Saturday, March 28, 2015



This past week in my american studies class, we had a discussion that led to the topic of mental illness. We talked about how for years there was a stigma about mental illnes. Our harsh solutions to dealing with these kinds of people were to lock them up in institutions. It was even viewed as Negitive to be seeing a shrink! But we then discussed the fact that things are very improved now a days. At my school New Trier, we have an excellent staff and programs designed to help educate and nurture any students that might have special needs. But even with the progress we've made, we still have far to come. There was a recent release of police vest camera footage of a 911 call that ended tragically. The call was made by the mother of the vitctim, who called 911 and said that she was concerned about the saftey of her son, who wasn't under control, her son being bi-polar schiztafrenic. With that knowledge in mind two officers responded to the call and the footage details the rest. The man with the illness steps out holding a screw driver refuses to put it down. He then takes a step towards the policemen and they draw their guns, what happens next is fast, but it results in the man being shot to death by both the policemen. 
I would like to draw attention to several extreme issues I had with the video. One, the officers didn't even try to respond with non lethal options, which they HAD. Two, they shouted at the victim, which only escalated the situation. And three, while he didn't drop the screwdriver, the man only took a slight step toward the officers before he was shot five times.
 What I really want to focus on is what the news anchor said next. She then had the mental illnes leazan of the madison police department come on the news for a interview and she asked her what her opinion on the video and that situation was. The policewomans response was that the force has spefically trained some of its member in ways to deal with this sort of situation(calls involving the mentally ill). She says that in the Madison police dep. they have full time officers that specialize in dealing with the mentally ill, and that they try to take a proactive approach to these kind of situations. Hopefully this tragic incident can serve as a nreminder and a call to action to other departments in terms of their policies and responsis to crisises dealing with the mentally ill.

Sources and actual video



1 comment:

  1. frank, not sure where my comment just went. let's talk about blogging soon. this post takes too long to begin. embed video and analyze lang and footage. find relevant stats to help you generalize from this incident

    ReplyDelete