#stop cop cit

[commiepinkofag]

September 10, 2009 Atlanta's Police Vice Squad and paramilitary 'Red Dog' unit illegally raided the Atlanta Eagle Bar

Settlements from lawsuits filed by victims of the raid reached over 1 million.

Per a court order, the APD created a one-hour training video which all officers have to watch and answer an accompanying set of questions.

The 'Red Dog Unit' was disbanded and replaced with another unit — currently named 'Titan'.

The Titan Unit "will have to be more aggressive," Police Chief Rodney Bryant told a House committee. But, Bryant also assured lawmakers "in no way" would it "replace what Red Dog was." — 2021

'Red Dog' was at one point was led by Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn "C.J." Davis, who then created the 'Scorpion Unit' in Memphis — the 'Scorpion Unit' subsequently responsible for the murder of Tyre Nichols.

Police falsely imprisoned Atlanta Eagle bar patrons, employees in raid, rules citizen review board

Among the many racist and homophobic slurs used by police that night, an officer was heard saying, “Raiding a gay bar is fun, we should do it every week.” ['alleged']

The owner of the Atlanta Eagle stated that the city's actions following the ruling have been "nothing more than a slap in the face of the gay community".

Review finds widespread wrongdoing in Atlanta Eagle bar raid [2011] Two officers from Atlanta Eagle raid in trouble again; complaints allege groping, body search [2011]

The officers named involved in the Atlanta Eagle raid were: Sgt. John Brock, Sgt. Willie Adams III, Sgt. Kelley Collier, Officer Melonie Mague, Officer Robert Goodwin, Officer Stallone Davis, Investigator Bennie Bridges, Officer Jeremy Edwards, Officer Dimitri Jaques, Officer Dione Meredith, Officer James Menzoian, Officer Cayenne Mayes, Officer Christopher Dowd, Officer Craig Condon, Investigator Herman Glass, Investigator Timothy McClain, Officer Brandon Jackson, Officer Marlon Noble, Officer Stephanie Upton, Officer William Porter, Officer William B. Walters, Officer Vincente Marcano, Officer Darnell Perry and Officer Jared Watkins.

14 years after the notorious raid…

The Eagle reopens in a new location, after closure during the Covid epidemic.

[leavingautumn13]

Tell me about Walking After Midnight?

[wip ask game]

walking after midnight is the (actual) second chapter of my fallout 4 fic what becomes of the brokenhearted. it's from nora's perspective, and covers her and valentine searching kellogg's apartment and tracking him through the city to the cit ruins, and we get to see the start of what later becomes their dynamic once nora joins the agency. danse is also there briefly--his scene in particular i like, because it sets up the first half of a parallel that doesn't get explored until much, much later in the fic. it's very fun.

a little excerpt for you under the cut.

“I want to investigate this with you.”

“Figured you would,” Valentine said. “Yeah, sure. That works just fine.”

Nora stared, incredulous. “That’s it? Just ‘yeah, sure’?”

“What are you expecting?”

Disinterest? Platitudes? A sorry, ma’am, but there’s nothing more I can do?

Anything but this.

Nora pinched the bridge of her nose again. “I’m sorry. I—I wasn’t expecting this much… help. I’ve gotten nowhere since I woke up, and now, I…”

Valentine nodded, like that was a coherent sentence. “What was it you did before the War?”

A what’s that got to do with anything almost fell out of her mouth before she stopped it. “I’m a—I was a lawyer.”

“No foolin’,” Valentine said. “Prosecution or defense?”

“Defense,” she said, watching him carefully.

He nodded, expression completely neutral, and flicked ash from the end of his cigarette. “Try anything I might’ve heard of?”

Nora pursed her lips. “Very funny.”

He smiled faintly. “A guy’s gotta try. Well, that explains it, I think.”

“Explains what?”

He fixed her with bright eyes, and leaned forward. His smile was gone. “You know I’m not a cop, right?”

Nora stared. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

[sjerzgirl]

They'll jail people for killing "unborn" children. But they suspend without pay a cop who helped save two LIVING children - because he hurt their police car in the process. Notice they rarely suspend cops without pay who shoot to kill someone, even that person they're unarmed and not a threat. Family values Florida. Yeah.

[michaelcosio]

Cash-in-transit robbers beaten hands down by heroic retired cop cash van driver

Published on 02 May 2021

AUTHOR Sbu Mzobe

Bulletproof windows, great driving skills and a very strong Toyota Landcruiser bakkie are the reason why two escort guards in a cash-in-transit vehicle survived a horrific attack last week.

The two were on the road when armed robbers opened fire on their cruiser which fortunately for them, was bulletproof.

A round, which appeared to be from an assault rifle, was aimed directly at the driver but it failed to penetrate the armoured escort vehicle.

The driver of the vehicle, who was apparently in the police task force, was lauded for the way he handled the situation.

National Police spokesman, BrigadierVish Naidoo said: “On Thursday, 22 April, a group of men tried to rob a CIT vehicle on the N4 in Pretoria. The suspects fired several shots at the CIT vehicle in an attempt to stop it during a high-speed chase.

“The driver of the CIT vehicle managed to evade the robbers for a while but later stopped in wait for the robbers. The robbers fled without taking any money. No arrests have yet been made.”

At the end of the video, the retired cop grabs the rifle from his companion and springs into action.

With his back against the wall and ready to exchange fire he waited for the robbers to catch up but seemingly his earlier resistance was enough to put them off.

They fled empty handed.

On social media, where the video has gone viral, some hoped he would get a movie role and others went far as comparing him to James Bond.

“Hollywood shows us actors, Real life shows us heroes.” wrote Robert Schultz.

Nelson Club commented “Chuck Norris, James Bond, John Wick and Jason Bourne all rolled into one actual living person…mad respect”

[lucilleandherrobots]

Okay. I wrote this as a response to an earlier post by @jasmineofthecommonwealth, but I really want it to be seen by others. Not that people can't just read the notes on there, but I really wanted to see what people think which means I'm making my own post about it. 

Fun fact- I don't think Nick can technically die unless they damage whatever runs his personality and stores his memories. So even if he were theoretically uploaded or put into a Securitron, Assaultron, or Sentry bot, or another Synth, in some way he'd still be Nick and he'd still be very VERY much alive so long as his memories and personality subroutines stayed intact. 

In fact if his entire drive could be cloned you'd have a way of making multiple Nick Valentines. Don't think it would end well. They might start trying to fight each other in a self destructive fit of existential crisis and confusion. Then there's that whole theory of if a person's memories and personality were cloned, would their consciousness ALSO transfer into the clone body or stay in the original and all that. 

Which leads me into another theory of how deadly the mind scan was and whether or not the original Nick's consciousness won the proverbial coin toss after all. 

In a way we do have to ask ourselves here- what exactly IS Nick?  What part of him makes Nick... ALIVE?! And in the same vein we could apply what makes a human alive, kind of- once that part of your brain that holds all of your memories goes, you kind of stop... Living. You are EFFECTIVELY brain dead, meaning that even though everything else is still working like normal to some degree,  you, or at least the part that makes you "YOU" is dead. You are lost at that juncture. 

But Nick is a computer. If you rigged it right you could transfer EVERYTHING to a NEW synth body so long as it's compatible.  Therefore he cannot actually die if his entire personality remains intact in long run. 

Of course, there's the whole issue of the coin toss- the transfer of consciousness to the new body vs the old. Usually in most scenarios this whole situation plays out, there's a 50/50 chance the original wins out and transfers over to the new body. Whichever body the consciousness of the individual doesn't choose kind of exists as a separate entity from the one that retains- it's kind of shown as a sudden shift of perspective if it's transferred at all. 

At what point here could original Nick (the synth) be considered dead if a copy of him is killed?  Is the consciousness of him a signifier of Valentine's life? His very soul even? Does the copy count as a new life if he develops some form of sentience and consciousness of his own?  Do I even understand what I'm talking about? 

And if it does count as the original Nick (the synth) being "Alive," what does that say about the cop who lived back before the war? Is he "Alive" then, too? Did he lose the coin toss? Or perhaps, he won it and now has convinced himself he's a copy of a long dead detective from before the war.

