Not one department in the country would have an unarmed response respond to a Mental Health call with any type of weapon involved.

You're quite right, the whole country is a mess when it comes to mental health and it would be great if our city could lead the way on making things better.

An unarmed response to mental health calls seems like a tragedy waiting to happen. A non-violent situation could easily turn the other way quickly. A Co-Response would be much safer.

I think the city has great services if one seeks them out. No one is talking about this young man’s history. Was this the first episode? Was he suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness?

> I think the city has great services if one seeks them out. No one is talking about this young man’s history. Was this the first episode? Was he suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness?

Can we expect a person who is experiencing mental illness (and therefore lacking reliable mental function) to identify that for themselves and seek out resources?

I've yet to see an actual suggestion that would have resolved a person running at the police/others with a machete but people keep claiming the police overstepped their bounds.

Sometimes shit is just bad. You can't send unarmed negotiators without zero protection, especially in situations where the person has a dangerous weapon.

Maybe - or maybe the family he was living with could’ve. Is it reasonable to think that a 20 year old, otherwise healthy person had his first mental health episode and went right to cutting himself, running around the neighborhood with a machete then charging at police? Or were there earlier signs that the family missed or ignored? Both are possible.

Tbh, the answer here is that some people need to have help forced on them. Same goes for people dealing with severe drug addiction. Frequently, people dealing with these issues are unable or unwilling to seek out the help they need. We cannot just assume that everyone has family or a support network. Forcing treatment on people isn’t a pretty solution, but it may help some people who wouldn’t otherwise receive any treatment.

The outrage over this is dumb. If an armed person covered in blood isn't listening to reason and charging at you, you'd shoot them too if you had a gun. I understand that people want somewhere to direct their anger and put blame on someone but for once, this shooting was completely justified.

Sure, but you need to think bigger picture.

We need to make investments in our society so that the situation you describe doesn't end up happening, and so that we don't get to the point where shooting them is our last remaining option.

Cambridge looking for new ways to waste government funds, shocking.

Yes, I agree. Never stop improving..

But if what the police are saying is true - this may well have been the last remaining option. It would be nice if there were bodycams to get a definitive answer but that is being held up at city hall, not the police. It would be nice if there were more tools, like tasers that could’ve been deployed, but again - that’s on city hall.

The problem I have is that almost everyone is taking this tragedy as an opportunity to push their anti-police agenda. The Muslim Justice League and others are trying to make this a race issue when it’s not. Some City councilors are again using tragedy to shit on police, calling for them to disarm and disband. Councilor Zondervan actually asked why do we need armed police to respond to dangerous calls and that firefighters don’t go into burning buildings with guns. Councilor Azeem asked was it necessary to chase a man who was self harming with a knife. Either these people are out of touch with reality or they just use any tragedy to push their agenda and hope people really aren’t paying attention to the details.

I'm sure that cops never killed anyone without a reason. Certainly not in the US.

>It would be nice if there were bodycams to get a definitive answer but that is being held up at city hall, not the police. It would be nice if there were more tools, like tasers that could’ve been deployed, but again - that’s on city hall.

Man, I didn't know that's where the body cameras stalled out...yeesh

Marc McGovern, a Cambridge city councilor, told MassLive that body cameras have been long supported by both the former and current city police commissioners, the city’s police union and several city councilors.

“Unfortunately, despite agreement, the city has not allocated funds for body cameras, thus there is no body camera footage,” councilman McGovern wrote in a newsletter statement.

God I wish people would stop trying to astroturf some anti-police reaction to this in this subreddit. Dude had a weapon, didn't respond to orders to drop it, and charged at people. Wtf did you want the cops to do??? This is exactly the sort of thing Copa should be getting called in for: someone with a deadly weapon is actively threatening people. If he'd holed himself up somewhere and no one was in immediate danger then great call for some mental help professionals.

Wow the rest of these bootlicking comments make me ashamed to know you are my neighbors. Shameful.

