Do you feel safe calling 911?

[hunter]

23. I've seen the police shoot people I wouldn't have shot...

... so I always think hard before I call them.

When I do call them I explain the situation as carefully as I can.

Years ago, over the course of a few months, the police in our city shot a few mentally ill people and it was a huge scandal.

The police now get special training to identify and deal with mentally ill people, but I still don't trust them.

When my wife and I were younger and our children were small we lived in some rough neighborhoods.

I did call the police once for a neighbor... it was two o'clock in the morning and he was pounding on our front door. I peeked out the window and he was covered with blood and asking me to call the police.

It turned out he'd come home drunk and his wife had smacked him in the head with a big glass bottle of bourbon and was threatening to kill him. He may well have deserved it, but not on my front porch. I sat out there trying to be some sort of calming influence, ready to jump out of the way if they started hammering on one another again, but it didn't come to that.

When I was in and out of college, all nine years of it, before modern psych meds, the local police knew who I was but didn't consider me dangerous, possibly because at my very worst I can still be an affable white guy. I think the police considered me a humorous diversion from their usual sordid graveyard shift duties of domestic violence and mean drunk frat boy rapists.

Ah, here's Hunter, running shoeless in the middle of the night with bloody feet. Always good for a laugh.

I don't like living in a nation where we have to think twice before calling the police, but we do.