Never Let a Police Officer Near a Vulnerable Person

In November last year, back when I was still homeless, I rode in the back of a police car being escorted back to my shelter after an encounter at the hospital, and had a friendly conversation with the constable behind the wheel (I wasn’t under arrest at the time). She lamented that the reactions they got from homeless people every time they answered a call pertaining to the city’s poorer neighbourhoods was at best chilling and at worst utterly hostile. I gave her the following insight and advice: This is not going to change because we belong to opposite sides of an unbridgeable gulf. When answering such a call, be as little visible as possible and let outreach do the intervention. One cannot be both a police officer and an outreach worker because the roles are incompatible; if you want to help the homeless instead, give up the uniform and start a career in outreach.

And I mean every one of these words. A police officer is a tool of repression, and their training is diametrically opposite to that of an outreach worker or paramedic, which means they’re the wrong tool for the job. For starters, the police is trained to intimidate, if only to compel compliance and avoid escalation. Its most potent weapon isn’t hanging from the officers’ belts; it’s their uniforms. Of course this cannot have a positive effect on people who have already been abused by the system, suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or paranoid schizophrenia, or use psychoactive drugs. Intimidating such people just pours fuel on the fire. Truly, the officers have barely shown up answering a call involving such a person, haven’t said or done anything yet, and they have already worsened the situation, because the sight of the uniform is enough to make many such people freak out.

Another issue with police officer training is that they’re not supposed to think. They’re being told, and rightfully so, that hesitation means death. They’re trained to hunt down vicious predators that will take advantage of every weakness they display, and may seize any opening to jump at an officer’s throat. From an officer’s standpoint, every single encounter with the public may degenerate unpredictably into a fight to the death within a split second without warning, and the multiplication of random assaults in recent years due to the toxic drug supply can only reinforce that conviction. So they’re not going to pause and take a moment to assess a complicated situation as a paramedic would do, for example.

Then there comes the issue of officer summons. A police officer is trained to summon the public to comply with its orders, under threat of force. The problem is that many vulnerable people cannot answer police summons. I personally know someone extremely verbally challenged at the best of times who can hardly communicate with unfamiliar people and may struggle to understand people’s speech. Imagine that person being intoxicated and feral and being the subject of a police call; if following their training to the letter, the officers will draw their weapons because the suspect is agitated and order him to submit to arrest, and when that fails they will use “less lethal weapons” to enforce compliance. This isn’t merely speculative; I personally witnessed the aftermath of such a close call and I wasn’t happy about it one bit (nobody was hurt in the end, fortunately).

It’s not just me saying this, it’s also the police. Many will eagerly admit that they don’t want to do it because it’s not their job. The police should not be dispatched over incidents involving the mentally ill, and should not be performing welfare checks. Period. To do otherwise is systemic incompetence and mass murdering vulnerable people.

Review of recent encounters gone awry

A flurry of recent incidents are certain to have made every outreach worker cringe across the country, from coast to coast, in addition to causing mass indignation among the public at large. I’d like to go through some of them to illustrate exactly what went wrong and why:

Video shows lead-up to VPD shooting of Indigenous man on Downtown Eastside using bean bag gun

This episode, which led to the death of an innocent man whose crime was to have been sprayed with mace clearly illustrates why police intervention is wrong, even when the officers try their best to defuse the situation.

When the police arrived, the officers faced a man that was visibly agitated, for no clear reason. To their credit, they asked bystanders for assistance in engaging with the subject, which is frankly more clever than I would expect of most of them, but unfortunately no one stepped forward. Then, following their training, they issued summons which went predictably unanswered; it’s that mace thing, you see. With scarce information and fearing violent escalation they once again fell back to their training and opened fire with a bean bag gun, supposedly less lethal than a firearm but plenty enough to kill someone. The subject died another statistic, just like that.

An outreach worker would have instead given the subject as much space as possible, and would also have had a much easier time getting bystanders’ cooperation; it’s the trust bond and the lack of uniform that would have made the difference. Then the worker would have taken the time to assess the situation and called for a paramedic instead of reaching for a weapon. The outcome would have been completely different.

On a concluding note, I would like to point out that shooting the victim pretty much killed all hope of apprehending the suspect in the mace spraying incident, which means the police encounter was most counterproductive from a law enforcement perspective as well. The police should have been called to investigate in the aftermath of the incident, not before the health emergency was resolved.

‘I’m not resisting’: Video shows police Tasering shirtless woman at busy Vancouver transit station

Here’s what happens when police officers follow their training down the cliff.

