Yes. Yes. I know CNN is garbage media. However; as I have admonished people for years, I read across the spectrum because you never know who is going to give you good information or ideas. This one is about
non-police interventions
(CNN)Around 30 years ago, a town in Oregon retrofitted an old van, staffed it with young medics and mental health counselors and sent them out to respond to the kinds of 911 calls that wouldn't necessarily require police intervention...
It works this way: 911 dispatchers filter calls they receive -- if they're violent or criminal, they're sent to police. If they're within CAHOOTS' purview, the van-bound staff will take the call. They prep what equipment they'll need, drive to the scene and go from there.
An exceptionally good idea on the part of the town that I would definitely see replicated nationwide.
CAHOOTS was created in part because of another disturbing statistic -- around 25% of people killed by police show signs of mental illness, according to a journal review of the Washington Post's extensive officer-involved shootings database.
I'm all for reducing such incidents to as close to zero as possible.
"I believe it's time for law enforcement to quit being a catch-base for everything our community and society needs," Skinner said. "We need to get law enforcement professionals back to doing the core mission of protecting communities and enforcing the law, and then match resources with other services like behavioral health -- all those things we tend to lump on the plate of law enforcement."
Absolutely nothing to argue with here. The rest of the article is a good read and something those who are interested in actual reform should seriously look at. And I'll say that these "CAHOOTS" people have done more to save lives than BLM.
