Latest / Millennial Mental Health Channel / Defund the Police! Or... support, retrain, reallocate.

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Defund the Police! Or... support, retrain, reallocate. · Millennial Mental Health Channel

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I think you'll see a lot of issues that people have with like the streets
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and what they see out in like cities. I think a lot of those
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start to go away when those basically needs get met. This is Millennial Mental
0:13
Health Channel. I'm doctor Justin Romano, a child adolescent psychiatry fellow, and
0:17
I'm Medikoreo, a licensed clinical therapist. Our podcast is here because we want
0:21
to start a much neater conversation about mental health. Our goal is to teach
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you as much as we can by sharing our own experiences and interviewing experts in
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the mental health field. We will discuss topics like mood disorders, psychotic disorders,
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substance use, personality disorders, and many more. Millennial Mental Health Channel
0:37
buy Millennials for everyone. We hope you enjoy today's episode. MMHC is a
0:43
production of Speaker from iHeartMedia, I HEARTMA Beyond Venue. Welcome back to Millennial
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Channel. It is nice to have you here. Pardon the terrible French accent,
1:00
Eddie. I want to have an icebreaker, a classic icebreaker question.
1:04
Okay, two truths in a lie? Okay, no, that's actually not
1:08
a bad one. Yeah, let's actually do that. Get Okay, yeah,
1:12
give me no, no, no, go back to your other one,
1:15
because I'm terrible at that one. Okay, dinner with anyone in history
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or dead or alive. Who would you have dinner with? Oh god,
1:26
I know that's a tough one. It no because yeah, because I'm gonna
1:29
say, like something super lame, like a professional athlete or something that makes
1:34
me seem like such a like loser. I don't care about sports. I
1:38
don't know man uh Sebastian Janakowski or Canon uh for those of you don't know,
1:51
the Raiders kicker. For years and years and years he was the first
1:53
round draft pick. Yeah he was. Oh I forgot about that. Yeah,
1:59
dude, Like but he was amazing for a long time. Yeah.
2:04
Him and Shane Lecklaer. Okay, god, this is so bad. Okay,
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first thing that popped into my mind because I'm about to get his book
2:13
and now I have to look it up to pronounce it correctly because he has
2:15
a Greek last name. He's the author of The Silent Patient and then The
2:20
Maidens. He just came out with a book called The Fury. It's another
2:23
like thriller. So his name is Alex Mickuye Lighty's Miklights Yes to him because
2:30
his first two books, the main character is a therapist and like those were
2:35
like I think those it took a little bit, but those set me on
2:38
the trajectory to get back into reading for fun. So let's do that.
2:40
That'll be And his book, his News book, just came out yesterday and
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it should be getting delivered to my house in the next day or so,
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pending the ice situation. Shout out to my sister because she got it to
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me for my birthday. Nice. Yeah, Eddie. And the city of
2:57
Portland has been in shutdown because it has been frosty. Frosty and not the
3:01
snowman kind. It has just been frozen roads. You know, I've always
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the answer to my question has always been Jim Carrey, like I've always really
3:12
wanted to have But you know, I was thinking about it and the I
3:15
actually would really like to have dinner with my paternal grandfather, who I never
3:22
got to meet because he passed away before I was born. But it sounds
3:25
like we are similar in a lot of ways, and he sounds like he
3:29
was an awesome dude, former teacher and principal. So yeah, I would
3:32
say I would like to meet family that I've never gotten to meet before,
3:37
or honestly, Sebastian Janakowski would be a good one for me too. Oh
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yeah, we better answer than me, all right. So today we are
3:49
talking police, we are talking mental health issues. I'm sure a lot of
3:54
you guys out there have heard about defund the police, and that was a
3:58
pretty big movement. Honestly, there's been a lot of stories that have made
4:01
us kind of mad of police hurting people with mental health and police potentially even
4:06
killing people with mental health too. But I think it's really important to try
4:10
and see both sides of this argument too and understand how difficult it is for
4:15
police to deal with these situations. And so we understand that the police do
4:19
have a hard job, but sometimes they are trained to jump to violence instead
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of the escalation tactics. And so we wanted to look at the evidence and
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see if there's a better way to police what other people are doing, and
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give you a little bit of the history and background of this issue. At
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any story time, have you had any run ins with the police, and
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if so, how were you treated. Most of my interactions have been like
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fine, like nothing like out of the ordinar area, but the one that
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does come up and one that actually my dad brought up when I was home
4:51
for Christmas, because one time we were driving up from the B area up
4:57
to Oregon to visit schools and he got pulled over. He was probably speeding,
5:01
so that was his problem for his fault, but got pulled over in
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like northern California, like not a lot of people that look like me or
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my dad. And when we're getting pulled over, like the guy was talking
5:15
to my dad blah blah blah, and my Dad's like, oh, yeah,
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it's a rental car and all this. At some point the guy like
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looks at my Dad's like ID and was like, oh, this guy doesn't
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look like you. And my Dad's like what the fuck, Like it's my
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idea, And he started like questioning him, like, oh, where do
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you live where? My Dad's like reciting everything and at one point asked my
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dad if he had like a nose job. It was just like being like
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an ass about it too, was like really like, h just being a
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douche and yeah, like basically like mistreating my dad in front of me while
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I'm like seventeen eighteen not really knowing what to do of just like harassing him,
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of like saying he doesn't believe that that was him in the license.