I often wonder if Nick the cop survived the CIT scan at all. I wonder if he lived his own life after the procedure- miserable and grief stricken. Or worse, beyond the reaches of the current Nick's memories, did something... that's best left forgotten. Or did the scan fry his brain in the process, making it mout whether or not he won the bloody coin toss or not. Who knows? 

Tldr: As long as the original copy of Nick's personality and memories persists to exist, even turned off/damaged and unresponsive, Nick cannot actually die.

[96thdayofrage]

Scaredy Cops: Fear-based training of police officers makes them more likely to shoot

Amber Guyger and Aaron Dean, the cops who shot and killed Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson, respectively, had something in common: Both shot an innocent person for no good reason because they were scared.

Maybe that's because they were trained to be. Guyger testified that she killed Botham Jean because she feared for her life. And clearly Dean, who had snuck into Jefferson's backyard instead of announcing himself at the open front door, considered himself in grave danger just from seeing a woman's silhouette in the window. But neither faced an actual threat. The greater threat in both cases stemmed from their own fear. Cop culture brims with fearful rhetoric about the dangers they face, even though most cops never fire their service weapon over the course of their careers. A former Baltimore cop writing in Medium last year worried that "police are trained to fear." "Cops are supposed to be heroes and first responders and run toward danger," he wrote, "but it sure seemed like our training was teaching us to be afraid of everyone." The most important thing for a police officer is to be sure they "go home at the end of the day," they tell themselves repeatedly, including in police trainings on use of force. "It's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six," is a common refrain every police officer has heard repeatedly throughout their careers. Officers and their union representatives have said it to me dozens of times over the years. In reality, though, the people who pick up your garbage are significantly more likely to die on the job than police officers. That doesn't mean police don't have difficult jobs, that they aren't subject to lesser assaults, or that they are never justified in using force. But in terms of going home to their families at night, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and fishermen all have more dangerous occupations. Much of this exaggerated fear stems from how officers are trained. Amber Guyger had received deescalation training as mandated under Texas' "Sandra Bland Act," but she said she never considered following it over the course of her encounter with Botham Jean. And Dean had just completed 40 hours of CIT training aimed at dealing with people with mental illness; in essence, CIT courses are a version of deescalation training. However, deescalation tactics are not typically included in the general use-of-force curriculum officers take at the academy. They're treated as an extra, an add-on, not as a fundamental philosophy that should infuse every encounter where force is used. In addition, there is a sizable cottage industry of fear mongering cop trainers teaching officers to adopt a "warrior" mentality. In Minneapolis, anti-police-brutality advocates have pushed back against such "fear-based training" and the Mayor earlier this year pledged to get rid of it, declaring, “Fear-based trainings violate the values at the very heart of community policing. When you’re conditioned to believe that every person encountered poses a threat to your existence, you simply cannot be expected to build meaningful relationships with those same people.” Police officers who shoot people have other things in common. They are more likely to be white, much more likely to be male (even controlling for job assignments), and more likely to have NRA-friendly views on gun rights, found a Pew Research Center survey in 2017. But those effects are relatively small compared to the impact of repeated trainings which teach police to value their own safety above all else. That notion has become deeply embedded in police officer culture and underlies many of the incidents that most inflame the public. None of this is intended to diminish real-life tragedies like that which befell Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal - who recently was shot to death by a mentally ill parolee at a traffic stop - only to put the relative risks in context. Such incidents are far more rare than most people believe. (Pew found that three in ten Americans estimate police fire their weapons several times per year, whereas in fact most never fire them.) There are more than three-quarters of a million police officers in the United States, but the number who are feloniously killed in the line of duty typically never exceeds double digits (with the terrorist attacks of 9-11 being an important, notable exception). This chart, compiled from FBI data, depicts the number of officers who die each year including both accidents and felonious deaths.

By contrast, police shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people per year across America. Grits believes it will take a generation to change police culture surrounding use of force and end the "warrior cop" mentality that's become de jure in modern law enforcement. But it will take longer than that if officer trainings continue the scaredy-cop approach. Deescalation can't just be tacked on in addition to use-of-force training - it must BECOME the use-of-force training. And it needs to happen soon.

[musicfeedsmysoul12]

The Wedding

Commission from @crazyfanatic97!!! This was a lot of fun!!!

Almost every little girl dreams of her perfect wedding. She dreams of the dress and her Prince Charming and the food. Marinette’s been dreaming of her perfect wedding since she was thirteen and met Adrien Agreste. Much of it had changed since she was a kid- no white horses or magical carriages. Instead, it was a wedding in a gorgeous venue. A large fountain was bubbling outside the venue in a garden where they would take their photos. 

 The Kwami she was responsible for as Guardian were all secretly in attendance in the rafters, with their little tables and chairs. Her friends and family were all in attendance, with her best friend’s mother and her own parents catering the event. 

 The best thing of all was that she hadn’t been wrong about her groom. Oh sure- there were some years she thought perhaps she’d be marrying a future rocker or a fencing star or her superhero partner. But instead, she was right on the money when she was thirteen years old. 

 Adrien Agreste. Her fiancé, her future husband. The light of her life. She was so happy to be with him.

 The only downside to the day was that her partner, her kitty, wouldn’t be in attendance due to a wedding of his own. It hurt, a little. But she tried to focus on her own happiness.

 “You look beautiful Marinette,” Alya told her as they fixed the tiara in her hair, most of her hair down her back and curly.

  Marinette was wearing her own design today, a beautiful white dress with a veil for her hair, off the shoulder straps that showed off her collarbone and neck. The top layer was white with the bottom two layers- one barely peeking out underneath the others- silver and sparkling enough to be beautiful and not tacky. Gold sparkled on her dress as well, making it shine all the more. She had no red or black in her design- to dangerous for anyone to possibly guess her identity. 

  “Thank you, Alya,” Marinette said, smiling at her friend- her maid of honour. And part of the Miraculous Team though no one really knew that. Marinette smiled to herself. The entire team was part of her wedding party and she couldn’t be happier.

 “We ready?” Marinette’s mother said, poking her head in. “Oh, baby…” Sabine wore a beautiful red cheongsam with gold designs. She looked so proud of her daughter as she strode forward to hug her. “You look beautiful.” Sabine sniffled and Marinette felt pinpricks of her own tears.

 “Oh mama, don’t cry! I’ll cry too!” Tom poked his head in and looked like he was about to burst out sobbing himself dressed in his grey tux. No black- it may have been a more western wedding but Marinette had wanted some homage to her heritage and had asked for everyone to avoid black given the fact it was bad luck at Chinese weddings. 

 Adrien, she knew, would wear a silver suit with gold highlights. His groomsmen and women would wear gold with red accents like her bridesmaids and bride’s dude. 

 It was perfect. Nothing could ruin this day.

 “AKUMA!”

 Or perhaps something could. 

 The doors slammed open and an Akuma stomped into the dressing room. The Akuma wore a classical wedding dress and had a long veil. Gold and black designs covered her and she snarled at Marinette.

 “I am Objector! And you, Dupain-Cheng- I object to!” It wasn’t hard to realize who it was given the hair.

 “Lila? Are you serious?!?” Marinette shouted in her anger as Objector used a ring on her finger to put her into a bubble.

 “I’m  Objector!!! And I OBJECT TO THIS WEDDING!” 

 Marinette felt she honestly shouldn’t be surprised. After the announcement of their endgame the there had been multiple instances of Akumas of Adrien’s fangirls. Lila hadn’t been one but she had basically harassed Adrien until he’d blocked her on social media and her number.

 Why shouldn’t there be an Akuma today? And why shouldn’t it be Lila? She had been exposed after college- everyone had started seeing holes in her stories. No one had really cared about her after that. Sure she had gotten in huge trouble with her actions towards Marinette but she’d faded more or less into the background. Would have fully if Gabriel hadn’t kept her on as a model. And even then after Adrien had threatened Gabriel to stop pairing them up together she rarely appeared at all. But she was still around, trying to get to Adrien.

 Marinette really couldn’t be to shocked. 

 “Let me go!” She snapped at Lila. The woman ignored her and instead went looking for Adrien. Marinette could hear her muttering about how their wedding would be better and how soon Marinette would be out of the way and…

 Marinette snuck a peak to her hair where Tikki hid. The Kwami looked as bored as she felt. The two rolled their eyes together. 

