tl;dr, we need more time examples and research to say anything authoritative, but anecdotally things look very positive. One excerpt,
There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job so far, according to experts. And data suggests unarmed responders rarely need to call in police. In Eugene, Oregon, which has operated the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (known locally as CAHOOTS) response team since 1989, roughly 1% of their calls end up requiring police backup, according to the organization. Albuquerque responders have asked for police in 1% of calls, as of January. In Denver, the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) team had never called for police backup due to a safety issue as of July 2022, the most recent data available. In Durham, members of the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART) reported feeling safe on 99% of calls.
Many communities are still sending alternative responders to a narrow subset of calls, and debating whether it’s safe to expand their scope. For example, many cities will only send community responders to situations that are outdoors or in public spaces. Programs are also divided on whether disputes between neighbors or within families are a proper place for crisis responders, or calls involving suicidal threats.
Maybe because involuntary commitment does more harm than good? It was all the rage in the 19th century.
19th century people had all kinds of problems, but that’s an excuse to learn from it and correct it, not get rid of it.
We need to fix what Reagan did to mental health care. That’s where our current problems started.
What we learned from that is that involuntary commitment doesn’t work. And we corrected it by not doing it anymore.
This guy thinks we’ve somehow evolved as a species from 50-100 years ago, so we should definitely go all in on it again. Government workers should totally be allowed to snatch people up off the streets or even in their own homes and send them to a facility where they’re tied to a bed and pumped full of drugs based on little more than their own discretion. This would never be abused by some officer who thinks that anyone who doesn’t kowtow to their ego is obviously crazy and needs to be put in a facility where they’re considered crazy until they can somehow prove that they aren’t to a bunch of strangers.
Come to think of it, these comments sound a little bit unhinged. Perhaps we need to call the authorities and have someone 5150ed…
Involuntary commitment, with modern facilities and techiques, absolutely can work.
Lol