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And then I think ultimately what happened was when he wrote the ticket, he
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made my dad give him fingerprints to basically say like, Okay, if we
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send this ticket to the person you claim you are and the real person gets
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the ticket is like, that's not me, then we at least have the
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fingerprints to be like, oh that they can like prove that it's not them.
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What. Yeah, that's I've never heard of anything like that. That's
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wild. Yeah, me either. So it's like that's really the one that
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like sticks out. Like all the other times have been fine. I've gotten
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my fair share of tickets, but like, yeah, that was really one
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that stood out. And I remember one time I was in I got called
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for jury duty and I made it to like the top whatever we have to
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like answer questions, and I remember talking about that, and part of me
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thinks that sharing that story got me disqualified from being on the jury. But
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it's the truth. So the truth shall set you free and get you out
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of jury duty. Yes, sir, what about you? Most of my
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interactions with the police, I haven't been that great either. Mostly they've been
7:01
pretty rude and unfair to me. So I've got a little bit of a
7:04
bias against the police. I will have to admit. One time I got
7:09
a speeding ticket. I was going eighty three in a seventy five. I
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was in the interstate and the cop was like, caught you going ninety three,
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and I was like, I was going eighty three. I'll admit to
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that. And he's like whatever, and handed me a ticket. And I'm
7:20
like, dude, unbelievable that he can just lie and make up whatever he
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wants and give me a ticket. And of course, like I wasn't going
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to come back to I was in the middle of nowhere, Colorado. I
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was like, I was driving through going back home. It's like, I'm
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not coming back and going to court in this potunk little town. So and
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of course, on the I paid the ticket and said by paying this,
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you admit that you were at fault and you did everything. I was like,
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oh, come on, Like I just hate that. And then once
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when I was living in Seattle and medical school, my buddies and I were
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playing video games, were playing Diablo three, excellent game, and we heard
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a bank bank bank on the front door, and it was the cops and
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they're like, we're looking for someone in your apartment complex, like can we
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can we search your place? And we're like sure, we're just chilling there
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playing video games. They pulled their guns and swept our place and we were
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like, what the hell's going on? They came back to us, they
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had a sit on the couch, three dudes on one couch, just sitting
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there like terrified, like what is happening? And they're like, we saw
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someone in your window and we're like, we're just playing video games, Like
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I don't know like what you saw, but it was just us in here.
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They like, don't happen lie to us, and it was just like
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we're not and so and then they just left, like no apology, no
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thanks for your help, just left. And then the next day we left
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our apartment, there was blood everywhere. So there was just like blood smeared
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all over the walls, all over the pavement, and so we never really
8:50
got the full story, but apparently someone like broke a window or tried to
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get into the apartment complex and was bleeding and just yeah, I felt free
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to smear their blod all over the place. So they were trying to keep
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people safe, but they were also being douches about it, so you know,
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it's kind of a kind of a plus minus. Yeah, And I
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always think about that that. Yeah, police have always been generally kind of
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rude to me. And I'm white, and studies show that typically white people
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get treated by police better than people of color. So I'm like, if
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they're treating me like garbage, what are they treating everyone else like? Spoiler
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not well? So well, just I know you you did a lot of
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deep dive in and got a lot of historical information for us, and a
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lot of it was new for me, and like it helped like connect some
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dots. So give us, give us the stuff, give us the info,
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and and let's let's let's share some history and some information with the listeners.