 “Hopefully Adrien is hiding well enough… and Alya tells them where I am. I’m so happy we bought the Akuma Package for this event.” Marinette grumbled as she waited for Chat to show up. She couldn’t transform now in the bubble. 

 Luckily she didn’t have to wait long- Chat showed up pretty fast. But it took a while until he could pop the bubble and she could run off and hide. 

 Running off and running back transformed, Marinette hopes it would be a short time to defeat Lila. No time limit or not, Kwami still needed food to be able to be transformed. 

 Of course, she didn’t get her wish. Not even on her wedding day. Lila had always been an annoying Akuma and this time was no different. It took hours to fight off the Akuma- and half of the cit was wrecked from her anger. In the end, they had to recruit a few random cops to give a hand and trap Lila. Destroying the ring and releasing the Akuma, a lot of energy went to fixing the city.

 “Why are you wearing a white dress?” Chat asked her, but Ladybug barely paid attention to the answer- crashing a wedding of course- and instead took off. She needed to get back to the revenue, she needed to get back there in time for the wedding.

 She ran upside a building, planning to take the rooftops to the revenue. However, it appeared that Karma was not on her side that day.

 She was halfway across the roof, her earrings beeping, when the transformation overtook her, leaving her in her wedding dress.

 “Oh no!” she groaned, covering her face as Tikki let loose a stream of curses that impressed the designer. “Is there any cookies around?” Marinette asked the Kwami who sighed. After Chloe’s reveal of Kwami everyone knew they recharged by eating certain foods. So sometimes civilians would leave things outside during fights. 

 “Too much of the city was damaged,” Tikki told Marinette who groaned even louder.

 “...Marinette?” asked a voice from behind and she turned to see Chat Noir standing behind her, staring at her in shock. Marinette felt her cheeks flush as Tikki eeped from beside her. Well… this was one way to tell her partner who she was. She didn’t care he knew now. That had been on her mind for a while- a reveal. She wanted Adrien to know to, so he wasn’t worried when she ran off or when she got busy with dealing with Akuma. She’d been lucky her career had taken off like a jet just by designing Jagged’s clothing and him recommending her. She had never had to get a job at a fashion house or anything. She had never worried about that part of her life. It had only been her romantic life she’d been worried about issues appearing because she would vanish on them. It was why some of her relationships failed. Adrien had been perfect but she knew it couldn’t last forever. Not after getting married.

 “Hey, Kitty… hey could you give me a lift?” she asked hopefully. Chat blinked but then laughed.

 “Of course m’lady.” something about the grin in his face made her eye him a bit warily. He swept her up. “I’m low too but I should be able to get to the revenue.” Marinette rattled off the address as he took off, jumping across rooftops, landing on a few fire escapes.

“My shoes!” Marinette said as they fell off over one jump. Chat immediately jumped down into the alley where they were. 

 Unluckily that was when the bad luck side of the Black Cat Miraculous acted up. One second Chat Noir was holding her, the next Adrien in his silver suit was. Both stared at each other for a long moment. Marinette burst out into laughter, covering her face while Adrien couldn’t help his own laughter. She leaned up and kissed him right on the mouth, Adrien sinking into it. 

 “We’re so ridiculous and blind.” she laughed. Adrien laughed as well. Marinette pulled off him as Tikki said she found the shoes… but one was broken.

 “Great.” She sighed, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Just great.”

 “You’re veil thing is ripped too.” Plagg voiced and Marinette groaned loudly, burying her face into Adrien’s shoulder. 

 “What street are we on?” Adrien asked. Tikki went to find it and Adrien let out a sigh of relief. “That’s about six blocks from one of father’s stores. We can walk there and call someone to come get us.”

 “You can put me down once we get to the sidewalk,” Marinette told him as he carried her out of the alley. “It’s pretty clean around here.”

 “You sure? I mean… it’s still gross. And you’re wearing stockings, those will get ruined.” Adrien said to Marinette who nodded.

 “They’re not that expensive stockings.” She told him. Adrien put her down in the street, while some people stared at the couple in wedding clothes.

 “Akuma was after us,” Marinette told them. They all nodded and moved on. The two began moving quickly down the street, Marinette already telling the stockings were getting ruined as they jogged. 

 “Lady! Your veil!” one woman called out, picking up the veil when it fell off Marinette’s head. Marinette took it from her with a smile, and continued her jog.

 A few times she got snagged on somethings and had to detangle the dress, knowing it was getting ripped and a little ruined. Luckily it was mostly in one piece when they made it to the store. Said store was right in front of a fountain with a ledge around it to sit, something Marinette took advantage of.

 “Go in and call. I want to see the damage to my dress.” Marinette told Adrien.

 “Of course. I’ll also see if I can’t charge any shoes to my account.” Adrien told her. Marinette nodded, and she began inspecting her dress. Not too bad- a little torn on the bottom layer but you couldn’t really see it. 

 Marinette was so busy inspecting the dress that she barely realized someone was running at her until she was knocked into the fountain.

 “YOU STUPID-” Marinette struggled, shoving whoever it was off of her, but the person got a good hold of her bodice and ripped it. Marinette shouted as the person managed to get a hold of her again, at least until people managed to separate them.

 “OF COURSE IT’S YOU!” Marinette yelled at Lila who glared at her hatefully.

 “I should be the one marrying him you stupid Asian-” Lila began blasting a list of Italian insults as Marinette tried to get out of the fountain but had to be helped by someone. Marinette looked down at her dress and wanted to start crying. It was ruined-  utterly ruined. The bodice was ripped, and it was soaked through. 

 “Marinette!” Adrien cried out, running from the store. With him are a few attendants, all staring in shock as Marinette gave up her fight and burst out into heavy sobs. “Excuse me, officer- I’d like to press charges,” Adrien said to an officer who had shown up, as Adrien wrapped his arms around Marinette.

 “WHAT!?” Lila shrieked as Adrien gave her the coldest look he could. Which was fairly cold given he was Chat Noir and had faced off some pretty nasty Akuma. “But-”

 “No- I’ve been done with you for years. The only reason I never pressed charges is because my father felt it would look mad. Well now, I don’t give a damn.” Adrien snarled before he and the attendants pulled Marinette into the store. She was stripped of her dress, and a robe normally given to people who were in for a consult or professional tailoring was given to her. Marinette stared at what was left of her dress, completely miserable. It was ruined- all of it. Completely ruined.

What a day this wedding turned out to be.

-0-

 Nathalie strode into the store wanting to rip Gabriel’s head off. Of course, he decided that Akumatizing that Lila brat would be a good idea. He didn’t even care that she would go after his own son and his future daughter-in-law!!! He could just make a perfect wedding later when he wished for his wife back!

 Nathalie was planning on a few changes to his schedule to piss him off when she froze. Marinette was sitting in a robe, hair a mess and wet, staring at the beautiful dress she had made for her wedding. And it was ruined.

 “What happened?” Nathalie asked, moving quickly to her. 

 “Lila decided to attack us again,” Marinette said in a broken tone. “This time as herself.”

 “I’m getting a restraining order and we’re pressing charges,” Adrien told Nathalie. “I’m done with her no matter what father says!”

 “I agree,” Nathalie told him and she did. Lila was a loose cannon, selfish and entitled. She never agreed to anything Gabriel planned with her. “...Wait right here- no wait. Adrien, your bodyguard is outside. Go.” Nathalie shoved him out the door. “August! Make sure he doesn’t see anything else!”

 “August?” Marinette asked.

 “I believe Adrien still calls him the Gorilla,” Nathalie said to Marinette before she turned to one of the workers. “This is the bridal store, yes?”

 “Yes, Madam Sancoeur.” Said the woman. 

 “The red dress is here?” Nathalie asked and the woman nodded slowly. “Excellent- get it.”

 “But the red dress-” the woman began but Nathalie gave her most poisonous look towards the woman.

 “The red dress is perfect.” Nathalie snarled. “You- you have excellent hair and make-up. You’re helping.” she pointed at another worker. Marinette blinked, staring at Nathalie who gave a short nod.

 “We’re about to fix this mess.” And Nathalie was going to skin Gabriel she swore.

