1. Houston Chronicle October 18, 2013
2. Dallas police probe shooting of mentally ill man
3. State
4. According to police officers in Dallas, a mentally ill man was lunging at an officer with a knife which resulted int he officer shooting the man, but a video was recorded showing that the man was not threatening the officer.
5. This effects the mental health community and their families because a lot of mentally ill people are living on the streets and get negatively and dangerously stereotyped.
6. I found this article especially interesting because I recently went to the panel held at TXST about mental illness and the law. They were talking about how there are certain police officers who are properly trained to deal with the mental health community. This is especially important to train these individuals because law enforcement agents are the deciding factor on whether or not a person has to be put on emergency detention. But what happens when one of these specially trained officers doesn't get to the scene in time to stop a person or assess their mental capacity? The job goes down to officers who don't have training on dealing with persons with bi polar disorder, or schizophrenia, or another mental illness. They dont understand how to talk to these people or how to keep from triggering them. I worked as a nursing assistant a the state psych hospital in El Paso, and when you talk to these people you need to address them in their own way. You approach relationships differently and in a non threatening way. Officers who are not trained in mental illness could easily jump to conclusions or react in a way that is unnecessary. We need to train all officers so that they are all equally prepared to deal with the mental health population, and so that instances like this do not happen again.
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