Posted on 01/11/2011 2:04:45 PM PST by PieterCasparzen
The annual reports of Arizona Department of Health Services, Division of Behavioral Services are show on their website.
With all the money that is spent on mental health in Arizona, citizens should be outraged that the police neglected to refer Loughner to mental health services on even one occasion when his problems were so obvious, documented and indicative of violence.
CPSA alone has a $300 million dollar budget and it's only 1 of 4 agencies; it's the agency that covers Pima County. I have not found the budget of Division of Behavior Services itself.
Arizona spends millions on these services; CPSA (service area includes Pima County) for the year ended June 30, 2010 reports revenues of $305,786,052.
This is CPSA mission/guiding principles:
http://w3.cpsa-rbha.org/static/index.cfm?contentID=9
It's very unfortunate that after 20 years of lawsuit a struggling system and hundreds of millions of government programs - I don't think this is something governemnt should be doing anyway - when the chips were down and the opportunity was there to perhaps intervene in some way, the phone call was not made. Shame on you Sheriff politico.
It seems like the Sheriff’s Office, the Military which rejected him alledgedly for psychological problems, and the school which expelled him, unless he got a mental evaluation, all failed in this regard.
Not positive why the Military rejected him, but I read on FR it was for psych. The school failed in that instead of taking initiative and getting the mental health agencies involved, they depended on the shooter to get help himself.
unless it was all spent on illegals, Sheriff Dumbprick has no excuse.
What exactly does “dereliction of duty” Dupnik do with his 1513 employees and $118 million budget?
The community college had many complaints against this guy. Don’t these public institutions have a duty to the public to make psychiatric evaluations of these individuals mandatory?
Well, school had properly notified law enforcement of danger: if there’s a school shooting, school does not take care of it completely, they call law enforcement. You agree ? And, of course, military has no jurisdiction; I don’t know if they have a policy governing what recruiters should do if they come across an unstable recruit.
Local law enforcement, though, has reems of stuff all over the web showing that they have all sorts of instructional programs for officers, local laws, policies, a huge pile of government policy and procedure, so with any sort of encounter they have with a mentally unstable person, they know how to refer to the proper agency. This is apparently a routine task that officers do: they transport the mentally unstable person to the treatment center. Well, I’m wondering, is this actually true ? Do they or don’t they identify and handle unstable people this way, that is, is this standard procedure in Arizona ?
If it is, then it should have been done when they encountered Loughner, based on interviews that have been published on the web - I don’t see how this was not done... you know ?
There’s nothing the school could do. You can’t force somebody to see a shrink, not even for an evaluation. Not until they’ve at least been charged with a crime, and even that is of highly limited scope. Getting somebody committed is a nice trope for movies, but out in reality people’s association with psychiatry and psychology is voluntary. Demanding he get a psych evaluation before coming back is the absolute limit of what can legally be done in this country.
The don’t have the ABILITY. The most they can do is what they did, suspended him indefinitely with a psych eval necessary for reinstatement.
I was going by what I heard in a TV news report. They said anybody including one of his classmates could have called the state and requested that he have a mental evaluation.
That sounds too easy to me. I would think someone would have to get a court order to force him to submit to an evaluation. So the news report is probably wrong or not reporting on the amount of evidence required to actually get the state to act.
TV lied. You can’t just call up the government and have somebody evaluated. You can get a court order but it’s really tough and almost always has to revolved around charging the person with a crime, which then requires cooperation from a wronged party, the police and county attorney. That’s part of why you occasionally run into the clearly nuts person talking to themselves on the street, yeah they’re out there and clearly in need of help and would fail any evaluation they took, but until they actually present a threat there’s nothing that can be done.
PCC involved the police but not enough of the right people chose to press charges, that pretty much ended any forcible psych eval. Unless he had really wanted to go back to school.
Unless the person is behaving violently or presenting a threat they don’t have the authority to take them to the place. Most of that “referring” is just like a doctors reference, they tell the people they should call this agency, and then it’s up to the person to call or not call.
Millions spent on Arizona mental health system employees
I am not sure I am willing to blame a police department for some alleged failure to refer.
I’ve known enough psychos to know that most of them will not go in for treatment. They think they are sane and we are crazy. The vast majority will not acknowledge that they have a problem.
Still, it would be fun to blame the Sheriff, since he seems to be hell bent on blaming everyone he doesn’t politically agree with.
The question seems to be did an officer or officers have a person report a threat made by this individual. If a person threaten someones life and then upon investigation the person appears to be mentally unstable, I would think protocol would be to advise the threatened person to file a complaint, and then we’re off to the races, the officer does an arrest and referral. But this is not my field, I don’t know.
Not only that - I would think that if the officer sees a dangerous enough situation, that even if the person threatened would not file the complaint, then the officer would, so they could do the referral.
I think officers get trained in all this for dealing with homeless, i.e., they don’t automatically refer them, as the homeless person can be actually afraid and prefer to stay where they are on the street. But I’m sure if a homeless person was walking around a park with a butcher knife and they were belligerent and would not calm down, an officer would arrest and refer them - don’t you think, or do I have to do more homework ?
I think it comes down to the difference between an officer seeing a person who appears unstable versus seeing a person who is unstable and is threatening people. Wouldn’t they always do the referral to cover themselves so they don’t get wrongful death lawsuits if the person goes on a rampage ?
I would agree in the case of aggressive and/or violent behavior.
I haven’t seen any anecdotes about this guy threatening to harm or kill anyone, though.
I think it should be against the law to threaten to kill or harm anyone, outside of humor. Just like it’s against the law to do that towards a political official. They are not “worth more.” It bothers me that someone can threaten to kill me in a serious manner and it isn’t an arrestable offense.
New Jersey Criminal Laws
2C:12-3 Terroristic Threats.
a.A person is guilty of a crime of the third degree if he threatens to commit any crime of violence with the purpose to terrorize another or to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly, or facility of public transportation, or otherwise to cause serious public inconvenience, or in reckless disregard of the risk of causing such terror or inconvenience. A violation of this subsection is a crime of the second degree if it occurs during a declared period of national, State or county emergency. The actor shall be strictly liable upon proof that the crime occurred, in fact, during a declared period of national, State or county emergency. It shall not be a defense that the actor did not know that there was a declared period of emergency at the time the crime occurred.
b.A person is guilty of a crime of the third degree if he threatens to kill another with the purpose to put him in imminent fear of death under circumstances reasonably causing the victim to believe the immediacy of the threat and the likelihood that it will be carried out.
L.1978, c.95; amended 1981, c.290, s.15; 2002, c.26, s.11.
If they can’t get a person to press charges then all they can do is the referral, those kind of referrals are kind of like when your doctor says you should see a specialist, if you’re smart you’ll do it but he can’t make you.
Crazy guy walking around with a butcher knife is presenting an obvious immediate and legally actionable threat, though often times the most the cops can do with something like that is take the knife away and maybe make them spend overnight in the holding tank. Crazy guy putting up weird youtube videos is no longer obvious, immediate, or most importantly legally actionable. Unless part of one of the videos is a threat of violence AND the person threatened chooses to press charges. A lot of DAs/ CAs (we have county attorney’s here not district) don’t really like those threat cases though, because they’re a pain to prosecute, difficult to prove, and the penalty is rather minor. Usually they’ll advice the person threatened to get a restraining order, not for their protection because of course a piece of paper doesn’t protect anybody, but because restraining order violation are a lot easier to prove and prosecute.
He definitely threatened multiple PCC employees, and it IS arrestable, but it’s tough to prove and the penalties are low so most of the time nobody bothers with the follow through.
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