9:46
Yeah, you want to put on a cheesy English accent and talk about
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history minutes. There's something very important to you, something called de institutionalization.
9:58
This is something that is actually super were important to both politics and mental health
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in this country. And I thought it was fascinating that I had never heard
10:07
about this until I got into the world of mental health and psychiatry. I
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feel like everyone should know that this happened in our history. But the government
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used to fund mental health asylums and sanitariums. This was a really common practice
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and mostly it was like federal government giving money for these facilities, and you
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see him in movies. We don't really have many left. This is where
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people who were mentally ill would go to get their needs met or get medicine
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if they needed it, have a place to live. But asylums weren't perfect.
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There's lots of stories of people being abused, not having their rights,
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so it's not a great system, but it at least gave people a place
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to go and gave people a place to go get help. Then in the
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nineteen sixties, the US started to get rid of asylums for primarily three reasons.
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They wanted to reintegrate people with society. This was kind of along the
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lines of the civil rights movement. They wanted that everyone was supposed to be
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equal and in the same playing field. Reason number two is that antipsychotic medications
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were starting to come out and seem to be effective, so they thought,
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Okay, they don't need to be in an asylum, maybe we can treat
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them at home in their community. And then number three, of course,
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has everything in this country. To save money, they closed a lot of
11:20
these asylums to it's for the cash baby, because asylums were expensive and the
11:26
severely mentally ill weren't necessarily rolling in the dough. So essentially, the government
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started shutting down the asylums and said that it was going to put money into
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community mental health problems to catch all the people falling out of the asylums,
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and that did not happen. They did not fund the community mental health system
11:45
properly, and it led to people with severe mental illness being kicked out onto
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the streets, out of the asylums, having nowhere really to go, and
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having to figure it out on their own, which also led to a massive
11:56
increase in homelessness. What happened, Who's opposed to help or who was supposed
12:01
to I guess take over for the job that the asylums did. You might
12:05
have been able to piece it together based off of what we said the episode
12:09
is about. But the criminal justice system, and as we've seen over the
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I think especially this is like anecdotal, but let's like just say the last
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like seven eight years has just been amplified because of things like social media and
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being able to have our news like at our fingertips. A lot of this
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has been amplified and seeing like this is not okay that it's been like this
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for the last sixty plus years. After like asylum started to close down in
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America, the correction system has become the largest provider of mental health services.
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I know for me, when I worked at the juvenile department, when we
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would have teams go to like the higher like basically to correction, so they'd
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go to teenage or young adult jail. A lot of the time. Thankfully
12:48
they were able to get into like programs or get treatment. But that's not
12:52
always the best, Like, it's not always the best for it to be
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mixed right, to be integrated into, Like I'm locked up and I'm in
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treatment. It might be better if I was in treatment and like living somewhere
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else but still getting help and support. I also think of like when I
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worked, it was like a six or seven month period. I worked in
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an adult residential the in between for people either going to prison or returning from
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prison and then reintegrating back into the community. And I was there for a
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while working as like I was the community correction specialist. It really was.
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It was I would walk down the halls into the dorms and the pods and
13:30
just checking on everybody, making sure they're okay, take them off for their
13:33
break, all that stuff. I was just making sure they're falling rules and
13:37
same thing. Like a lot of them had treatment while they were in there.
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I feel like that said it, and I liked a little bit more
13:43
because at least like the way that it was structured was if you had a
13:46
job, if you had things to do, you were able to leave,
13:50
you needed permission beforehand, but you're still able to engage in those like community
13:52
things. So I felt like that combination was a little better with like you're
13:56
living in the community to get to engage in the community and you get treatment,
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whereas if you're in prison and you're getting treatment, just something about that
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feels ichy, don't I don't have a good way for it. It just
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feels it feels like are you really getting the most out of it? If
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like you're learning all these things, you're you're getting help, and then you're
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thrown back into a cell or large chunk of your day. And I had
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a couple of friends who would moonlight at the adult prison in Omaha, and
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they didn't have access to the same resources. You know, they didn't have
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all the different types of therapies. The medicines that they were able to use
14:31
were limited to. So using the corrections is the primary way of treating people's
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mental health in this country may not be the best way to go about it.
