Hired Killers and Complicit Media

                                 No Taser: Defunding the Police 

By Valeria Vegh Weis: Psychotic break. Confusion. Rupture of temporal reality. Delusions or hallucinations. This seems to have been the diagnosis of Santiago “Chano” Moreno Carpentier. The expected answer? An interdisciplinary mental health team to assist the person in crisis and even provide support to the family, and evaluate the best procedure in the specific case. That, of course, is what the National Mental Health Law 26,657 provides. But that is not what happened. 

 Instead of uniformed in white, policemen in blue came who solved the crisis situation by shooting the person suffering from the mental health episode in the abdomen. Instead of a comprehensive approach to the psychotic break, Chano ended up in intensive care as a result of (misguided) state intervention. And he doesn't end there. Instead of laying eyes on the policeman who shot, the intervening prosecutor's office initiated actions against Chano for resisting authority and injuries! The easy trigger that he left in intensive care, whom he had to protect, is under-criminalized. Those who could not understand what they were doing because they were suffering from a psychotic break are over-criminalized. Pure and hard criminal selectivity.

 I hope it was the end of the case, but Berni's statements were added, who seems not to be aware of the current legislation on mental health, and considered, instead, that the problem is that the policeman had a regulation firearm and not a Taser. Tasers have proven to be deadly. And they are certainly not considered as treatment for mental health episodes.

 What to do? Lenin would say. Nothing better than looking at the northern country, the United States, where these trigger-happy episodes as a way to solve mental health problems continually occupy the covers of newspapers. There, tired of the police intervening in tasks for which they are not and cannot be prepared, a massive campaign from the streets is demanding to defund the police (Defund the police!). 

 Hired killers and complicit media

Note: Hitmen Stop resisting and  Media assault a female officer

The proposal is simple. Today the police are in charge of intervening against people living on the streets (remember the UCEP?); What channels and tools can the police use to address the problem of a homeless person? Wouldn't it be better to transfer the funds allocated for this type of operation to the Ministry of Social Development and the directorates devoted to housing policies? 

 The examples follow. The police are also in charge of intervening in cases of drug possession for personal use. What is the intervention? Over-criminalize: detain the person, start a file, fill the courts with causes that distract from the problem of drug trafficking and complex crime. How about trying to remove the money planned for these interventions and assigning it to education plans on responsible use of narcotic drugs and treatments under informed consent for those with problem use? 

And the case that brings us to account. What would it be like to take away from the police the functions of intervention in mental health cases and derive that financing from the meager funds that the mental health units have (despite the fact that the Mental Health Law provided for an exponential increase in these amounts)?

 To each player his own. The police are trained to respond with punitive power. Neither homelessness, nor drug use, nor mental health (just for starters) can be solved with criminal control. The slogan of defunding the police can give them back the ability to take care of what they are trained to do, while social and health problems are redirected to those professionals who know how to act. Containing instead of firing. And for that, no Taser is require

 

Words of Wonder/Get Up Stand Up feat.