America's Mental Health Crisis And Excellent Policing

In almost all of the videos I watch of drunks who turn nothing into a felony, the biggest problem (aside from alcohol) is immaturity.  And that's the issue we have here:  people who are simply brats that need a time out.  America is full of people with inadequate coping skills that become a police problem.  That makes law enforcement an almost impossible job.

I'm posting this video because (a) this young lady is hilarious and (b) the cop handled her masterfully.  This calm, temperate officer is the opposite of Greg Morabito who I just posted about, who couldn't handle the first moments of an interaction calmly.

An officer approaches to find this young woman face-down on the dirt alongside the road.  She begins an ambulance en route.  The girl gets up and is obviously quite drunk.  She says things like, "I just mean I thought I was somewhere else," which is one of her more coherent statements.

She's there with a couple of other people, including a couple of young men who seem perfectly sober and were trying to help her get safely home.   The guy apparently helped her not get hit by a car and stood by waiting for an ambulance while she was face-down on the roadside.  She stands there calling him a liar and asshole the whole time he's talking to the police.

Throughout this interaction the young woman -- who is carrying someone else's ID -- is incredibly rude, both to the person who was trying to help her get home and to the cop, who is also perfectly polite the whole time.

My point in covering this is that this call is the majority of police work in America.  They get called out to this kind of crap constantly.  This is the demeanor they need to have.  They also need to be prepared to use force up to and including lethal if she happens to pull out a weapon.  Right?  We're asking a lot of people.  But most of the time it's almost nothing, like this.  And I wanted to highlight the amazing job this cop did with her.

This is exactly how to handle someone who says this litany of idiotic piss-takes -- you ignore and laugh, just as this officer did.

I'm sure the comments are full of "Karen" comments, too, despite both people being in the same demographic.  Because bigotry isn't about reality checking.  But here are some of the funny things this girl said while being arrested -- which was probably avoidable if she would've cooperated and given her name. 

• Your body cash is on
  
• I'm not arrested.  You're getting arrested and getting fired.  [Cop:  "Okay" LOL]
  
• You're illegally detesting me
  
• ...because you're not smarter than me.  And you're not smarter than my mom.  And you're an idiot.  And you will regret it.  [Cop takes phone call as she drives off.  "What's up?  I'm getting yelled at by a drunk girl" she nonchalantly explains.]
  
• ... and you will be arrested, and I will sue you.  You wanna know why?  Because I have more education than you.  And my mom, most of all, has more education than you.  [Cop continues phone call, ignoring her completely.]
  
• Learn your fucking place in the court of law, how I"m illegally being detested right now, because no one read my my Miranda lights and I'm in the back seat of a cop car.
  
• If I'm being detested my Miranda rights have to be read to me.
  
• ["It's called being detained," the cop explains.]  Girl, you're about to be fucked so far up your asshole that you will not know where you are when you come out of it.  I'm being detested illegally.
  

I would point out that it's legal in all 50 states to detest her. 

TL/DR the cop wins.  You can watch the video if you really want to hear the whole thing.  It's pretty sad/funny.  I'm glad that the internet wasn't around when I was young.  But also, despite getting drunk as a dog every night for years, nothing like this ever happened to me.  I was never banned from anything or even thrown out of anywhere. 

My point is that this is what policing is in America.  You have to go from this situation of a teenager who isn't safe to be out on the streets and getting her into a controlled environment, to a domestic situation where you're stopping family members from killing each other.  Then you bounce to a shoplifting situation.  And every once in a while someone is running down the street shooting people.  I ran calls like this constantly as a paramedic.  

My concern is how we can get this job done in the best way for all parties concerned.