Too Many Deaths…

With footage recently being released of the March 14th death while in police custody of Marvin Scott, I can’t help but get angry all over again.

This man was bound and constrained with excessive force leading to the termination of seven of the officers and the resignation of one involved.

Fatal Force project (police brutality statistics) found that one and four people that are shot by police are experiencing a mental or emotional crisis.

This rang true in the killing of Scott who was suffering from schizophrenia and was off of his medication per his family.

This brings up the case of Patrick Warren Sr. Of Killeen Texas. His family attempted to contact mental health professionals to no avail they were sent an officer. When Patrick would not leave the house as instructed by the officer he was then tasered and ultimately shot twice.

Officers are given a CIT crisis intervention training which is a 40 hour long program to help officers identify different mental illnesses and how to handle being in those situations. This training is it simply is not doing the job. The course shoulf be longer and definitely needs to be updated and ongoing.

More needs to be done.

Possibly have a special team put in place in every city that can handle these types of situations so that death can be avoided.

Police have so many other methods to safely restrain a person that their gun should be the absolute last result. It is common knowledge that while white males with mental illnesses are more likely given treatment, black males are simply criminalized.

There are simply too many deaths of black men that were unarmed and also had a mental illness.

More conversations need to be had about mental illness, treatment and sensitivity to those affected.