A friend of the blog emails:
So, if the cops think they got one of the shooters of those young kids in Mpls, they can’t pull him over if they have a taillight out?
Just asking.
Snark aside, I am trying to imagine the actual process of sorting calls between, at the most extreme case:
- The actual cops
- The unarmed traffic police
- The social workers that are supposed to respond to mental health calls
Mental health cases routinely escalate. As the FOTB notes above, traffic stops find felons all the time; two of Ted Bundy’s arrests, to pick a random example, started as traffic stops; not a few homicides started as mental health calls.
The gnashing and grinding at the 911 center alone will be epic – as will the hordes of cross-department staff that wind up getting laboriously dispatched to calls after the the first social worker or unarmed hall monitor,…er, traffic cop gets “unexpectedly” killed.
Yup! If I’m a woman with a partner that’s drunk and smacking me around at 2 a.m., I want a 110 pound female social worker to respond to my 9-1-1 call. I mean, it’s obvious that the partner has a mental health issue, right? I also would wonder if said social workers would be actually stationed at a police precinct on a regular shift or if they would be “on call”? If it’s the latter, we add 20 minutes to the response time.
Sounds like a perfectly typical Democrap program.
One thing that’s very telling is that when many activists go on a ride-along with a real officer in many of these cities, they change their tune regarding what they want the police to do. For some of us, we read the newspapers (or online reports) and infer “these traffic stops and domestic cases seem to be more involved than I’d want to handle while unarmed”, and for others, it appears to take a bit more direct interaction.