Accuse First, Ask Questions Later

Accuse First, Ask Questions Later - The left in Minneapolis is crying foul over the weekend shooting of a machete-wielding, mentally-illy Somali man by the Police - apparently after the officers on the scene exhausted all of their non-lethal options. Interestingly, they were issuing press releases via email long before the story got out via any other media.

The police apparently tried to use a number of officers that were specially-trained last year to deal with the violent mentally-ill:

"More than 40 Minneapolis police officers have
been trained to respond to situations involving
people with mental illnesses. They make up the
city's Crisis Intervention Team, which was created
last year in response to police shootings of three
mentally ill people in 1999 and 2000.

Crisis team members, who have undergone about 40
hours of training, carry Taser guns as a nonlethal
way to defuse a situation when police feel threatened.
Two members of the team attempted to subdue the man
Sunday before he was shot.

So - at risk to themselves and everyone around them, the police try to use non-lethal techniques to subdue him. Somalis attempted to talk him down. In the end, he took a swing at the cops and got shot - and that's unjustifiable?

What - is the life of a cop worth less than anyone else's?

The shooting is tragic. Does anyone have any solid evidence that it wasn't justifiable? The police aren't clairvoyant. If they did everything they could - and let's make sure they did - then what more was there to do?

I grew up near a State Hospital. The outpatients wandered the street, day in, day out. Some of them were severely schizophrenic, deeply dissociative. We were told they weren't dangerous - and they weren't. Until they were. There were killings, rapes, other crimes.

Do you suppose that saying "the perpetrator wasn't responsible for her actions" makes the victims feel any better? Or alive, for that matter?

This last year, with the shootings of the mentally-ill in Minneapolis and the Andrea Yates case, has seen a groundswell of support for the notion that the mentally-ill deserve a special dispensation for their actions, no matter now violent or homicidal. Yates, the logic goes, CAN'T be responsible for murdering her children; a mentally-ill man swinging a machete isn't a danger in his own mind, ergo he's no danger at all, and any damage he inflicts is just too bad.

This says "the life of the mentally-ill person is worth more than that of the rest of society". They are certainly worth no less than the rest of us. They can not be made worth more.