-0-

 Gabriel sat, waiting for the wedding to start. Perhaps he shouldn’t have Akumatized that Lila girl, but it was too good of an opportunity. And it would have been nice to have more say in the wedding. Ridiculous they didn’t pay his suggestions much attention. He had no problem with the nods to Mlle. Dupain-Cheng’s heritage but the rest of it? Ridiculous. With the wish, he could have made the changes he wished and could have had Emilie with him.

 “They’re back!” some random old classmate of Adrien’s cried out. “Places!” Gabriel let out a sigh of relief as the music started- preformed by that rocker Jagged Stone and that was a good thing about this wedding, the clients his new daughter-in-law was bringing in thanks to her work. Nathalie came in from getting Adrien and his new wife to sit down next to him, looking cold. Still upset he saw. She’d get over it.

 Gabriel studied the clothing that the wedding party wore. No black, mostly red. The dresses and suits were beautiful, though he wished they hadn’t let that pink-haired girl wear a suit, and he wished instead of being in the groom’s party Mlles. Tsurugi and Bourgeois had been in the bride’s, and that blue-haired boy in the groom’s- perhaps with Felix and some model to make it even. 

 Gabriel turned to see the bride come in, eager to see her dress- he had enjoyed the sketches- only to freeze. Instead of the white, silver and gold dress, she wore a long red dress with red butterflies covering it. It had a halter neck with the halter being tied into a bow, the ends going down her bare back to her waist. She had no veil and instead wore a simple tiara with her hair up in a complicated updo.

 “That’s the dress I-” he began in a hissed tone, but Nathalie grabbed his wrist. 

 “Your little pet destroyed her dress,” his assistant snarled quietly, her voice full of venom that shocked Gabriel a little. “I had to get her a replacement, and this dress was the perfect one.” Gabriel scowled at her but had to nod. It was perfect for the girl, and fit the wedding colours. He just hated that his special design had been used without his permission.

 ...If Lila had attacked her after she was an Akuma, perhaps she was still- 

 A hand grabbed the Butterfly Miraculous from where he had it in his pocket and yanked it out. Nathalie glared at him with daggers in her eyes.

 “You can get this back after the honeymoon,” she growled at him, voice dangerous. “You’re not ruining anything else about their special day or time.” Gabriel scowled at his assistant but nodded his understanding. His gaze turned back to the wedding.

 At least it was a beautiful one.

[moonstone-blues]

Fallout 4 AU: October 24th

If you guys remember, a while ago I quickly sketched up an idea of a modern/what if the bombs didn't drop Fallout AU for FOCCA (I'll get round to finishing the rest of the submissions eventually.)

Well, I've been doing some thinking and just wanted to share my notes on how the story would go. (This is my own personal interpretation.) 

For now, the name is October 24th. Although the main story takes place after that, the name is supposed to symbolise that we're after the day of reckoning and everything is fine… mostly.

Be warned: This is a long one. 

Story:

Okay so the story starts on the Morning of October 23 2077. Everything is the same as in game. River and Jack do their thing, joking around and making sure they look good. Shaun in this story is older, being around eight years old. (This is because I wanted to keep the 10 year old Shaun element and he can't be an old man in this version.) The television continues playing the usual news and… The bombs never fall. Not a single detonation. The McConnell family continue on with their day and attend the event at the Veteran's Hall. 

When they go home, that night as they're sleeping, Kellogg breaks in and attempts to kidnap Shaun. In the struggle, Jack is shot dead and River is attacked, being knocked into a coma. This coma lasts a year with nearly another year of physical and mental therapy to go through before she returns home. Upon realising they never found Shaun or Jack's killer, she sets up on her own, trying to find her son and avenge her husband. The story beats are obviously very similar but adapted to be more modern. Synths are now clones because I felt like synths would be too Sci fi for this story. 

Factions:

The Minutemen - A kind of neighbourhood watch organisation. Funded by the army, they were supposed to try and keep the peace, without using violence. Thus made sure the military had all of their soldiers back so they could fight. However, after some fighting within the organisation and the military suddenly cutting off funding, things quickly went downhill from there. 

The BOS - This is simply the army. After the shut down of the Minutemen, a new group was made, the Brotherhood of Steel. These were soldiers sent by the military to patrol Boston, much like how they did before the Minutemen. However, since the threat of war is now gone, they have the soldiers to spare and want to show off their muscle to intimidate the people. 

The Institute - I'm still not entirely sure about the synths being clones instead things so this one is really up for debate. My thoughts so far are that the Institute still kidnaps people. They harvest their organs and make a clone to send off to replace the original person. I know, not the best idea. But I was thinking about what they would do with the kidnapped people that seemed justified in their minds? Well, they still have the same belief that humanity is doomed with the way it's going. Rioting, corrupt governments and the rest. They replace people with clones of themselves, engineered to behave. And they kill and harvest the organs of the original person and send them to hospitals for people who can't get organ donations because they're too low on the list. In their minds, they're getting rid of corrupt people, replacing them with people who they see as being better for society and giving people who may not have one a chance at life. They're technically doing good, but they are killing people. They still work out of the CIT but in secret laboratories.

The Railroad - Very similar to their in game selves. A secretive organisation dedicated to setting clones free and stopping the Institute. 

Characters:

Dogmeat - A stray dog that kept turning up on River's doorsteps during the first couple of weeks she stays at home. She eventually takes him in, being reminded of her other dog that ran away. She calls him Biscuit. 

Codsworth - Mostly the same. A faithful robot butler mourning the loss of two of his masters and constantly worrying over River. He makes sure she takes all of her medicine and never let's her miss an appointment. 

Preston - An ex Minuteman who spends most of his free time handing out fliers that promote it and tries to get people to sign a petition to bring the Minutemen back. His efforts are mostly in vain until he meets River after being attacked in an alleyway. 

Piper - The same noisy reporter working for the Boston Bugle. Known for her sometimes controversial articles and her willingness to do anything for a story. She's very interested in River since the kidnapping of her son seemed to be the beginning of all of what she believes to be the Institute's kidnappings. At first River wants to stay away from her as Piper is particularly intruding in her life but accepts her help. 

Nick - After the original Nick Valentine went for his brain scan, he was disposed of. The new Nick was made with Nick's DNA but due to the fact that the cloning technology had only just started being put to use, it wasn't perfect. He wasn't a complete copy of the original Nick and he was more than aware that he wasn't actually the original. At first he was loved up, the scientists not knowing what to do with him, but eventually Nick was broken out with the help of DIMA. He tried explaining that to 'his' boss and coworkers but they said he was mad. Eventually, Nick quit the police, feeling like he hadn't deserved to be there in the first place. After all, a man was murdered so he could live. He roamed the streets, no clue of what to do. He eventually found his way at the original Nick's home, still covered in evidence against Eddie Winters. Eventually, people started knocking on his door. They knew Nick Valentine was a great cop and did his job damn well. So when the police started ignoring missing person cases they came to him. Nick would've refused but without a job, he had no money to live. He begrudgingly accepted a job from someone in high power. (The same missing person case he dealt with in the original game but without the hilarious beeping part.) When he succeeded, he was overcome with a passion to help people. He stopped feeling sorry for himself and officially turned his place into Valentine Detective Agency. With the knowledge of his big case, people came to him from all over for help and he continued to give it to them. He had his lower right arm, some of his face, some parts generally all over damaged when one of Eddie Winter's men planted a bomb in his mailbox. He only placed his hand in so it wasn't as bad as it could've been. He did need everything below his left elbow removed and he now has a prophetic arm and eye. River Meets Nick when she rescues him from Mafia boss, Skinny Malone. 

