04-20-2021, 11:29 PM
DeusxMac wrote:
C(-)ris, you miss my point...
We have Fire Departments which can respond to a fire situation almost immediately.
We have Police Departments which can respond to a crime situation almost immediately.
We have NO government department which can immediately respond to a mental health situation... so the untrained and unprepared police are called. And this incident shows how dangerously poor that often goes.
I did, you missed it. There isn't a department that can immediately respond because it doesn't work that way. You can't immediately respond to a mental health issue and solve it and move on to the next one. Your fleet of mental health navigators would work for about 2 weeks and then they would be over run by the follow up and ongoing needs. You would have to be constantly hiring people exponentially as new calls come in. Caseload will never decrease, it will only increase. Plus, you are going to have people who refuse treatment. Are you going to force them to comply with the Mental Health staff? Some of them will be violent. How do you distinguish and decide who responds?