The officers answer a call at a train station and rush toward a suspect taking off her clothes and behaving erratically. An outreach worker would probably have construed that the subject was either intoxicated or psychotic and given her some space, for starters, but the officers engaged her and tried police de-escalation techniques instead, as they were no doubt trained to do. The problem is that these techniques were either intended to be used on agitated but rational people, or devised by people with no understanding of mental illness or toxicology. Now repeat after me: You do not argue with a psychotic patient. Say it fifty times until it sinks in, because it makes things worse, not better. I’ve had this conversation with outreach workers, so imagine what I think of police officers doing it.

As for tasering someone trying to put a shirt on, I certainly hope this isn’t part of police officer training, because if that’s the case then the said training urgently needs to change. In fact, it makes me wonder which side actually displayed mental health issues.

Alberta teen with autism still traumatized weeks after RCMP arrested him at a playground

I’m so dismayed by this account that I just don’t feel like writing a description for it. I’ll let the original article do the talking:

The Edmonton teenager, who has autism, was arrested at a St. Albert playground earlier this month. More than three weeks later, the boy’s parents say he remains traumatized by his encounter with police. 

Ryley, 16, was playing in a park behind his grandparents house in St. Albert on Oct. 2 when he was detained by RCMP who believed he was a man impaired by drugs. 

An hour later, he was transferred from a police holding cell to hospital. Mounties said the boy repeatedly harmed himself while in their custody.

Source: CBC

The fact that they couldn’t tell an autistic person apart from a drug user shows a stellar level of cluelessness even from people without mental health training. As for putting intoxicated people in jail cells, the officers were indeed following their protocol, as egregious as it may seem. I have myself witnessed an incident in which the police barged in uninvited following a call to the paramedics over a subject experiencing a panic attack, ordered paramedics and outreach workers to step back, and incarcerated the subject as just another junkie, effectively denying him health care. I can attest this is normal behaviour from the police. Must I point out it’s also a civil rights infraction?

Burnaby to review approach to tent checks after RCMP officer’s stabbing death

I’m certain to alienate a lot of people by rubbing salt into that wound, but let’s review that particularly cringe-inducing incident leading to the death of an officer who tried to be both a cop and a mental health worker, with predictable results.

If nothing else, entering a tent whose occupant is unconscious displays utter temerity; I would never do such a thing precisely out of concern I’d get stabbed. A homeless person’s tent is their castle, even more so than someone’s home, because it’s the last refuge of a desperate person with nowhere to go, and one violates it at their own peril. Imagine for a second how you would react in such circumstances upon waking up with a stranger in uniform inches from your face about to stab you with a needle. Honestly, even I might just reflexively lash out, and I’m reputably level-headed.

Which brings me to the naloxone part. Once again it shows that police officers are trained to act first and think later, because assessing the situation for ten seconds would have shown the absurdity of such a course of action. First of all, there is nothing extraordinary about a homeless person being unconscious in a tent and not answering summons; various forms of intoxication could explain it, may it be alcohol, heroin, or even benzodiazepines. Asking for bystander help would have been wise, but probably futile while wearing a uniform. Rushing for a naloxone kit makes a mockery of relevant training and reduces a 2-hour course to “sticking the needle in the patient’s arm”; if nothing else, assessing the patient’s vitals is a no-brainer. And then there’s common sense kicking in: naloxone can only save a patient from an opioid overdose if injected within minutes of consumption, which means if one just stumbles upon an unconscious person with no vitals the morning after on a random welfare check, it’s way too late, might as well call the coroner.

Of course an outreach worker would know all this and handle the situation accordingly. A police officer trying to be both at the same time is just begging to be stabbed. That’s how tragedies happen.

Solutions?

There are multiple initiatives which could avoid such tragedies. The most obvious is to dispatch outreach workers along with police officers. These teams are already being deployed and achieving results on the ground, and indeed I’ve never read or heard of a police incident involving the homeless in which outreach workers were present. I’ve had the opportunity to observe such a team in action: one police officer behind the wheel of an unmarked car, letting two outreach workers perform the intervention. It makes the difference between helping someone in need and getting them shot, while protecting both the public and the outreach workers.

Solving the underlying social ills would also go a long way toward minimising such incidents in the first place. I’ve already made the case that a safe drug supply would greatly reduce the incidence of random criminality in poor neighbourhoods. Also, supportive housing for the disabled and mentally ill would take people off the streets where they’re most vulnerable. Reforming tenancy law and improving legal recourse would counter the current wrongful eviction crisis. Defunding the police and investing in genuine solutions to social problems instead of repression would incidentally reduce criminality and avoid unleashing paramilitary units unto vulnerable groups already struggling to survive.