Hancock - John and his brother came from a poor family. Honest but poor. Living in a bad part of town, their parents tried to instill good values into them despite their circumstances. Unfortunately, neither really took it to heart. They were still a happy family, doing the best they could, even taking trips to museums as a treat. As they grew up, John found himself in a lot of trouble. Joining gangs, drinking, doing chems. However, his brother was going places. He worked hard, eventually becoming assistant to the mayor. However, once it was found out the mayor was using taxpayer's money to build his own luxurious vault, he was kicked out of office. With a position to fill, Hancock's brother worked hard. His campaign was brutal. His major promise was to move the poor people to the opposite side of Boston so they couldn't bother the more wealthy. This also meant they would be receiving less help from tax payers and left to fend for themselves. The people, after having plenty of money taken off them for years, loved this plan. He won at a landslide. John was furious. He thought with their situation, his brother wouldn't dream to hurt those who could barely afford to live. But his brother still carried it out. He left the promise of a cushy life with his brother and decided to live with the less fortunate. It wasn't the best situation but anywhere would've been better than with his brother. The particular section of Boston was horrible. Mostly lawless, police not even wanting to go near the place. It was a dog eat dog kind of town. Eventually, a mob boss named Vic overtook the town, making himself the leader. Forcing people to pay for protection or they would be beat. John watched every day. Despite wanting nothing to do with him, the mayor still gave John protection. He hated it. Being treated better than everyone else who was suffering. He got insanely wasted one night, feeling horrible for the protection he got and the way he ignored Vic's actions. He needed things to change. He couldn't stand the man he saw in the mirror. He poured his remaining bear over himself and set himself on fire. Most of the damage was on the left side of his body, mostly burning his face so that he was hardly recognisable. After putting the flames out, he broke into one of the museums he loved so much as a kid. He remembered learning about the men that built America. It was when he looked up at the coat of John Hancock that he decided enough was enough. After a very long trip to the ER with a very expensive medical bill his brother paid off, he went back to the town with a crew who hated Vic and challenged him directly. He managed to kill Vic, albeit not as barbaric as he does in the game, and took over the town. Vic's old crew feared John's strength and left the people alone. Hancock stepped up to be the leader, officially naming the town Goodneighbor. He even changed his name to John Hancock, fully separating himself from his brother and becoming his own person. He runs it mostly the same as he does in the game. River meets him after going into Goodneighbor with Nick following a lead on her case. 

MacCready - Grew up in an orphanage in DC. He was roped into criminal activity at a young age. When he met his wife, Lucy, he claimed he was military being deployed in many places when he was off committing crimes. When his son was a few years old, Lucy was killed by a pack of rabid wolves when he didn't check out a camping spot. Duncan eventually became sick so MacCready moved to Boston with him after hearing that Med Tek was working on a cure. Unfortunately, that meant that Duncan had to live in the Facility and the cost to keep him safe and quarantined was high. MacCready works odd jobs, even stooping to criminal activity to help his son. He meets River after she hires him to help with doing some shady things since he knows his way around a lock and he's good protection. 

Curie - Curie's 'father' Kenneth Collins works as a scientist in the CIT. While he isn't aware of the Institute, he had a friend in it who he confided in about how he was sad he could never have a child since he was alone and old. This friend wanted to surprise him one day and using his connections, managed to get the Institute to create a clone for him. They created an amalgamation of personalities, most intelligent and scientific and put it in a young woman. This became Curie. Collins quickly figured out that his friend must've been part of the Institute. After all, the rumours were largely spread around the CIT building. He kept Curie a secret, knowing how suspicious it would be for a random woman with no records of anything suddenly popping up. She stayed in mostly total isolation, learning everything she could about everything to do with science. While she did very rarely step outside her home only under the supervision of her father, she still didn't understand a lot and yearned to be outside to explore and study. Eventually, the Institute found out that their 'property' had been given away. Kenneth was killed and Curie remained trapped, locked in her room. River meets her after walking past her house, hearing her bang on her window. She eventually gets her out of the house and with nowhere else to go and no clue of what the outside world is like, River offers her guidance. 

Danse - A Brotherhood member who is very patriotic and eager to defend the people and his country. However, despite his love for his country, he hates how the country is run. Despite the threat of nuclear war disappearing, Danse believes that America has become too relaxed and lazy, expecting everyone else to do the work. He believes the military are the only people pulling their weight and the American people need to wake up. He was replaced with a clone shortly after being deployed in Boston. River meets him when she comes across a small riot going on in the street between Danse's small squad and some members of the Minutemen. She steps in and resolves the situation. Danse is, of course, mistrustful since they were her people and he doesn't know if the Minutemen are a threat yet. However, River offers her help, guilty that Minutemen were involved in riots and Danse finds her to be quite useful for his mission. 

Deacon - He was always a con man, weaseling his way into situations for his own benefit. However, he was also very troubled by the growing tensions between America and China. He joined a group that were against the Chinese and harassed any they met, even lynching a young man. Deacon left the group after this, being disgusted by his involvement and soon met the love of his life, Barbara. A Chinese-American woman. Despite some lingering feelings of fear and hatred, he eventually came to love her, growing out of his previous beliefs. They were happy together, even wanting to have a child together, however, before they had the chance, his old group found out about the pair and reported Barbara to be a Chinese spy, taking her away forever to what Deacon assumed to be her death for sure. Using his skills as a master of disguise and a con man, he managed to ruin every single one of their lives. The least someone got was being put in prison for life. He felt empty after he had his revenge. He didn't know what to do with himself. That's when he heard about the Railroad. A group dedicated to helping people. Deacon found his new cause. He may not be able to protect everyone but he could at least try to protect some. River meets him when she finds the Railroad, looking for their help. However, Deacon has had his eye on her for much longer than that. 

Cait - Her parents abused her much like in the game. After she turned 18, her parents made her work on the streets to get money for their drinking, drugs and debts. Cait was isolated most of her life with the abuse and didn't know what she could've done to escape. Eventually her parents revealed their debt was too great to be paid off by Cait being on the street. So, as part of a deal she wasn't aware of, she was forced into an underground cage fighting ring. The owner of the ring itself was Tommy who was sympathetic towards Cait but the real people in control were the gang that took over, the people Cait's parents owed money too. She was forced to stay there under a contract, her only option to fight. River Meets her accidently when she wanders into a bad part of town and uses her legal knowledge to get Cait out of her contract. 

Strong - Armstrong was the youngest out of six brothers. With his parents dying too young for him to remember, he was raised by his brothers, being abused and neglected by them. He was looked in his room most days and given the scraps of food. His brothers would fight them, knowing he was a weak target. Armstrong became stronger this way. Eventually, he escaped from his home. However, due to his lack of socialisation and education, he couldn't find work. Fortunately, he eventually found a free education program for adults. There, he was taught by radio personality Rex Goodman about literature. Macbeth stuck with him especially. Rex offered him work in his studio, hauling equipment but Armstrong still doesn't have the best socialisation and Rex doesn't get to spend as much time with him to teach him. River Meets Armstrong after she is invited on Rex's radio show to talk about her son. River feels bad for Armstrong and after some explanation about his life from Rex, River offers to help Armstrong and educate him in her free time. 

X6-88 - A clone working as security for the Institute scientists. During the times the Institute scientists are not working, he works as a security guard at the CIT. He also brings in any clones who figure out they're clones. River first meets him when she enters the CIT looking for answers after she gets clues that the CIT is where the Institute is.

DiMA - Dima was the Institute's first attempt at creating life without the use of cloning. He was put with Nick who was the first attempt at creating life with the use of cloning and the two formed a bond with their imprisonment. They even considered themselves brothers. However, with Dima's lack of an imported personality, he tended to be quite unemotional, something the Institute would take advantage of when making their security. However, Dima could tell how much Nick was suffering and wanted to freeze him. He himself wanted to be free too, of course, but he wanted his brother to be happy more than anything. He eventually helped him escape but something happened. Nick was injured in the escape, causing him to lose most of his memory of the Institute and Dima. Dima was scared, especially since his brother didn't recognise him anymore so he fled. He hoped to see him again some day but he would wait for Nick to find him. 

Obviously there's more characters and stuff but this is what I've thought of so far.

Feel free to ask questions or request something about this! 

[jaywrites101]

The City In FreeFall: Part one, Chapter One.