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Spoiler again, continuing on with with history and staffs and facts. It's
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estimated that about sixteen percent of the prison population has a severe and persons to
14:52
the mental illness. The American Medical Association estimates that about four hundred thousand people
14:56
with severe mental illness are behind bars in the US. I think of like
15:01
trauma. That's the big thing that popped up. Traumatic experience, as we've
15:05
talked about for a long time. It does not always lead to like mental
15:09
health issues, but it's like kind of a precursor to a lot of people
15:15
who are diagnosed with severe and persistent mental illness have some type of traumatic experience.
15:20
So I think it makes sense that so many people in sixteen percent is
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a lot Like if you think about like the rates of depression or anxiety,
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like it's not that high, but sixteen percent is huge of the population.
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That's a lot. In the clinic that I did in Omaha, we saw
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a lot of people with SPMI, severe and persistent mental illness that's bipolar schizophrenias,
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SKISO effective disorder, all that stuff, and so many of them had
15:43
had episodes of being homeless. And so many people told me like, oh,
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yeah, I was given tickets for disturbing the peace, for drug and
15:52
alcohol related charges, for trespassing, because I mean they had nowhere to go,
15:56
and so they were trying to find places to go. All these little
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things would add up and almost every single homeless person would end up in prison
16:03
at some point, especially the ones with the mental health issues too. So,
16:08
man, the homeless problem is multifactorial. There's multiple things going on that's
16:12
contributing to it. But I think a big reason why it is such a
16:15
huge problem, and in the United States it's a really big problem, is
16:19
because the severely mentally ill are not supported in this country. They do not
16:23
have the resources, they do not have a place to go. And that's
16:26
why a lot of the people that you see that are homeless on the streets
16:30
are talking to themselves, are having auditory hallucinations because yeah, they just they
16:34
don't have the support we've talked about, like when people have like a psychotic
16:38
episode or they're having schizophrenia, whatever it is, we've talked about how much
16:42
correct medication and support, it doesn't make it go away, but it makes
16:47
it manageable to where you can live a life and you can live a I'm
16:51
not even to say normal, you can live a regular, standard life.
16:55
But you don't give people these opportunities. And I guess, like you said,
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it's multi fact, multi fact, Like we can complain about this and
17:00
that, but there's also there's gonna be something else for like what about this?
17:04
There's no correct answer. I'll set myself before you just keep rambling.
17:07
But yeah, like if basic needs given to people, I think you'll see
17:12
a lot of issues that people have with like the streets and what they see
17:17
out in like cities. I think a lot of those start to go away
17:19
when those basically needs get met. So cops have to deal with this,
17:25
and oftentimes cops are the ones interacting with the people on the streets, the
17:30
people with mental health crises, and sometimes these people are treated like criminals because
17:34
that's what the cops are used to treating people like. And sometimes people with
17:38
SPMI, severe persistent meal illness can have can act strangely or behave strangely and
17:45
unpredictable ways, which makes cops really nervous and uneasy. And unfortunately, there
17:49
are lots of stories about people who are psychotic and the police try and help
17:55
and then they get really really paranoid. They might grab a knife or a
17:59
weapon, and the cops have to react to protect themselves. It's just it's
18:03
just a terrible system where the people who need the help are getting hurt by
18:08
the people who are supposed to be helping, and then the people who are
18:11
supposed to be helping can also be hurt by the people they're supposed to be
18:14
helping too, So it's just, yeah, it's a bad cycle. And
18:17
it just seems that cops and emergency rooms and hospitals and even Eddie and I
18:22
were talking before the show, libraries have to deal with a lot of the
18:26
failures of society to take care of the people that need the most support.
18:30
A lot of things end up falling on the public entities. So when we
18:34
talked earlier, we were talking about like libraries, Like I started going to
18:38
the library more frequently over the last year, and I noticed there's a lot
18:41
of home homeless people who are houseless people who will go to the library to
18:45
access certain things. And it makes sense. I mean, the library is
18:48
open from ten o'clock to whatever time at night. It's a place you can
18:52
go. You're outside, you're not outside anymore, you're away from the elements.
