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Opinion: NYC’s Budget Does Not Make Policing Safer for those with Mental Illness

2 Comments

  • Luz Torres
    Posted July 10, 2020 at 10:47 am

    This is great. What you are asking is so needed and there are many of us advocates out here that will certainly take a stand for, Response to Mental Health Crisis by those who are equipped to deal with those who need help. Not
    encounters with the police, Not incarceration, not Mental Health wards. We need alternative intervention and prevention; community intervention by; Peers, Social Workers, Psycholigists. We need; Respite sites and Housing (not shelters), Educational Programs, Back to work initiatives. This will build up communities. Not tare them down.

  • Elyse Shuk
    Posted July 22, 2020 at 11:56 am

    This is an extremely powerful and moving piece. I know firsthand the experience of being forced to deal with the police when I was experiencing a psychotic episode in my apartment in Brooklyn 2 years ago. For a person who lives with mental illness, seeing cops enter her apartment in the very midst of being delusional was traumatic on so many levels.
    I still cry when I reflect back and share my experience. I am a peer specialist and I have extreme empathy for all of us “crazy people.” We deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, not be traumatized at the hands of a police force that has no idea what to do with a person who is experiencing a psychotic event. But then again, no human being, regardless of whether they live with a mental illness or not, deserves to be traumatized by cops. It is grossly unfair and an inherent betrayal of the civil society that the US is supposed to embody (but unfortunately fails on so many levels).

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