StreetTeam members: @ciestess @leave-her-a-tome If you want your name here, join my StreetTeam by signing up for my newsletter and be notified of all The City In FreeFall updates, giveaways and more! Also tagging: @bexminx @ednaraged @ahotpeaceofshit @nemothesurvivor @siarven  and @jaclynwashere If you want on this list you should try messaging or interacting with my stuff more ;P

The happiest day of my life was when I discovered my wings. But you should know upfront that's such a low bar limbo players use it as a standard. Most children dream of flying over the trees and touching the soft clouds. I never did… No, I've always been scared of heights. My name is Sam Farsight, and I need your help. Normally, if I need something done I'd just do it myself. That's the kind of man I am. It burns my gut to ask anyone for anything, but… well, I've got other things burning me at the moment--bigger things. You see, today is the day I'm going to die. Strangely enough, this isn't the first time I thought I was going to die. This time, I think it's gonna stick… You'll see what I mean. You don't know me from Adam, but if you'll hear me out I'll explain everything in its place. I can't promise you anything as compensation--I don't have anything of value to bequeath to anyone. All I have left is my story. My legacy. It'll have to be enough. You're my only hope of getting the truth to the world. You see, I have a confession. And a promise…. I won't say whose, but there are hundreds of thousands of lives that depend on the truth getting out. Maybe even yours. Because my life as Sam Farsight means nothing to nobody. I died at twenty-one, and there's nothing more to say. But I have a secret. A secret I'm leaving to you, whoever you are. And the soul of a massive megalopolis hangs in the balance. My name is Sam Farsight. And for the last twenty-three years, I have been living as the vigilante superhero known as the Wingman. ### You've probably heard of him. I have a… reputation in these parts. But you can't believe everything the papers have said about me! Not all of it was my fault. I didn't mean for those people to die--and I certainly wasn't involved with the Nuclear swap! No sir! I stayed the hell away from that fiasco. I've done a lot of things--some of them I'm more proud of than others. But I've always tried to save lives. I've always tried to be better than the villains I put away… It's just… sometimes things don't always work out. I've made terrible mistakes. But what I have to tell you today should make up for all of them! No doubt, by the time you read this, the rumors of my death will have spread like wildfire... They're probably true. But there's something else you should know. I've saved the city. And this time, it's saved for good. What I'm about to tell you is the truth of my time as the city's savior. Please--Please! My final request is that you help me set the record straight. Things cannot ever be allowed to get as bad as they did. It took me dying to fix them. You'll have to finish plugging the holes yourself. I just hope… but that's getting ahead of myself. As they say Everything in its place. It's better I start at the beginning. Before I got my wings… If I sound reluctant, it's because this wasn't one of my proudest moments. ### The year was 2114. Old America. Jakob McCorbin was just elected President. Spring had only just faded and Summer was at our doorstep. The cars were still powered by the old steam & solar hybrid tec. Eternal Plasma Drives hadn't been invented yet. Railways had just made a big comeback for cross-country travel. I remember sitting under an advertisement for the Atlas Air&Ground commercial cross-country liner. Jerry and I would look up at that billboard and promise each other that when we got rich with our law firm, we'd book a car all the way out of Briar City, past HollyTown, past DoggWood, and all the way out of this continent! Those were the days… Let's see… 2114… International crime was dropping all across the globe. We'd just come out of a big war against Grephsnia. Jobs were at an all-time high. The politicians called it a utopia. But those of us who lived in the ghetto just thought it was another day in the history books. From our perspective, things didn't look so cheery. Jobs down there were still hard when you had them, and impossible to find when you didn't. Drug dealers still sold their product to school children. Gangs still put kids in caskets… They put a lot of kids in caskets. That's why I, Sam Farsight, thought it would be a good idea to start a gang war. The plan was simple. Goad the two gangs in Briar city, the SmashStones and the BloodBlades, into attacking each other and force the cops to actually do something to end them both once and for all. Nothing is ever simple. I was about to find that out the hard way. To find the SmashStone gang and learn their plans, I had to join them. A tricky feat since I live in BloodBlade territory. If the BloodBlades ever found out I was with SmashStone, they'd kill me. Of course, if either of them found out what my real plan was, they'd both kill me anyway. I thought I was so damn smart back then. That was the year I turned twenty-one. It was the year I got a casket for a birthday present. Jerry, my best friend since grade school, found himself on the wrong end of a shooting. That's where the Wingman found his start. Newly adulted. Chip on my shoulder. And the weight of the world in my back pocket. I wanted to do something with my life. But I decided then and there being a lawyer wasn't good enough for me. I wanted to do something "important." God, I was so stupid. I even thought the city would erect a statue in my honor. I can't believe I was ever that dumb. The only thought on my mind was no more kids in caskets. I was going to end the gang wars forever. That's why I was sitting on a brick wall in the rain just outside the 14th precinct. That's why when the cold wind blew across my face, I didn't back down. I was shivering and hungry and… and… …    Lonely….    Yeah. That's the truth of it. I was so very lonely. I had a hole in my heart that was colder than the rain, and more painful than my stomach. That emptiness kept me moving. If I stopped… It would consume me. I wasn't ever going to back down. Not until I did what I came here to do. I checked my watch. 7:48 pm. He wasn't going to show tonight. I had to be back home before 9 O'clock or somebody would get suspicious. If not my family, then the gang. At the same time, sitting around in the rain waiting for a cop who might not even show wasn't the brightest idea I'd ever had. But the SmashStone goon I'd met with needed me to steal a cop car. And I had the perfect cop for the job. Officer Filbert Warren. A cop so dirty garbage washes him off. The man's a walking personification of the seven deadly sins. But… If you looked past all that. If you ignored the stink, the stains, the empty burger wrappers he leaves instead of footprints. If you looked into his soul. You'd find a second, even meaner cop living in his gullet that just wants the world to burn. Seriously! None of the other cops trusted him either. He earned himself the nickname "the Rat" back when he first joined the force, and he's done nothing but live up to his nickname since then. Rumor has it he's on both gang's payrolls. Witnesses against the gangs have a bad habit of going missing after this guy gets a look at their file. Nothing's ever proven, of course. Rumors go on to say that IA has a file on him the size of Texas, but it's all full of dead ends, missing evidence, and hearsay. Which would be surprising because Officer Warren isn't smart enough to pull any of that off. For example. Just as I was giving up hope that the fat rat masquerading as a cop would show up, he did. The cop car slinked up to the front of the precinct like a pissed-off cat. The headlights glaring angrily ahead. "Alright Berny, take this one in," I heard him say from across the road as he rolled down his window to throw out a sandwich wrapper. Littering is against the law, but Officer Warren didn't seem to mind as he dug into his burger with gusto. Berny glared at his partner in disgust but said nothing. He went around and marched some kid into the building. The girl spat at him, but the weary patrolman didn’t so much as flinch as he did his job. Apparently, he’d faced worse today. Warren chuckled after they'd gone. He gulped down the rest of his burger in one bite and waddled out after them in leisure. I swear, the car rose two feet when he got out of it. The fat lard even left the engine running. It was like he was begging for someone to steal it, but I hesitated. Not because I was having second thoughts. No, I hesitated because I knew I'd have to take a bath in acid after I'd sat anywhere Officer Warren had been. I could only hope the rain would offer me some protection. I didn't waste time driving around once I was in the car. Sure, I stamped the pedal as far down as it would go, flashed the lights and turned on the siren. I may have held my middle finger out the window like a good little delinquent, but I had a plan. The initiation required me to make some noise so people would know what I'd done, but I had to get away without getting caught. I drove the car as fast as I could to the graveyard just past the hill on the edge of the city. I expected there to at least be some kind of chase, but apparently, Warren's fellow cops didn't put too much priority on his misfortunes. I parked the car with the headlights flooding a row of gravestones. People who'd been killed by the gangs. I hoped it might remind someone they had a duty to fulfill. I opened the door and took off, being careful not to go around the front or the back where the cameras were. Step one was completed. Easy. I should've known it was too easy.

[fandomwitch13]

I posted 516 times in 2021

39 posts created (8%)

477 posts reblogged (92%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 12.2 posts.

