It only takes one to kill you? I think that's op's point.

But it isn’t a good point absent the bad assumption that the mentally ill are more dangerous. It only takes one bicyclist that’s fallen off his bike to kill you. So what?

It isn't just the aspect of someone being mentally ill, it's someone being mentally ill and that their behaviour caused the police to be contacted.

like that one time a white woman called the cops on a black man in central park?

I don't think doing an action to have the policed called on you is the best approach, considering it can be weaponized by dishonest actors.

This is a symptom of people being to primed to believe that mentally ill people are dangerous, not a legitimate cause for concern.

Purple call the police on someone yelling. A mentally ill person yelling isn't a danger. They might be in crisis or pain, or they might be unable to effectively communicate.

A gun didn't help in any of those, the vast, vast majority of cases.

Nobody in this discussion has presumed such a thing.

It's the explicit expressed fear in the root comment, and the basis of the police warrior ideology.

The root commenter has said explicitly of armed violent people: "the vast majority of patients are not like that"

So to reiterate, nobody in this thread has presumed as bluntfang claims.

Yet their claim is that we need to respond as though every mentally ill person is an imminent threat.

Their claim, as I've interpreted it, is that their lived experiences have lead them to believe any situation must be treated with caution because they never know what to expect. That is simply not the same as presuming that every mentally ill person is carrying a firearm and is violent.

As I see it, that's just common sense. If you get a call from a woman telling you she's fallen down and is hurt, how likely is it that EMTs are met at the door by a drunk man who claims nothing is wrong? What first appeared to be a simple medical situation may actually be a case of domestic violence. Neither the dispatcher nor the EMT can know this before anybody arrives on the scene, so whoever gets there first needs to be cognizant of all possibilities. Recognizing the possibility that somebody might be violent is not the same as believing they will be.

But I think you've made my point for me:

> As I see it, that's just common sense. If you get a call from a woman telling you she's fallen down and is hurt, how likely is it that EMTs are met at the door by a drunk man who claims nothing is wrong

This is

1. Exceedingly unlikely

2. A situation where escalating might be warranted, but the person who knocks on the door isn't in imminent danger.

3. You wouldn't bring a police officer to this call, but as you've so clearly pointed out, there's a chance it could turn violent. The logical conclusion here would be that police should respond to all medical emergencies, but they don't for reasons that become clear if you look into the history of how separate medical emergency response came to be.