious mental health condition. It’s very common for people who are affected by mental illness to seek out resources like that.
A lot of people suspect suicide by cop, and I bet the officer did too and that may be part of the reason he hesitated.
I feel for the officer and for her family and friends. It’s a brutal situation for everyone.
One thing not considered here is that in an environment where the vast majority of the population (and therefore the vast majority of the police) aren’t all armed this would not have happened. If this were the UK the police officer would have had a night stick or a taser.
I can't stress how much people seriously underestimate the damage a single knife stab can accomplish, it's almost like video game logic of knives causing less damage points than guns.
If you want a real-life example of how UK police handle these situations, realize that it takes dozens of cops with riot shields to subdue one knife-wielding guy on an open street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFaPooJBDSg
Knife wounds are no joke. My guess is most of the people who would make ignorant comments about knives are also people who, if they were in that police officer’s position, would freeze in catatonic fear. Being in close quarters with someone who is homicidal and wielding a sharp object is very scary.
In December 2020 in Ireland, a young man with a history of serious mental illness was having a mental health episode, during which he assaulted a sales assistant in a grocery shop. The police were called and the young man led them on a merry chase through the surrounding suburbs for several hours, repeatedly slashing at them with the knife he was carrying. Almost all police officers in Ireland don't carry guns, but I think they realised early on that deadly force might be necessary and called an armed response unit. Nonetheless, they made every effort to subdue him non-lethally, repeatedly deploying tasers and pepper spray to no effect. It was only when the young man attempted to enter his family home (his family had taken out a restraining order on him because of his violent and erratic behaviour) that the guards decided they had no choice but to shoot the young man to protect his family, and did so.
Even in countries in which almost no civilians OR police officers carry guns, tragic incidents like this one can and do occur from time to time.
I presume this is the incident you mentioned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_George_Nkencho
That's correct.
Do you know why the taser was (can be) ineffective?
I could Google this, but for other's benefit too.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is the main reason is that the darts can't always penetrate through fabric.
See this article: https://eu.lcsun-news.com/story/news/2016/04/03/tasers-often-dont-work-review-lapd-incidents-finds/82577228/
"LAPD officers fired Tasers just over 1,100 times last year, according to a department report published last month. The devices had the desired outcome — causing someone to submit to arrest — only 53 percent of the time."
"Some people have tugged the metal probes from their bodies, rendering the device useless. Mental illness or drug use can also influence how a person reacts to the shock."
"Experts said there are a variety of factors that can influence whether a Taser works as desired. Baggy clothing or sudden movement can rip the wires away. The drive-stun mode may not have the same effect on some people, particularly those who are under the influence of drugs or who are mentally ill."
I mean, the officer HAD to check that she was alright (FSVO 'alright'). This means potentially going in and checking that she doesn't have a loaded gun or handfuls of pills or... A wellness check includes many facets. Even if the officer wasn't worried about being subsequently sued for not following procedure, he probably honestly thought that she didn't seem 'ok' despite her protestations and wanted to just talk to her to confirm she really was OK. I would hope that all police officers and neighbors and family would do the same.
If Elon hadn't bought Twitter, this shooting would be this year's George Floyd.
No it would not have, the mainstream media didn’t even cover this story much. Shooting like this happen everyday and no one even protest. You right wingers are so dramatic
Of course the corporate press--nothing "mainstream" about them--didnt cover this story. The second the body cam footage was shown it would have destroyed the narrative they would try to push. Which, to my point, would not have happened without Elon purchasing Twitter--the body cam footage would have been banned under some pretext or another.
Body can footage is usually sealed by judges protect the cops, it’s liberals who pushed for bodycam footages to be released in most cases like the Macdonald case in Chicago, they sealed the footage to protect the cop
Yes. That was a pretty big miscalculation on your part wasn't it?