I added 271 tags in 2021

#the rosewood chronicles - 58 posts

#rwch - 57 posts

#rosewood chronicles - 54 posts

#the owl house - 30 posts

#rose rats - 21 posts

#every weekend my blog becomes an owl house blog - 12 posts

#pah spoilers - 11 posts

#the owl house spoilers - 10 posts

#olivia rodrigo - 10 posts

#lol - 8 posts

Longest Tag: 122 characters

#im just thinking plural princesses because lottie and ellie literally have to make up and realize they have to be together

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Head Canon

Jamie now owns at least a dozen lint rollers and always has one on him because he now knows the struggles of living with an animal that sheds A LOT

26 notes • Posted 2021-02-02 20:00:02 GMT

#4

Ellie (at the Maradova Palace): the only straight I'm having-

Ellie: is a straight up not good time

29 notes • Posted 2021-06-28 20:38:18 GMT

#3

Lottie's Hair

Okay cuz Lottie has curly hair and I have curly hair, so I always imagined that we would have similar hair types so here are my headcanons on Lottie's hair

Definitely had 2c-3a curly(2c is s-shaped waves that start at the root and 3a are like coils that are about the size of sidewalk chalk)

Her mom probably taught her how to manager her hair when she was younger but it either wasn't that good or Lottie was never able to do it because of Beady

I can't decide of Lottie's bangs are curly or if she straightened them, but she defidently kept they curly after she cut her hair

Actually her hair became way more curly after she cut it(cuz you need to cit those ends every once in a while to maintain the curls)

She also vowed to maintain her hair better after she cut it

When she first came to Rosewood her hair routine was mediocre at best

Like sude she only shampooed her roots and condited the ends, detangled with a wide tooth comb and didn't brush her hair in between washed, but like Lottie didn't have leave in conditioner(which is a must with long hair) and didn't cover it while she slept so her hair was frizzy in the morning

Binah immediately noticed this and made it her goal to educate Lottie on her hair because it was kinda painful to watch(yes their hair types are very different because Binah has like 4a-c hair, but curly hair has mainly the same up keep, but with different amounts of products, washing, and different levels of maintenance)

Saskia also joined in because why not and now the three have a kinda chill day once a week where they put a hair mask in and watch a movie or something

Binah showed Lottie the complicated world of curly hair products(it's not that's complicated but the different products can be overwhelming)

So Lottie now has and regularly uses leave in conditioner, a diffuser(which is normally usee to dry finer curly hair like type 2-3), possibly curl gel or mousse(to keep the curls in a cast so they don't break alpart)

She also had a denman brush(uses for styling) which is an actual gift from God or whatever entity you beleive in, like curls just look better when you use it

Binah also got her a satin pillow case for Christmas(which is used to stop curls breaking when you sleep because of how fine it is)

Lottie also pineappled her hair and wraps it in a scarf so the hair sticks out of the front

Now that it's short, she sticks it in a satin bonnet cuz it's so much easier

Actually her whole routine is easier now that her hair is short. Less washing. Less combing. Less product. Lottie just wondered why it took so long for her to cut her hair

Also Lottie feels bad about Binah helping her with her hair, so Lottie learned how to style textured hair so she can return the favor to Binah

Honestly Lottie wasn't that good at first but Binah really appreciated the effort so she helped Lottie through it

Now Lottie's pretty good and Binah really enjoys Lottie's help because she doesn't have to be the only one to style her hair while at school

31 notes • Posted 2021-02-14 02:11:07 GMT

#2

So my copy of Princess at Heart came and decided to make some memes before I cry

36 notes • Posted 2021-03-08 19:59:07 GMT

#1

King Alexander @ Ellie: So you like girls

Ellie: *nods*

King Alexander @ Lottie: and you like girls

Littie: *nods*

King Alexander: Does anyone in this house like boys?!?!

Jamie: I do

King Alexander:

65 notes • Posted 2021-02-14 02:59:08 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[hjgale]

Killed by SPD from 2000 through August 2010 (when John T. Williams was killed)

Killed by SPD from January 1, 2000 through August 29, 2010

(For the list of SPD killings after the SPD murder of John T. Williams go here.)

The data comes from the Fatal Encounters website which documents individuals killed “during interactions with police,” see: https://fatalencounters.org/view/person/.

Fatal Encounters includes people who died indirectly from a police action which may not even involve a police pursuit (e.g., suspect flees from police who are not in, or who earlier ended, a pursuit, then crash their car killing themselves and/or others), or even includes police on their way to a crime scene who get into an accident. These cases are noted in the list below, but are not assigned numbers and are not counted. This same procedure was used in counting SPD killings from 2010 to the present.

There are also 2 incidents (noted below) in which people were killed by law enforcement in Seattle but not by SPD (killed by either King County Sheriff or Port of Seattle Police)

In the list of the 27 SPD killings below one person was not shot by the SPD but died later in the hospital after repeated Taserings, likely due to “acute cocaine intoxication” (see number 26 below).

01. David John Walker         04/12/2000  near Seattle Center, Black w/4″ knife in mental health crisis (diagnosed w/bi-polar) skipping & ranting, shot after motioning w/empty hand, 3 CIT officers were on the scene, The Stranger,

02. Daniel Delfierro              06/22/2000  bank robbery, fired at cops

       Andre Waldon                 10/06/2000 (killed by armed carjacking suspect, pursued by SPD, who crashed into him)

03. Steven John Covyeow    01/13/2001  had gun & fired at cops

       Joel Silvesan                   02/27/2001   hit by SPD car on way to crime scene, witnesses claim cop speeding & went thru red light

04. Aaron Roberts                 05/31/2001  Black, traffic stop, no weapon, cops claimed he tried to drive away dragging cop

05. Devon Jackson                08/13/2001 had gun, fired earlier, had pointed repeatedly at cops

       Name withheld by police  09/30/2001 (car crash; SPD claimed there was no pursuit pursuit)

06. Anthony James Shuster 11/27/2001  white, Lake City boarding house, kitchen knife, drunk & threatening to harm himself; had threatened suicide after argument w/girlfriend (some listings have 11/26)

       Christian Fairbank            12/26/2001 (crashed 2x into SPD car, vehicle pursuit, crashed)

07. Adam L. Alexander           01/06/2002  white, U Dist. at night, had pellet gun & took hostage, drugs

08. Shawn Jerel Maxwell        02/18/2002  Black, U. Dist, sword, behavioral health crisis

09. Vandy Thevongsa             04/04/2002   17 y.o.; had gun & fired at cops; shot a person whose car he stole; on sherm

10. Shawn Howell                   11/05/2002     had gun & pointed at officers; distraught & asked officers to shoot him

11. DeOntrel Davis                  12/13/2002   17 y.o. w/paint nozzle in Wallingford robbing people at ATMs, SPD stakeout at night, shot in head running away

        Desseria B. Whitmore       10/25/2003 (Port of Seattle police at SeaTac)

12. Lawrence Owens               03/17/2004  had just killed a woman, had shotgun & repeatedly pointed at officers, shot after long chase at Miller Community Cntr.

13. Daniel Vanderhoek             05/15/2004  had gun & fired at cops (says 5/14)

14. Herbert L. Hightower          09/08/2004  Black, mental health crisis, knife

15. Rick Camat                         10/10/2004   API, SPD responded to a fight (very early Sun AM) outside of Quest Field, claim he fired his gun toward the west & refused orders to put it down. Relatives claim he fired his gun into the air to stop a fight, that officers never told him to drop the weapon, and he was shot multiple times by police officers.

16. William David Dawejko       11/14/2004   white, Ballard, made suicidal threat to girlfriend, pointed shotgun at cops

17. Robert Valderama Estrella  03/21/2005  API, domestic disturbance, was holding a 2″ knife & holding his 10 month old son, cops say he held knife to baby’s throat, negotiated for 44 minutes, shot by sniper while standing up & holding baby

18. Dennie Kenneth Trujillo       04/29/2005    Hispanic, clearly suicidal (& had history), 6 cops on scene & no weapon, shot by cop in struggle for gun, cops claimed he had their gun in his hands, “ ‘The officer did not intentionally discharge the gun,’ Kerlikowske said, adding that it wasn't clear who pulled the trigger. Trujillo was struck by the gunfire, although it was not a fatal injury. The officer then regained control of the gun and fired. That shot mortally wounded Trujillo”; KC Inquest

19. Perry L. Manley                   06/20/2005  White, shot by SPD in lobby of Fed. Courthouse holding an inert hand grenade; after 40 min. of negotiations he made a “furtive” movement w/grenade & was shot

       Mark Allen Prince  ��             11/19/2005 (shot by KC Sheriff)

20. Rhys Joseph Michael Poc   04/25/2006  White, 18 y.o., pointed gun at police

       Neal Kelley                           11/13/2006 (collided w/SPD officer driving to work in personal car, both Kelley & officer killed; no police pursuit or stop involved)

21. Robert Sullivan                    01/17/2007   gun, shot at motel manager, fired at officers, one officer sent to hospital w/gunshot wound

22. Miles Allen Murphy              01/01/2009  White, drunk UW student w/WWII rifle, cops had 911 reports of shots fired (Murphy had been firing rifle in parking lot) & came upon Murphy holding rifle at bottom of steps; reports that witnesses told cops Murphy was firing blanks; shot by Sgt. Adam Elias who went on to kill Larry Flynn in 2014 & Kyle Gray in 2017, & has hi UOF & on Brady List.

