I would argue that officers who truly believe in justice should be advocating internally for these techniques and approaches and asking to have those responsibilities given to those trained for it. It feels reductive and irresponsible to me that the argument could boil down to "I wish we had people to care for these folks, but since we don't I guess I have to kill them." Officers are conditioned to believe that killing one person can save others, but that system empowers them to make judgement calls about whose lives are valuable enough to save. I would like to see a shift in culture where officers stand up and say "stop putting me in positions where I have to end innocent lives" instead of being conditioned to believe they are actually doing good for society.

I also acknowledge that the level of income inequality in our country creates power dynamics in which individuals cannot always risk losing their jobs over their principles (though if they stood together they'd have a lot more power to do so). This is further evidence that we have a cultural problem around policing and that we should continue to expose how race, mental health, economics, and policing are always intersecting. Saying that someone is "astroturfing an anti-racist agenda" over any story about police brutality overlooks the reality that the history of policing is racial in nature.

I'd love to hear from some qualified and experienced mental health responders on how they would respond to a situation like this to inform what best practices might look like. Many of the comments in this thread carry an assumption that if you are experiencing a mental health episode that endangers other, then the logical consequence is that your life deserves to be forfeit. That does not sit well with me for the same reasons that death sentences and corporal punishment don't. I don't believe you can truly call a justice system just if it claims to uphold the dignity of life and humanity by taking exactly those two things away from people.