But do
He did nothing wrong, but unless there was other information provided that raised the likelihood that she might harm someone else, it does seem like "someone is worried about you" is insufficient for a police officer to be forced to keep on badgering someone in their own home, when they pose no threat and clearly just wanted the officer to bugger off
On the other hand, if the police had declined the counselor's request for them to make a wellness check and Wilson had killed herself, that would have been cited as proof positive that American police officers don't care about mentally ill black women. It's a lose-lose situation.
The shooting was obviously justified (and should have happened a few steps earlier, as evidenced by the fact that the officer still almost got stabbed after the first two shots), but I'm not convinced that they did *everything* right. After he got confirmation that Sydney was alive, why continue bothering her after she's made it clear that she doesn't want the police there? Knocking again wasn't helping her in any way.
Checking that they're alive is absolutely not enough for a mental health wellness check. And failing to conduct one of those is one of the few areas where a police officer can be successfully sued for not doing their job.
The officer may have been correctly following procedure, and if so my complaint is with the procedure. I don't think the police should have the right to enter people's homes and interrogate them without due process just because someone else called for a "wellness check". A lot of mental health issues that manifest in people acting erratic don't make them a danger to others, so I don't see the problem with just leaving them alone after they express that they don't want help from the police.
I agree it's a nuanced question with intractable trade-offs. I'm comfortable with where it's currently calibrated at.
I think you're distorting what happened a bit. It's not like the cop tried to break down her door or demanded to be let in.
I think there are a *lot* of cases where the police officer / social worker insisting a bit and sticking around for five minutes can make the difference between "patient gets an emergency session with a psychiatrist" and "patient is found dead in their living room after committing suicide".
I appreciate the position you have expressed here but wonder about the context in which you've expressed it.
Do you believe Sydney was not a not a danger to anyone until the wellness check or that despite it being 100% valid in this particular case it still shouldn't be done or... something else?
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Yeah, no, that headline works for school shooters, but deranged people getting shot or almost shot by the police is something that happens everywhere.
It happens with greater frequency here than any other OECD country besides Colombia and Mexico, both of which are currently in open warfare against drug cartels (with both sides heavily funded by the U.S., fwiw). Not sure if those are the peer nations we want to be in company with.
Well now you're moving the goalposts by changing it from "nation" to "OECD country".
Sorry that the Onion headline I repurposed for this topic was only true in the most relevant sense rather than in every sense, don’t know what I was thinking
The Onion headline is literally true in reference to mass school shootings, as they really do only regularly happen in the US. It is not true at all in the case of police shootings. I also don't know what you mean by "in the most relevant sense" - "OECD nations" is a more "relevant" meaning of the word "country" than "all sovereign nations"? Okay.
Yes, I think comparing our rate of police shootings to, say, Great Britain makes more sense than comparing it to, say, Somalia.
I admit to not having much evidence here, but I doubt that there is a total absence of these types of incidents in countries like Brazil or the Philippines, where cops kill around 6 times as many people annually as US cops do (and that's total, not per capita).
Venezuela has a vastly higher rate of police shooting people dead than the US, both per capita and in absolute terms.
So the countries that have worse rates of police violence than the U.S. are literally failed states? I think that proves my point lol
People with mental illness are as likely to commit a crime/violent crime as often as the general public. The reality is that they are more inclined to hurt themselves as opposed to others. That said, it seems to me that such an individual was on meds to help her cope. Begs the question if she was on these meds and/or were they effective? Sad outcome all the way around. Pax
It's actually the case that people with certain mental illnesses are at a higher risk of violence, although substance abuse is a stronger predictor that tends to get neglected in these discussions. Even with ~5X risk, the upper end of what you see when specific symptoms are present, the baseline risk is still very low (because very very few interactions are violent) when interacting with people with psychosis. You could maaaaaybe equate the absolute rates if you're rounding aggressively but it's not accurate to say there's no association.
I imagine a postmortem would determine whether or not she was on her meds at the time of her death. As for whether they were effective, I think the video speaks for itself.
Meds are a mixed bag …