Young couple goes on van tour of US, boy comes back with van - no girl

DaveXA said

While I agree about the hole in the system part, I'm not sure we have the resources to fill that hole. Do we have social workers or mental health workers capable of defusing crisis or chaotic situations effectively? Do they work in tandem with cops? Do 911 calls get rerouted to them, or do cops call them in when they realize the situations warrant it? Just seems like an issue with far more questions than answers.

Maybe there's a local program out there I'm unaware of that might address this.

I suppose it's another thread entirely though.

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Yeah, definitely another thread, but just making the observation that this is where the whole “defund the police” thing gets co-opted.

In a world of limited resources, the question isn’t defund in the sense of taking all funds away but rather reallocation of funds, perhaps from SWAT/anti-terrorism/military-type police funding to associated mental health responders. Of course, I don’t pretend to have all the answers and I certainly recognize the need for SWAT/terrorism response in today’s world. But I expect that there is massive redundancy (with associated cost) in duplicating response teams across local departments, where perhaps you might have more of a regionalized heavy response unit in order to free up funds to support more local social response resources — for example, during the forced separation of these two, would separate follow up visits with Gabby or Brian by a trained professional have identified that she was in more trouble than it appeared to (relatively) untrained LEOs?