Parents called for mental health help. Police arrived and fatally shot their son.

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 771 points – Parents called for mental health help. Police arrived and fatally shot their son.
nbcnews.com

Less than 10 seconds after officers opened the door, police shot Yong Yang in his parents’ Koreatown home while he was holding a knife during a bipolar episode.

Parents in Los Angeles’ Koreatown called for mental health help in the middle of their son’s bipolar episode this month. Clinical personnel showed up — and so did police shortly after. 

Police fatally shot Yong Yang, 40, who had a knife in his hand, less than 10 seconds after officers opened the door to his parents’ apartment where he had locked himself in, newly released bodycam video shows.

Now the parents of Yang, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around 15 years ago, have told NBC News exclusively that they are disputing part of the account captured on bodycam, in which police recount a clinician’s saying Yang was violent before the shooting on May 2.

212

You are viewing a single comment
View all commentsShow the parent comment

At the same time you can call social services and you end up with them being dead instead because someone having a psychotic episode slashed/shot them...

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, you can now take the time to go two replies down for a bunch of examples

That sounds absurd. Please provide one example of that happening.

It's absurd to think that never happens. It's not absurd to think that doesn't happen as often as cops killing someone.

I never claimed it never happened. It's just not something I ever recall hearing of. I spent 20 years in the medical industry and a few of those in the mental health space. I've heard of a lot of violence on mental health professionals but the characterization that the people I replied to didn't fit with my understanding. I haven't made it through all the articles but I'm still not convinced it's a thing that happens enough to consider it anything but rare.

Please provide one example

Kind of implies that you think it never happens...

https://youthtoday.org/2023/02/murdered-on-the-job-a-year-after-a-child-welfare-investigator-was-killed-little-has-changed/

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/mobile/we-re-not-giving-up-friends-of-social-worker-killed-on-the-job-continue-calls-for-justice-1.4783551

https://people.com/teri-zenner-social-worker-murdered-widower-honors-memory-7557328

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/01/09/social-workers-field-safety-remains-concern-after-killing/

https://vancouversun.com/news/crime/b-c-ministry-of-children-and-family-development-worker-shot-to-death-in-prince-rupert

Yeah, social workers are never put in danger, right?

Cherry picking data does not a compelling argument make.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics in 2022 the total number of deaths for community and social services in the US was... 19. (That's on page 8, in case you want to check.)

I found a CBS article from 2017 that cited another BLS study which said that social workers were the 20th most dangerous job category in the US, with a fatality rate of 1 per 100,000 people. That's fewer deaths than architects and engineers, which was the 19th deadliest job.

On the other hand, American police have killed more than 1000 people every year for the past ten years. To put that another way, the police killed more people last year than social workers died of job-related causes in the past decade.

It's really funny that by almost every metric you can think of, policing in the US is systemically flawed and needs major oversight.

You should compare the number per 100k for the people killed by the police if you want to make a comparison that makes sense

1000 out of 330 000 000, that's 0.3 per 100k, looks like police officers are less deadly to the population than the population is to social workers!

Also very funny that you would accuse me of cherry picking data when only situations where officers kill people during mental health checks get reported on, right?

So you're trying to normalize your ass-pulled estimate of the entire population of the US to compare it to the normalized full-time equivalent workers (which obviously isn't the entire US population)? You can understand why using people who had no interactions with the police would be an inaccurate comparison, right?

My dude, until you get a better understanding of statistics I'm not going to engage with you further.

Ass pulled estimate of the US population... I mean, the number is easy to find my dude if you want to confirm it.

Not all social workers get in contact with people suffering a mental breakdown while armed either, how is that relevant to the situation then?

It doesn't happen because the social workers call the police, the paramedics call the police, the fire department calls the police...

The police are the catch all for emergency situations. "I don't know what's happening, send the police" is pretty standard practice.

There are some police departments with salaried social workers and "community specialist" officers that are employed explicitly to deal with issues like this. The problem is that a change to law enforcement in this direction must come directly from each individual community and must be supported by those in charge of the local department.