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Denver is Swapping Cops for Mental Health Professionals
The worst thing about not being able to manage mental illness, other than the multiple confinements in psychiatric wards, were the police interventions. Someone would call emergency services, asserting that I was an imminent danger to the community, precipitating a visit from a phalanx of police officers armed with tasers and guns.
As a relatively easygoing person who eschews possessing a gun or a knife for any reason, I never exhibited a penchant for violent behavior. I was just a young black man who needed help, preferably from individuals with experience in dealing with someone who was unraveling psychologically. Nevertheless, in an ironic twist of the knife, I was forced to deal with individuals who were the least equipped to help me. Police would usually come in primed and ready to stamp out the disobedience, their eyes wide open when they saw the larger than normal black man facing them, my signal to do everything I could to deescalate the encounter.
Sixteen years ago, I was pacing back and forth in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, when police officers kicked in the front door, brandishing guns and tasers. They grabbed and threw me down onto the carpet, shot taser probes into my rhomboid muscle, and applied constrictions to my wrists and ankles. As I lay prone on the carpet, cold and dreading gunshots to my back, the…
