Originally posted on Quora December 6, 2022
This doesn’t surprise me one bit; New York City has always been a police state hell hole. The same city that gave us stop N’ frisk, secret gang databases, nuisance abatement, urban renewal, legal rape by cops, Mosque surveillance program and a total CCTV surveillance grid has now decided, through newly elected Mayor Eric Adams (D), to introduce class based discrimination and make a fundamental constitutional right contingent on one’s ability to afford housing. New York’s homeless will now be subject to mental health detainment by armed bureaucrats who have no legal duty to protect them, qualified immunity to violate their rights and who’ve been trained to shoot first and ask questions later when they glimpse anything that could be construed as a gun, knife or anything else that could resemble a weapon or threatening gesture.
How the Forced Hospitalization of "Mentally Ill" People Will Work in NYC
What could possibly go wrong when mentally ill or suspected mentally ill homeless people refuse to comply with being detained without suspicion of a crime and arrested without charge? Recent history shows that even mentally ill persons with a permanent nighttime residence are gunned down by police at alarming rates. The deadly “welfare checks” have demonstrated that police are ill equipped to intervene for individuals in the grips of a mental health crisis in a non-confrontational and non-combative manner. That might explain why over the past 3 years police have killed 178 people experiencing a mental health crisis in so-called “welfare checks” usually initiated by friends or family ignorant to the fact that police aren’t there to help them.
Even people without disabilities or untreated mental disorders are not safe during welfare checks. The murder of Atatiana Jefferson shows that even the slightest wrong move or hesitation can be fatal for civilians on the other end of the barrel even if they are unarmed and not making threatening gestures. Apparently, just standing by your window at 2:30 am is enough to elicit lethal force.
If police had the tool kit and mindset to handle mental health crises they would not be 16X more likely to kill people with untreated mental disorders, compared to the general public, yet despite being a small percentage of the population, disabled individuals are one-third to half of people killed by police. When all you have is a hammer (state violence) everything looks like a nail (criminal/enemy combatant); the tools police have at their disposal are suited for investigating crime and apprehending suspects not for calming people down or helping them cope with disabilities and past trauma. If anything, the mere presence of police exacerbates symptoms by giving the appearance that the person experiencing a mental health crisis is in trouble with the law.