Current Events > President Obama made a statement regarding police I question

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On Trevor Noah tonight. He said, if theres a homeless guy in the middle of the street ranting and raving, it might be safer to send a social worker.

To me, it seems like that scenario is inherently dangerous to send an unarmed social worker in the middle of the street to deal with a potentially ED person

i agree, there are calls that could be a better use of not police time. But this example just seems wrong

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Fair. Seems like SWs and POs should work more cohesively to handle cases like that.

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One of my best friends is a 5ft6 female social worker and deals with unhinged people all the time. But shes well trained at deescalation and most of the time when someone sees a small woman approaching them they don't become more violent. Also she wouldn't go into a dangerous situation without some kind of backup.

I get your point but I think there's really merit in the idea of approaching more of these problems with people actually trained (well) to help rather than hurt.

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Obama still has to walk the razor's edge with what he says.

He's basically saying the police isn't a safe institution, not that a social worker would be a better alternative.

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Maybe they need a new class of social worker. Like case managers in a prison. Their job is to help the inmate in things such as home plans when they get released answering questions they may have us COs dont have access to the info of. Helping them get jobs etc. But should a inmate ever get violent with them they have the same training and weapons availaible a CO does.

So basically have a new group of social workers that are trained in verbal descalation unarmed self defense fire arms training and give them so pepper spray maybe a tazer and gun in case things do go sideways. Just train them to flee if at all possible and let regular cops come in and do their thing. But should fleeing be not a good option they need the tools to protect themselves

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The police generally take the opposite route and treat a homeless person like a criminal cause thats what they are trained to do.

Looking at a different way to deal with things isnt the worst idea.

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Obama isn't the President my guy.

ToadallyAwesome posted...

treat a homeless person like a criminal

Not entirely a bad idea...

At a minimum they need to be treated as dangerous.

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Ranting homeless people are pretty damn common and I wouldn't want police to get involved unless they were actually attacking people. A large majority of them would never harm anybody and they typically have some type of mental condition that keeps them homeless.

Personally I hate that we don't do more for them as a society. There is no legitimate reason for people to live like that in this country. There should be more social workers involved.

AP3Brain posted...

Ranting homeless people are pretty damn common and I wouldn't want police to get involved unless they were actually attacking people. A large majority of them would never harm anybody and they typically have some type of mental condition that keeps them homeless.

Personally I hate that we don't do more for them as a society. There is no legitimate reason for people to live like that in this country. There should be more social workers involved.

I agree with what youre saying but I think you also need to look into more numbers. In just CA, LA did a study that homeless individuals had accounted for 12 percent of the citys violent felony crimes despite making up less than 1 percent of the population. Again, it is largely due to mental illness, substance abuse, etc.. but its not just harmless subjects

this study too shows how mental illness can lead to violence
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19702378/

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