18:56
You can use the internet, you can there's like limit entertainment in the
19:00
library if you're if you read and do you know what I mean? Like
19:03
it just it gives you a place where you don't have to be sitting outside
19:07
out in the difference, especially like now whereas really snowy right now here and
19:11
really cold in the Poorland metro area. You can avoid places like that,
19:15
Like why why wouldn't someone take advantage of that? Why wouldn't they go and
19:18
use those resources. The unfortunate part is that because of the way a society
19:23
is structured like that falls onto public entities instead of like places that can actually
19:29
offer up treatment and help. How do we get that? I don't know,
19:33
that's where I'm That's where I'm lost. But maybe defund the police.
19:37
So that's that's kind of the argument, is that shifting the money from policing
19:41
people to supporting other people might be the answer. So we want to talk
19:47
a little bit about that today. And yeah, we want to shift the
19:51
conversation because defund the police got a lot of negative vitriol and there was turned
19:56
into kind of a negative thing and a political tool. But our ultimate goal
20:00
is to try and see if we can talk about evidence based ways to have
20:04
mental health be better treated by society, be better treated by police, and
20:08
maybe even better crisis response teams too. We found an article from the Associated
20:23
Press which we will put in the show notes. Fourteen out of the twenty
20:27
largest cities in the United States now have teams that they call civilian alternative or
20:33
non police response teams. And this article actually mentions a young man named Christian
20:40
Glass who was in Colorado who's having a mental health crisis. And on top
20:44
of having a mental health crisis, he got his car stuck in the snow.
20:48
He called police for help, and the officers responded, and then they
20:52
had bodycam footage of this and it showed that the young man thought that the
20:56
police were in quote, supernatural beings that were after him. And so this
21:02
sounds to me like he was having a psychotic break or having at least psychotic
21:06
symptoms, so he wouldn't get out of the car, so the police eventually
21:10
broke in his window and then ended up shooting him to death after he grabbed
21:15
a small knife to defend himself, so he called them to help him get
21:18
out of the snow and end up him dying getting shot to death, which
21:22
is a tragedy. What a horrible thing to happen. Yeah, just an
21:27
idea of some of the stories that can happen to people who call for help
21:33
and in tragedy. A lot of things we talk about in life have some
21:37
type of like spectrum of like what is one side thinking? And this is
21:41
like when I'm talking about this, I'm not even talking about maybe maybe it's
21:45
a little bit political, But when we talk about like the idea of like
21:47
defunding the police, I've heard a lot of different sides of it. If
21:51
you just look at the part of defunding the police, I feel like on
21:53
one side is like, yeah, you know, defund to like use money
21:57
and other space for other types of support and help for the public. And
22:03
then there's like other side of it who are like completely like no, we
22:07
don't need police at all, and like completely wipe out the police, And
22:11
I feel like I don't have numbers or stuff off at the top of my
22:14
head, but I feel like any extreme is going to be difficult to like
22:18
achieve, and I feel like it ultimately because of the way that society is
22:22
structured, and because of the way that like police and the criminal justice system
22:26
and all that is like integrated into our society, Like it's hard to come
22:30
up with a plan of just like right now, starting tomorrow, no longer
22:34
will there be a police enforcement. Most likely the correct answer, or the
22:40
answer that positively impacts the most people is probably somewhere in the middle, probably
22:45
somewhere that takes into account all all perspectives on it. I think you're absolutely
22:51
right. It can't be a black and white thing, and just completely getting
22:55
rid of police altogether is probably not going to work either that As of twenty
23:00
twenty three, governments were funding one hundred and twenty three million dollars towards these
23:06
non police response teams. One of the biggest ones was the Star program in
23:10
Denver, Colorado. Another big one was the be Heard program in New York
23:14
City. So these programs, or at least the one in Denver, sends
23:17
unarmed support workers to mental health crises, to offer support resources, de escalation,
23:22
and even sometimes food. In the Denver one I was reading about,
23:26
they're like, we bring cheese its because it helps people calm down. Offering
23:30
food is just a good way to connect and communicate with people. So Stanford
23:36
was actually studying Denver Star program and it showed that crime rates actually dropped thirty
23:41
four percent where this program was operating. And they think it's because people weren't
23:47
being taken to jail, people weren't getting arrested as much by the police when
23:51
calling for help. They were given resources to help them get out of certain
23:55
cycles, help them not reoffend. So there are good things that may come
24:00
out of these programs. So similarly, Portland has was called the Portland Street
24:04
Response, same thing I started, and I believe twenty twenty one, so
24:08
we're going into like the third year of it being around. And I know
24:12
when the pilot program came out, relatively speaking, it was pretty small.
