Nobody prosecuted him. It’s very beneficial to have laws that allow brief detention for psychiatric evalauations — in many cases, it has saved the detainee’s life and/or the lives of their immediate family members including children. If people are sending up red flags all over the place, we shouldn’t need to wait until they kill somebody to ascertain what’s going on.
It’s still not clear that police were out of line in this case. Though as I’ve said before, I don’t see any excuse for not having gotten a warrant before they started the early morning phone calls to him. And they’ve already admitted they screwed up by not submitting the required written form to monitor his gun purchases. But the question of whether or not they were justified in taking him in for a psych evaluation is still unclear. If, as a state trooper said (apparently based on reports from coworkers) he actually did come back to the office and bang on the door after being told by police he would be considered a trespasser if he returned to the premises without permission from his supervisor, then he broke the law. And if the reports from coworkers about his behavior having alarmed them were true, and properly documented by police before they started taking action against him (including monitoring his gun purchases), then they probably did have enough to justify the not-really-voluntary psych evaluation. And then there’s the matter of his hanging up on the police officer who was talking to him on the phone — the phone calls appear to have been part of an attempt to handle the matter in a less extreme way, and police could reasonably have interpreted the hang-up as a further sign of instability.
I’ll reserve judgement until more facts are out, but suspect that one or more people were feeding police exaggerated information about Pyles, to further some agenda of their own, and that that person or people should be on the receiving end of criminal charges.
>Nobody prosecuted him.
That can be a problem too, though. If someone is not-arrested [detained w/o prosecution] they are in a gray-state, legally. This is why we have the Habeus Corpus securities in the Constitution; to allow for someone being “detained indefinitely” to be released.
>It’s very beneficial to have laws that allow brief detention for psychiatric evalauations — in many cases, it has saved the detainee’s life and/or the lives of their immediate family members including children.
One problem is that ‘brief’ may mean different things to different people. Another is that people can be pushed & prodded until they [naturally] DO “send up a red flag.” Lastly, I am a bit weary of “psychiatric evaluations” as they may be tainted by political correctness or the [stupid] idea that violence at any time for any reason is wrong.
>If people are sending up red flags all over the place, we shouldn’t need to wait until they kill somebody to ascertain what’s going on.
True, technically. I still don’t think that it is the job of Law _Enforcement_ to do so. If it were, then the police could legitimately detain you [to lecture you] about speeding you haven’t done yet.
>Though as I’ve said before, I don’t see any excuse for not having gotten a warrant before they started the early morning phone calls to him. And they’ve already admitted they screwed up by not submitting the required written form to monitor his gun purchases.
That’s two major failings by the police right there. You might argue tat they are ‘technicalities,’ but I would prefer the [citizen’s] security of having warrants involved.
>And then there’s the matter of his hanging up on the police officer who was talking to him on the phone
I don’t usually hang-up on people; but I remember doing it to my dad once.
>the phone calls appear to have been part of an attempt to handle the matter in a less extreme way, and police could reasonably have interpreted the hang-up as a further sign of instability.
Perhaps. Though I am unsure how ‘reasonable’ they were; as stated they were rather early and we really don’t know what went on therein. The police could have called and simply breathed heavily until he hung up. {I’m not saying they did, but they could truthfully say that they called him and he hung up on them in such a case.}