>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.}
The account of the hang-up is confirmed by Pyles himself, who said he confused the officer (who had called a short time earlier and identified himself as a police officer) with a union official who has a similar name.
I’d be very concerned about all this if it wasn’t being investigated by law enforcement and publicized by the media. Given that both are occurring, and law enforcement has admitted at least one error already, and returned Pyles’ guns to him promptly upon request, I’m not too concerned. I suspect there are serious abuses of justice in completely unrelated cases/jurisdictions that aren’t hitting our radar screen, and I’d rather try to keep an eye out for those, than get overly worked up about this incident.
Psych holds must be “brief” as spelled out in the relevant state stuature, which is subject to some restrictions and limitations imposed by federal court decisions. The definition of “brief” is not just left up to the LE agency or psychiatrists involved in a particular case. Longer psych holds require a court hearing. Pyles was held for less than a quarter of a day, so I’m not concerned about any reasonableness standard being violated here.