Here's a strange story about how our emergency services need mental health responders that literally happened last night. I was woken up around midnight by what sounded like a cat in pain outside – turns out it was actually an old woman on the ground crying for help. (Thread)
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When we realized it was a person, we went out to find a gravelly-voiced elderly woman on her side in the gutter right outside my house. A shopping cart was tipped over on top of her, her pants were around her ankles, and she was bleeding a little from a small cut on her hand.
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What had happened was this rather frail woman was apparently out on a midnight walk, realized she needed to pee, decided to do so in the gutter, and presumably used the cart that she was using as a walker as a way to stabilize herself before it fell and trapped her.
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We got her up, helped pull up her pants (which were wet from the gutter), and tried to figure out how the heck to assist her from there. She was clearly shaken and weak, but also aware of what happened enough to be pretty clear in her responses and even tell us she lived nearby.
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But we don't have any experience with this sort of thing, and her condition was still worrying enough (especially the blood on her hand) that we figured the safest bet was to call an ambulance. Shortly after, three cop cars arrived.
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She immediately got agitated and decided to walk home. It was odd because despite being lucid, she was still an ~80ish year old person with a cut on her hand peeing in the street at 12am. She could clearly use help, but not in a way that seemed like she was in immediate danger.
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An officer started asking the basic questions about what happened, if she wanted someone to examine her hand, and she pretty much shut down everything. They offered her help home and she looked at them and, clear as a bell, said "I don't want no cops in my life."
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At this point she was already walking away slowly with the cart again, now pissed off at us for unintentionally calling in the cops when we just wanted to make sure she wasn't dying. I turned to the lead officer to see what they were going to do and he basically just went "
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He explained that since she had refused help and seemed with it enough I guess, the only option they legally had was apparently to let this elderly, half-soaked, partially bleeding woman just walk home. It's so unbelievable to me that this is how this situation was "resolved."
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A person went from yelling for their life in a gutter to defiantly denying assistance because our emergency services (and admittedly myself) aren't actually prepared to adequately assist in a more nuanced situation like this. Plain and simple, we need options that are.
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unbelievable. good on you for helping, Tom. it's so troubling that Americans can't trust the folks who are hired to serve and protect. mental health response is such a necessary reform, one that needs to happen asap.
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En réponse à @ZachariusD @TomRMarks
My best friend is SFPD but he’s not trained as a social worker. You can trust him but he can’t violate people’s rights. We need mental health workers and we need to open the state hospitals back so people like this can have a safe haven.
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Im a cop in Australia and I am trained and experienced enough in social care. Although in this situation an ambulance should have arrived not police. Universal health care would have sorted this incident.
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