Comment by uyzstvqs
5 hours ago
Well that's just not true. You're supposed to call 911 if you witness someone else in crisis, not the crisis hotline. The police will be sent because they have baseline training in de-escalation, and they have officers with specialized training in crisis negotiation. An ambulance is relevant only if someone is already hurt. They're medical professionals. Even in that situation, police officers are usually dispatched to investigate and to keep the ambulance personnel safe in a potentially unpredictable environment. And you're correct, protective custody exists and it's there to keep the person in crisis safe.
>The police will be sent because they have baseline training in de-escalation
There are something like 30,000+ police agencies across the United States, and a proportional number within California (if we're talking about that place in particular and not more generally). To say "they have baseline training in de-escalation" is, at best, wishful thinking. While no doubt some departments make that a part of their training and within those departments most patrol officers will have undergone the training (enough that your statement wouldn't be especially incorrect if you were to specify one of those departments), it is beyond fallacious to assume that this holds true for all of them in general.
Even when the training does exist and the officer has completed it, it consists of a one or two day seminar. They are not evaluated in a way that some pass and some fail. We do not know who took it seriously, and who thought it was some jackass bleeding-heart bullshit that they could ignore. We do not know if those anyone gains by it... if some are good at it afterward and others are bad at de-escalation afterward, has that percentage shifted upwards compared to whatever their pre-training scores would suggest?
I do not believe you when you fallaciously assert "they have baseline training". No one else should believe you either, if the answer actually matters to them. I do not know why you assert this, and the speculation ranges from "not a good reason" to "even worse reasons".