“He would light up any room that he entered into,” said Nicky McIntosh, one of his two daughters. “He just had that kind of personality that was infectious.”
According to RCMP, officers went to an address on 0 Avenue in Langley on Friday afternoon to do a wellness check after someone reported an individual was distraught and made concerning comments.
Police should never be the main responder to a mental health chrisis.
Unfortunately many people in the healthcare field similarly don’t want to be involved with these situations without police etc present as the possibility for violence is high.
The cases of assault/injury among healthcare professionals is pretty high, especially those that dream more with mental-health issues.
It would be good to have somebody trained in mental health to assist with crisis cases, but that’s not going to exclude police presence (and there aren’t nearly enough mental health professionals).
That’s what I mean by “main” responder. They should be on call for actual trained service workers to call the shots. Maybe literally available at the curb by policy, but the point being they aren’t calling the shots because they’re always the one with a gun.
But again, the issue is that we don’t have nearly enough people in the field to actual do that. I’m sure somebody will bring up the “defund the police and hire more” line, but even with money that doesn’t magically make able-bodied trained professionals magically appear, and if it fits that’s still need a supporting police presence anyhow.
No one is saying it’d be easy or take no further resources.
If we FUNDED people to respond to these incidents using a small portion of the funds allocated to the police force it would have enough people.
What would be “enough people” and where would they come from?
I don’t know what enough people would be, I would recommend you ask the experts that have been asking for this for years.
The people would come from the general workforce, like anything new it might take a few years to initially build up the program, but this is the case with literally anything.
deleted by creator
To be clear if I am in distress DO NOT CALL ANYONE JUST WAIT IT OUT!!!