24:17
I think their hours were pretty small. They I don't even know if they
24:19
were working seven days a week. But now I think they're starting to hopefully
24:22
expand to be like a twenty four to seven thing. To be available.
24:26
And then the interesting thing with Portland Street Response is that they partnered with the
24:32
Portland Fire Department. And this is something I just learned today getting ready for
24:36
that episode. I assumed that it was like with you know, the county
24:40
sheriffs with the police department, but they partnered with the fire department. So
24:44
what Portland State Portland State University studying how the first couple of years have gone.
24:48
What they found is that an estimated ninety seven percent of Portland street response
24:52
calls would have traditionally been required a police response. So they were able to
24:57
take those calls that they were getting basically all of them except three to three
25:02
or all of them was a three percent before would have sent out to a
25:06
police officer, but now they didn't have to do that. So in total,
25:08
Portland a Street response reduced Portland police officers annual call load by almost four
25:12
percent, which I think is probably a pretty big number. More specifically,
25:17
the numbers show a nineteen percent drop in police needing to respond to nine to
25:21
one one calls characterizes either welfare checks or unwanted person situations where callers we're concerned
25:26
about someone else, about their well being or about wanting someone removed from the
25:32
area. So basically like anything that was welfare or this person maybe on the
25:37
street is talking to themselves or acting what someone would classify as erradic. Instead
25:42
of a police officer having to come, they send out Portland Street Response with
25:45
the Fire Department and they're able to handle it, which I think is good
25:48
and it's positive. Like you were mentioned with the cheez its, they also
25:52
mentioned of just being able to provide like food resources. I think in one
25:56
of them I read two articles and one of the articles, I think it
25:59
even said like four percent of the people that they talked to they were able
26:03
to actually help with permanent housing, whereas the others they were able to help
26:06
with other like resources and maybe not permanent, but they're able to help with
26:10
something. Portland Street Response work also lessened the burden on local hospitals. So
26:15
in the year period that they looked at, only two point five percent of
26:19
all Portland Street Response calls ended with a client needed needing to be taken to
26:23
the emergency department. WHOA, so some good numbers and I want to throw
26:29
this out there, Yeah, huge deal because we talked off the recording right
26:32
before, where like emergency department is like, well, I guess you know,
26:37
if you're hungry, all right, let's take you to the point.
26:38
Let's take it to the emergency department, like get your sandwich, get your
26:41
gator, or whatever it is. And it's not always the best use of
26:45
an emergency department, like people need help, people need medical support, and
26:52
if one of the beds or things are being used by someone who could probably
26:55
be better served somewhere else, that overall, that's the better way to go
27:00
about it. So one of the things that I thought was interesting in what
27:03
I read was that the first year that Portland Street Response was out and was
27:07
the thing, they were funded partially by a defunding of the Portland Police,
27:11
So taking away some of their budget and using it for Portland Street Response came
27:15
up with this. So some might say that's a good reason. So like,
27:19
yeah, maybe we can reallocate some money. Maybe and it doesn't have
27:22
to all be the police, but maybe there is a place where we can
27:27
start to reallocate some funds here and there, or maybe the federal government could
27:33
be better at allocating funds towards things like that instead of filling the blank here.
27:40
So just some food for thought. I know we talked in the past
27:42
about how after nine to eleven there was a large militarization of the police,
27:48
and police budgets really expanded and blew up, and they spent it on the
27:52
military equipment, and it would be nice if we did less of that and
27:56
more of putting that money into public services. Yeah, teams like this,
28:04
and so it sounds like these programs can be a way for reducing violent interactions
28:08
between police and the mentally ill. But these programs are still young and they
28:12
have not been studied thoroughly. So today there are no major studies giving us
28:18
any hard data on how effective these programs are at a variety of outcomes.
28:22
We know that they you know, like Eddie mentioned, we've got little snipets
28:26
of data things that they help with, but we don't have like big sweeping,
28:30
overwhelming like, yes, these programs work, we got to implement them.
