St Peterbug non-Police

[Joe in PNG]

I predict that this will work great. Even if it doesn't, it will be reported as working fine, just fine.

For a couple of years at least. Then, there will be a well publicized case where an unarmed social worker is horribly killed. Angry questions will be asked about why the city is sending unarmed civilians instead of cops- and that by some of the loudest people on the defund bandwagon.

[lwt16]

Intoxicated individuals
Mental health crises
Drug overdose
Disorderly intoxication
Suicide crises
Homeless complaints and panhandling
Neighborhood disputes
Truancy, or disorderly minors
Disorderly juveniles at elementary schools

From my experience, just about all of those I have seen fights develop where we had to go hands on with the "non-violent" person. It takes very little to flip that switch if the wrong thing is said or the person simply doesn't want to comply.

I can think of several instances of police officers being shot in the above situations.

Now, who is going to sign up to go to these calls? Who is going to go unarmed, no communications/radio....into these situations?

[Caballoflaco]

From my experience, just about all of those I have seen fights develop where we had to go hands on with the "non-violent" person. It takes very little to flip that switch if the wrong thing is said or the person simply doesn't want to comply.

I can think of several instances of police officers being shot in the above situations.

Now, who is going to sign up to go to these calls? Who is going to go unarmed, no communications/radio....into these situations?

Plenty of people will want to go once. But most people have never had to make a full grown human being do something they don’t want to do.

[Wayne Dobbs]

While the hopers and dreamers of utopia without those nasty, mean, murderous cops may think this a great idea, it's not. This is going to lead to a whole body of unintended consequences for the SJW "Corps" that would be involved in these responses. One is a whole other collection of bureaucracy to manage this herd that will be in constant conflict with the policing side of the house. Think of the fire vs police budget fights and interagency issues times 100. Another is that this will be staffed by my guess by a majority of females, whom the cops will try to bed (unless human nature has changed in that regard) and bring on all the drama and discord of that biological process.

The next obvious issue will be how many, how badly and how quickly will we see these folks getting stomped into a greasy spot or killed on these calls? I'd venture to say quite a few and fairly soon. Then, the real police will have to respond on these shitstorms and put themselves at risk of death to solve what they would've handled much better with traditional policing responses. That is an unacceptable risk that the government placed those cops in for some kind of badly thought out social experiment.

My suggestion would be this and it's hard: do it if you want, but don't spend a single cop's life or time to go rescue these dreamers. No patrol response, no SWAT response. Tell them YOYO: You're On Your Own. That should quickly cause this stupidity to run out of gas.

[Caballoflaco]

What do you guys who do this job always say about sometimes a little bit of violence up front, can keep things from going south later.

What are the chances this actually leads to an increase in police use of force, especially on those disorderly conduct, public intox and domestics?

[Wayne Dobbs]

What do you guys who do this job always say about sometimes a little bit of violence up front, can keep things from going south later.

What are the chances this actually leads to an increase in police use of force, especially on those disorderly conduct, public intox and domestics?

I'd say the odds are very good that the exact thing will happen.

[willie]

Within this group are spitters, and some of these have hepatitis, and then there are the HIV positive people who bite and scratch, and some of these poor souls including the hepatitis cases have open sores, and not named are persons with active staph infections who may or may not have hepatitis and/or aids. Let nurses and social workers "process" these folks. But not all are infective. There are plenty of alcoholics and run of the mill pill heads who go off their nut and have episodes. And we must not overlook the harmless but needy looney toons who dial 911. They require attention too. Three shifts per day in a metro area will require a bus load of social workers to serve the community. What two cops once handled will now require at least four or five social scientists. How to transport some of these to destinations may not have been worked out. And there is the matter of restraining and deciding who can and can not restrain. The concept is good; the pay will be low; and turnover will be high.

[Caballoflaco]

What do you mean restrained @willie ? They’ll be able to solve all these problems with words and love.....

[RJflyer]

Three shifts per day in a metro area will require a bus load of social workers to serve the community. What two cops once handled will now require at least four or five social scientists. How to transport some of these to destinations may not have been worked out. And there is the matter of restraining and deciding who can and can not restrain. The concept is good; the pay will be low; and turnover will be high.

Exactly right. We have mobile crisis intervention teams in my area. They're actually really nice to have, as they take alot of the call load off of our patrol guys. The two main problems we've experienced are 1) lack of availability. These teams aren't available 24/7, because there just aren't that many people qualified and motivated to do it. 2) when any type of UoF is required, we still end up getting called. I've noticed these organizations tend to be very cautious of civil liability and their policies establish low thresholds for just calling the cops to take over a situation.

My prediction: alot of parts of the country will give this a try. And at first it might work, to an extent. But as it goes on, there will be more contacts between social workers and people in crisis on the street. With more contacts will be more incidents and UoFs. With more UoF there will be more lawsuits. And eventually we'll come full circle to where police are handling everything again.

[Bart Carter]

Is it just in the movies, or is the case load of social workers so large that they currently can't attend to it properly?