“They’ll adjust her meds and release her”
Yeh there’s nothing like a few good punches to the face and some meds to get a mental patient back on track. After that cop straigtened her out on the finer points of MMA ground pound she prolly won’t even need meds anymore. Ya just gotta know how to handle these people. Once you get a small woman on the ground its important to get in a few good licks just to stay in practice for when you get home.
Thanks for proving my point, GG.
This happened about two miles from my office — I use that onramp regularly, and there’s a group of “homeless” people who sometimes panhandle at that location. About two weeks ago, a “new’ person showed up, who could even be this woman. She didn’t so much panhandle, as yell at passing cars, and on occasion just step out into moving traffic. This could be the same person, or someone different, it doesn’t really matter, but it does color my own perception of the events because I know, from seeing it with my own eyes, that there are occasionally crazy people at that location who really do wander around in traffic. It’s insanely dangerous, places everyone at great risk, and is manifestly something that I want the cops to address...either by citing the non-crazy people for the VC violation (to try to get them to stop), or taking the crazy ones for a 5150 evaluation (so they can get some help, at least temporarily). The way we deal with psychotics is a topic for a different day: at the moment, we’ve dumped them on the street, where we expect the cops to deal with them.
So, I fully believe that this person was a danger to self/others. The cop had a couple of choices: play shoo fly, tell her to get out of traffic and leave. Of course, she’ll be right back at it as soon as he’s gone. Or, do what he decided to do (his duty, by the way), and take her 5150.
Now, you don’t like the fact that he had to use force to do that, and you don’t like the force that he did use. I get that. But, since you’re the expert, what would the proper course of action have been? Seriously, you seem to have a better idea, and I’d like to hear it.