28:33
Plus, all these studies or all these different programs are different city to
28:37
city too, so it's also hard to study them because they are not they're
28:41
not consistent between the different programs, and so it's hard to know what are
28:45
the active ingredients that actively help in these programs. Too. It ends up
28:51
just being like if you do a city, we city, it ends up
28:52
just being like a case study, and then you can like look at things
28:56
that like fit here or there. Yeah, like each each city's needs are
29:00
are drastically different to your point of the programs being young like Portland Street responses
29:04
and even three years old, like yeah, it wouldn't even be able to
29:08
go to kindergarten, Like it's that young, right, Like it's that brand
29:11
new, and like part of it is like, damn it, why do
29:14
we have to wait so long for these things to happen. The other part
29:17
of it is like, well, at least something's happening now, And then
29:19
the other part of it is like, yeah, but still we should just
29:22
not shit earlier damn it, because then we can at least look at data
29:25
and make some educated decisions, like have some data to back up like look,
29:30
when we use this money for this, or when we have this much
29:32
resource for this, this is what we're able to do. So hopefully in
29:36
the near future we'll move towards that. So one question I wanted to ask
29:40
too, and one thing I wanted to research for this episode was does having
29:42
more cops actually help anything? And the short answer is, and I'm surprised
29:48
by this. Yes, there was a really good systematic review done by the
29:52
economist Morgan Williams out of New York University and YU that show that adding ten
29:57
to seventeen cops to a police force actually prevents about one homicide per year.
30:03
So more cops, especially in high crime areas, does tend to translate to
30:10
less victim crimes like robbery, rape, and aggravated assault. The study also
30:15
showed that adding more cops leads to increases in arrest for victimless crimes like disorderly
30:22
conduct, drinking in public, drug possession, and loitering. They didn't mention
30:26
public urination, but I think I'm gonna get hit for that one day,
30:29
and then Black people were disproportionately impacted by these types of arrests. So more
30:34
police, more black people getting arrested for victimless crimes. We've talked about it
30:38
in the past, but things like adding cops to schools after Columbine has been
30:44
shown to add no protective benefits but led to people of color getting more tickets
30:48
and in trouble with the police. Basically, if you put in a police
30:52
officer and a place where there's not normally a police officer. There's a higher
30:56
chance, unfortunately for people of color to be disproportionately impacted and negatively impacted.
31:03
And I think, you know, the conversation we've had today, For me,
31:07
I've had to do a lot of thinking when you first sent me the
31:08
show notes and then earlier today before we recorded of like, you know,
31:12
one of my best friends is in law enforcement, and like we have a
31:15
great school resource officer at my school. But just because those the two things
31:21
are true does not mean that like there can't be room for growth. It
31:23
also doesn't mean that, like everything is bad with the system. I think,
31:26
like I said earlier, like it's probably somewhere in the middle that best
31:30
fits our society. I mean, I think there's so many things that have
31:33
just been so ingrained and intertwined into our society that it's I don't want to
31:37
say impossible, but really hard to go back from or move away from.
31:41
So it's like, Okay, how do we do the best with what we
31:45
got now? And how do we make sure we are treating everyone fairly,
31:48
taking care of each other, taking care of other people, Like there's so
31:51
much Yeah, and some stats on cops there are about three hundred and twenty
31:56
four nine hundred and fifty one police officers in the United States. It's seventeen
32:00
percent female, eighty three percent male, so it is a bit of a
32:05
sausage party if you ask me. And it's sixty percent white, eighteen percent
32:09
LATINX, and thirteen percent black, so it's kind of what you expect.
32:15
I bring that up to say that I think it would be better to have
32:19
more women police officers. I think that that could be something that could help
32:22
a lot. Not to say that women can't be violent, but it does
32:27
seem like they are better at connecting with people, de escalation, and perhaps
32:32
we just got too many men on the force. Who knows. That's just
32:36
conjecture for me, And let's do let's do one discussing discussion question here at
32:42
the end, Eddie, what do you think should cops have guns? Oh?
32:49
I knew this is going to be the one. It's I don't know
32:53
because you look at we talked earlier too before recorded of like what do other
32:59
kinds do? But I think the thing is that, like other countries,
33:02
their history is so different with criminal justice and with law enforcement that like they
33:08
can do different things you were mentioned in a country that like the police don't
33:13
even have guns. So it's like it feels like it right now, Like
33:17
is that really a thing we can move away from. I don't know.
