Carol Gotbaum and personal responsibility

[mosdef]

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Really? If the government is going to write laws defining who is mentally ill and granting the police the power to detain them to protect them from themselves and others (which they have) then they must also assume responsibility for the ill while their detained. They can't have it both ways.

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Your agenda caused you to miss poster's point: the family of the mentally ill individual ought not allow that individual to enter unescorted into situations that could cause the mental illness to come to the fore.

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Sorry to bump this old thread, but I missed this response.

Of course I agree with you that the family has a moral obligation to not let this person out on their own where they are in danger. That was not the point.

For the part quoted above, I was posting in response to the assertion that the police do not have responsibility for taking care of the mentally ill. However, the police are granted the right to detain the mentally ill, as defined by the law. In exchange they must take responsibility for them while in custody. As I've already said, in this particular case that doesn't apply because the police has no reasonable expectation that the person was mentally ill, and aren't equipped to do that kind of assessment. But that doesn't mean that in general police aren't responsible for taking care of the mentally ill that they detain "for the public own good".

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And yes, the government could quite easily write laws that would make this legally mandatory, rather than merely morally mandatory.

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Sure, but those would be in addition to the laws that say when the police find a mentally ill person out in public that they think is dangerous then they can detain them. When they do that, they must assume responsibility for them.

[kevin017]

it is clearly not the polices fault.

the police do have a responsibility to protect you from yourself once in their custody, in a sense. but they only have to do what a normal person would find reasonably necessary. if they heard her slamming her head into the door and let it go on, boo on them, but i'm guessing we can count on one hand the number of people who have strangled themselves with their own handcuffs.