Why Did Police Get Away With Killing a Mentally Ill Homeless Man?

[cali]

Disheartening and disturbing. This is an excellent, albeit long, article.

"Dad, help me."

"God, help me."

"Help me. Help me. Help me."

These were the last words of a mentally ill homeless man named Kelly Thomas, who was beaten into a coma by two Fullerton (California) police officers on the night of July 10, 2011. Thomas died five days later. Yet despite the fact that the beating was recorded on videotape, and the pleas of the beaten man were heard and recorded by audio devices worn by the officers, an Orange County jury Monday night acquitted both men of all of the criminal charges against them.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/why-did-police-get-away-with-killing-a-mentally-ill-homeless-man/283053/

[leftyladyfrommo]

1. The new way of handling the mentally ill problem in the country.

Just have the police shoot them. It's cheap and effective.

[geek tragedy]

2. the question answers itself.

police as perps and mentally ill homeless as the victim.

Would have been a stunning upset had the jury voted for accountability.

[Harmony Blue]

3. We live in a society that doesn't acknowledge that the majority of the population is hovering above

the poverty line. I see a lot of gated communities springing up all over Florida now while the poor are pretty much everywhere you go these days.

[Johonny]

4. Orange County jury

Ah the other California...

[Shandris]

5. He was poor. Clearly he was an odious, evil man who only got...

...what he deserved by good upstanding men of honor.

(and if you couldn't detect that sarcasm, you best get your meter checked!)

People as a whole have no compassion of those whom our society has deemed not just underprivileged, but immoral in existence. And to be poor is to not be rich, which means to not be 'blessed by God', which means to be a servant of evil, at least in the commonly-held (often subconsciously) belief system

[gwheezie]

6. I've worked with mentally ill people for 40 years

They are typically victims, they have few advocates and rarely get the care they need. They could just as easily wind up in jail as a hospital depending on the officers at the scene and what agencies are available to intervene. Sometimes they wind up dead. It's not easy being mentally ill, you have to be pretty tough to survive it.
I don't understand why supposedly sane people don't just back down when confronted with a mentally ill homeless person who clearly is not able to follow simple direction until someone who is trained in crisis intervention can arrive on the scene, why get into a power struggle over loitering or disorderly with a person who is having trouble dealing with reality. Did anyone see an immediate danger that the dead guy presented to anyone, it didn't escalate until the cops escalated it. The guy was homeless, he was loitering, he was acting bizarre but I didn't see the threatening behavior.

[Iggo]

7. OC! What it be!

[Brigid]

8. There was a time . . .

When, if I had gone to the police academy, I would have expected to get at least some training in how to deal with the mentally ill. I guess, in the back of my mind, I assumed I would have encountered them on a fairly frequent basis, as part of the job. Obviously, in light of this an similarly horrible stories I've heard about, I was wrong.

[FreakinDJ]

9. Blame the Supeme Court for this