Do you have a mentally ill relative???

[BronxBoy]

Any Body have a mentally ill relative?.....Are you nervous? How about a significant other in law enforcement......Are you nervous?

I've been following this incident in Miami pretty closely and I can answer yes to all of those questions and I'm nervous as hell.

The threads I have read have scared the hell out of me. On the one hand, we have folks who automatically assume that a law enforcement agent responding to a situation in which he had to make a split second decision is automatically made into a cog of some grand governmental conspiracy. On the other hand, we have folks who feel that all things being equal, it's ok to gun down mentally ill people and that to question such an action is absolutely asinine.

I come from a law enforcement family. Most of them wouldn't know a government conspiracy if it bit them in the ass. They get up. They go to work. They take pride in their jobs. They try to put food on their plates of their family and give their children a better life than they have. And try not to get shot in the ass while they do it. Same as probably most of us do.

I also have an autistic stepson. 30 years old. Sweetest guy you would ever want to meet. Loves kids. Is polite and has more of a work ethic than my own son. Highly functioning. Loves to work and be a productive person. But his illness manifests itself in eye rolling and teeth-sucking and other behaviors that, if you didn't know him, would be seen in the wrong light. His real dad is now starting to make a place for him in his life. Which means that come holidays, like this coming Christmas, my wife and I have to put him on a plane so he can visit his dad.

So I read with interest some of these threads in which blame was automatically assigned to either the air marshall or the mentally ill man (or worse yet: His wife) I am terrified for both my law enforcement family as well as my stepson because, increasingly both of them are being put on a collision course by a government of dumb asses.

Someone in another thread posted how this whole situation reminded them of Giulani and NYC. They that the same type of incidents happened during Giulani time and they're right. We need to look at the overall picture and not the individual actors. Kiss your law enforcement agent or your mentally ill loved ones today because the world has become an infinitely scarier and unforgiving place since Bush took office.

Here is my response to his post:

During Giulani's reign, his so-called tough guy act increased the potential for tragic interactions between civilians and law enforcement. As others have said, it's this public perception that law enforcement should take any aggressive action they deem necessary in order to make us feel protected that's an issue. Because promoters of these types of tactics often paint the world in stark black and white terms, it's very difficult to have to acknowledge gray.

In Giulani's world, it was "The Criminal Element". Today it "Terrorists" But in the end, it's the same old story: well-meaning law enforcement officials are put into situations with a wide variety of civilians with a policy that was probably thought up by someone while they were sitting on a toilet. It's like Tasers. I'm sure that with a proper policy, a Taser is probably an effective and life saving law enforcement tool. But it seems that no one with half a brain has developed and implemented a sane policy concerning it's use. So we have the spectacle of old women and children having their asses fried by Tasers when other tactics would have been effective. And of course, when old women and children are Tasered, the implementers of these asinine procedures have to defend said policies by saying that "This was a dangerous situation and we had to be sure"

While a lot, actually too many people, give Giulani credit for "cleaning up" New York, not many are aware of the price we paid as a society for doing so. So you had Diallo. You also had Dorismond, who became upset when an undercover Narc offered him drugs and he ended up dead because of it. And there was also the case of the mentally ill orthodox Jewish man who was blown away while waving a hammer in Brooklyn even though there was sufficient police prescence to defuse the situation. These are the results of our national "Fear Factor" You're either normal or you're not. And if for some reason, you don't fit into whatever profile is deemed to be safe, then God help you.

So the real issue here isn't the air marshall or this guys wife. Unless something comes out to show that AM was some sort of "do or die, Skin headed thug", I'm just going to assume that he was just another working stiff settling in for another day on what is probably an absolutely mundane job. Same for the wife. I have a mentally ill step child and on the rare occasions when he does act out in public, my strongest desire is to get him home ASAP with a minimum of problems. SO the issue doesn't start or end with them. It's how our government is attempting to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia in this country, how we as a nation are buying into it and how tragic situations like this are going to become a regularly terrifying occurrence.



edited to change title