33:21
I don't I don't think so, I don't know. I'm gonna go to
33:24
I don't know. Yeah, I think that's a very emotionally mature response.
33:30
It's okay to say I don't know. My wife and I were recently watching
33:35
a show on Netflix called Fool Me Once, which was pretty good, and
33:38
it was set in the United Kingdom, and we thought it was so funny.
33:43
There was a dangerous scene where a CoP's about to enter a situation and
33:45
I'm like, oh, he's gonna pull his gun, and it said he
33:47
pulls out like a telescoping baton, and I was like, what is he
33:52
gonna do with that? It's just the most non intimidating, especially in the
33:58
American mindset of like guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, Every
34:01
movie's got guns, every show's got guns. I was just so weird to
34:05
be like, he's got a baton. Yeah, all right, here it
34:08
goes. But yeah, I think you're right, the cats out of the
34:13
bag. There are already so many guns in America, and we have more
34:16
guns per capita than any other country by far, that cops kind of need
34:21
guns to protect themselves and to protect other people. So I know a lot
34:24
of people argue that point of like take away the guns, that'll help,
34:27
but I yeah, I would say maybe that wouldn't help and just put people
34:30
in more risk and danger. And I think one thing to say with today's
34:35
episode of like this is like, you know, people will say, like
34:38
this is just scratching the surface. I don't even know if it's scratching the
34:40
surface. There's like so much other Like we could go for hours if we
34:45
wanted to, but I think we really enjoyed to have our episodes to be
34:47
about forty five minutes long, so we're definitely not gonna go for hours,
34:51
but there's just so much. I think the biggest thing is one thing I'm
34:54
taking away from today is it's made me think. It's made me look into
34:59
like things around me and like Portland Street response. I've heard of it,
35:01
I'm aware of it, I know about it, didn't know the numbers.
35:05
So I think for me it was really good to learn that and to get
35:07
to hear that and to really just think like to have a discussion with my
35:12
own self of like what are the possibilities, what can be done better?
35:15
Like what is there? How do like the whole thing about the history you
35:19
said of a silence and the homes closing down. Didn't even know that,
35:22
didn't even piece that together, Like it's such useful information I have. So
35:27
I think my takeaway is this is just forty minutes of the start. It's
35:31
not enough of a conversation. Yeah, there definitely has to be more,
35:36
but I think it's hopefully it helps you all think a little more, just
35:38
like it helped me think a lot more today. You have a great point.
35:42
I'm glad we were able to talk a little bit about the history,
35:45
and I think that's something I want to start doing on the show a little
35:46
bit more is addressing how messed up that we are because of the things that
35:52
have happened in the past, and how psychiatry and mental health doesn't have the
35:55
most stellar history in the world. They've done some really horrible things to people
35:59
too, So we're going to dive into that in future episodes. But I
36:04
would say my big take home point for today is cops have a hard job,
36:09
and I recently read a book called The Best Minds where it talks a
36:14
lot about people who have psychotic breaks, and there was an instance in a
36:20
story, and this was a true story, where there was a woman who
36:22
was having a psychotic break and she charged the police with a knife and one
36:29
of the officers shot the woman and killed her. And this officer received a
36:34
ton of hate and hate mail. This was back in I think the seventies,
36:38
for doing that when he was protecting himself and protecting his partner in a
36:45
very dangerous situation, and the mental health community skewered that police officer for it.
36:50
So I think, no matter what, we gotta have some understanding.
36:53
We got to have some peace and some acknowledgment that police have a very hard
37:01
job and sometimes they don't know how to react. Sometimes they have to make
37:06
split second decisions. And if we can support the cops, or train them
37:10
in another way, or give them support teams to be able to respond to
37:14
some of those calls so they don't have to do it as much, I
37:16
think we need to consider those options for society as a whole. If it's
37:21
something that we already have in our society, and if it's something that's probably
37:22
not going away. Then how do we make them or how do we get
37:27
them to a spot where they get to do they can do their jobs better?
37:30
Or what improvements? Yeah can some people make? Yeah? All right,
37:32
my man, play us out. Thank you all for listening to today's
37:37
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38:23
as always, take care of all mentals.