I'd love to hear from some qualified and experienced mental health responders on how they would respond to a situation like this to inform what best practices might look like. Many of the comments in this thread carry an assumption that if you are experiencing a mental health episode that endangers other, then the logical consequence is that your life deserves to be forfeit. That does not sit well with me for the same reasons that death sentences and corporal punishment don't. I don't believe you can truly call a justice system just if it claims to uphold the dignity of life and humanity by taking exactly those two things away from people.

It’s 1000% being used as an excuse to push the anti police budget/ anti armed police agenda. You have to keep in mind that this is Cambridge, a city with some EXTREMELY far left thinkers in city government, in a city that NEVER has an opportunity to go after the police like this. They took their chance. Zondervan is a means to an end thinker who doesn’t care how he gets to his policies, he just wants to do it. It’s interesting that in the past ten years or so Councillor Simmons is repeatedly having to reign in a lot of the fervor that comes out of this council during discourse

Azeem did ask some pertinent questions I thought, like why couldn’t more non lethal rounds get deployed. The police responded that they require time to do so. They also got into why aiming at legs/arms/extremities is not an overall safe thing to do for anyone involved or around the scene.

It’s a good point. The next step is disarming people without killing them. Best practices could resemble more surefire non lethal devices, and more sound non aggressive first response techniques (dialogue, which was mentioned by the police speaking at the special hearing acknowledging this could be better overall). We currently do not have these however, and that is not the fault of the officers that were on the ground that day

They also say they tried a less lethal option first. They shot him with a rubber bullet but that didn’t stop him.

Rubber bullets are frequently called non-lethal but they can be lethal in rare cases when they hit someone in the head.

I would argue that officers who truly believe in justice should be advocating internally for these techniques and approaches and asking to have those responsibilities given to those trained for it. It feels reductive and irresponsible to me that the argument could boil down to "I wish we had people to care for these folks, but since we don't I guess I have to kill them." Officers are conditioned to believe that killing one person can save others, but that system empowers them to make judgement calls about whose lives are valuable enough to save. I would like to see a shift in culture where officers stand up and say "stop putting me in positions where I have to end innocent lives" instead of being conditioned to believe they are actually doing good for society.

I also acknowledge that the level of income inequality in our country creates power dynamics in which individuals cannot always risk losing their jobs over their principles (though if they stood together they'd have a lot more power to do so). This is further evidence that we have a cultural problem around policing and that we should continue to expose how race, mental health, economics, and policing are always intersecting. Saying that someone is "astroturfing an anti-racist agenda" over any story about police brutality overlooks the reality that the history of policing is racial in nature.

There are suits for bombs, but no budget to disarm mentally ill people

okay, I've never seen this suggested anywhere so I assume there's a good reason it's not done, but here's what I think could be a real solution to the problem:

nets.

obviously this could only work for situations where the person doesn't have a gun, but they do have a large bladed weapon or something. Part of the problem is that when the assailant has a knife, it's really risky for any officers to get close to them because they can get lethally stabbed really quickly. And tasers and pepper spray aren't very reliable, and we'd like to avoid using a regular gun, right?

Here's what I'm imagining: they basically have these dense, sticky nets. As soon as they get the net on the person, it sticks to their skin, clothes, and to the net itself, and makes it so they immediately can't move that much. There would be no risk of suffocation because the net is mostly holes. It would be made of a tough enough material that it couldn't be easily cut, especially given their limited mobility.

to get the net on the person, they could have two officers hold either end of a long net and then encircle/clothesline the person from a distance. Once a single net has touched them it should be really easy to get more nets on them. You could do other things too, like maybe a t-shirt cannon that flings the net out from a distance.

so once the person is covered in a few nets, frustrated but mostly unharmed, they could walk up and take the knife away. Then they could use some safe chemical that would dissolve the net's stickiness to free the person. This is kind of like those "man catchers" they use in japan to hold someone immobile from a short distance, but those are still prob too risky and require too much skill for the average cop.