23. Joseph Bernerd Hradec      01/14/2009    White, 6″ kitchen knife, under influence of drugs & alcohol, cops called to a domestic disturbance, tased him multiple times, woman was safely out of room before they shot him, day before called 911 reporting an anxiety attack & police took him to Harborview,  “ Police believe he may have been suffering from some mental illness”, also this

24. Maurice Clemmons             12/01/2009    killed 4 cops at Lakewood coffee shop, shot by cop when Clemmons reached for gun

25. Christopher Aaron Wright, Sr. 02/28/2010   cops stopping a rape in progress, tasered unknown number of times and died at hospital 2 days later, likely due to “acute cocaine intoxication.”  (according to King County ME ”died from brain death and organ failure due to acute cocaine intoxication with excited delirium and physical restraint... manner of death was undetermined”)

26. Ariel E. Rosenfeld                08/16/2010    pulled handgun on cops trying to arrest him, diagnosed w/bipolar in teen years (was 43 at death), repeated violent outbursts, KC Inquest clears officers

[judgeanon]

A SHORT HISTORY OF FEMALE JUDGES IN JUDGE DREDD FROM 2004 TO 2007

With a sense of newfound stability and confidence brought about by finally being owned by a company that genuinely cared for its characters and stories, 2000AD carried onwards into the new millennium, with John Wagner leading Dredd into a new epic and setting him off on the road to a storyline that would redefine both character and setting forever. One particular staple of this era is the solidification of the strip as a very character-driven, procedural crime drama, building even further on the lessons learned from “The Pit” but also adding a deeper layer of examination of the strip’s protagonist and his relationships with his supporting cast.

Unfortunately, said supporting cast is still running a bit low in the female judges department, although that doesn’t really put a dent on female protagonism in general, as Dredd’s niece Vienna takes a much more center stage. And although Chief Judge Hershey likewise remains a regular fixture, it’ll still take a few more years for Wagner to introduce a new female judge with any real lasting power. In the meantime, however, a new generation of writers and artists will begin introducing several new female judges in a variety of roles, from background extras to one-thrill wonders and maybe even villains...

(Previous posts: 1979 to 1982 - 1982 to 1986 - 1986 to 1990 - 1990 to 1993 - 1993 to 1995 - 1995 to 1998 - 1998 to 2001 - 2001 to 2004. All stories written by John Wagner unless noted otherwise. Cover art by Henry Flint)

Our first stop is “Terror”, painted by Colin MacNeil and published in progs 1392-1399 (June-July 2004). A prologue to the upcoming mini-epic of the year, it heavily features a Judge Stuyvesant as part of a small task force of judges investigating the extremist democratic terrorist group Total War. Sporting her own variant on the black bobcut, Stuyvesant runs surveillance on a suspected Total War operative as he falls hopelessly in love with a citizen, acting as a secret bridge of sorts between them and Dredd, and saving the latter from having to spend hours looking at monitors.

Right after the last episode of “Terror” comes “Big Deal at Drekk City”, drawn by Cam Kennedy (progs 1400-1404, August ’04), where Dredd and a Judge Vance take a handful of cadets, including a very aptly-named Cadet Laws on a rather troubled Cursed Earth familiarization trip. Vance proves to be an experienced judge, not just in combat but also at testing the cadets’ attitude, but at the story’s climax she takes a spear to the chest and comes extremely close to dying. Luckily for her, the cadets overturn Dredd’s orders to stay back and return to save both of them, with Laws taking care of her injuries. So a decent outing, all things considered.

And so we get to the first big thrill of this post, the 12-episodes long “Total War”, drawn by Henry Flint and published in progs 1408 to 1419 (September-December ’04). This is also Chief Judge Hershey’s first city-wide crisis in office, as both “Helter Skelter” and the Aliens invasion were events mostly isolated to one or two sectors. The threat itself comes from an alleged two hundred nuclear explosives secretly placed around the city by Total War, the afore-introduced terrorist group. Their demands are simple: all judges must turn in their badges and surrender their power to the public, or they will begin detonating the bombs at regular intervals until they accept or the city has been reduced to glowing dust.

With a clear (albeit hidden) enemy and the tense, gripping pace of a good Tom Clancy novel, “Total War” has little room for character development, and most of it is taken by a subplot involving Dredd, Vienna and a genetically-altered clone. The impersonal nature of the threat also means there’s not much in the way of gunplay or fight scenes, with most of the action being a race against the clock for Dredd and a team of investigators to locate and dispose of the nukes. One thing we do get to see, however, is Hershey at her best as Chief Judge: unfettered, collected and focused, but also willing to resort to certain tactics that many of her predecessors would’ve found difficult to stomach. The most obvious case being the opening page of episode 7, where in a citywide broadcast she concedes to Total War’s demands and orders the immediate disbanding of the judges and a return to a civilian government.

Naturally, it’s all a ruse designed to buy more time as Dredd and company desperately chase every possible lead and exhaust every resource to find the bombs, and to Hershey’s credit it works like a spell. Chief of Undercover Division Judge Hollister also makes an appearance, as does Judge Stuyvesant from a few months back, and it’s actually pretty interesting to see how Flint manages to give the latter’s design a few unique qualities to differentiate her from her chief.

A few female undercover judges, an unnamed bespectacled control judge and a fairly striking PSU judge also make small appearances, and once the crisis is over we get a short and somewhat odd scene where Dredd tries to hand over his badge for racing to save an endangered Vienna from the devastation of a nuclear blast instead of protecting the citizens, but Hershey downplays his perceived dereliction of duty and reminds him that he’s still human. It’s rather strange and almost out of place at the end of a story where her stoicism reached almost robotic heights, but it does make a good job of showing the personal bond that still exists between them. And at any rate, it’s worth it to see her turn Dredd’s catchphrase against him.

By way of intermission, the special prog 2005′s “Christmas with the Blints” (Andrew Currie, January ‘05) has Dredd travelling to Brit-Cit hot on the trail of a married couple of serial killers, which nets us a couple of background female brit judges in a few panels. Then it’s back to the Big Meg for a handful of epilogue stories dealing with the fallout of Total War’s terrorist attack. “After the Bombs” (Jason Brashill, 1420-1422, idem) has yet another appearance by Stuyvesant; “Horror in Emergency Camp 4″ (D’Israeli, 1425-1428, February ‘05) has a quite staggering amount of possible background female street judges, including two named ones called Rush and Woo and a very librarian-like PSU judge; and “Missing in Action” (written by Gordon Rennie and drawn by Ian Gibson, 1429-1431, March ‘05) has not only a young Judge Herriman as a small plot point, but also a very odd female judge with dual straight shoulderpads, platinum blonde hair and a Justice Dept. branded hairband who may be a psi (Anderson, even?), although it’s hard to tell because the badge looks like a regular street judge’s.

(The one liberty Justice Dept. hasn’t crushed: artistic liberties!)

EDIT: via Facebook, Gibson himself has confirmed the judge pictured here is indeed a regular street judge. He also had a few comments about the design:

"Returning to the ‘uniform’ topic, for some reason that now escapes me, I decided to give the female judge from the Missing in action adventure a Justice department head scarf. I think it suits her and makes her less scary for the little girl they rescue.”

Speaking of Psis, a slightly redesigned Judge Karyn reappears in progs 1432-1436’s “Descent” (by Rennie and Boo Cook, April ‘05) with a new pink hairstyle and a psi-flash that leads her and Dredd into the Undercity to rescue some survivors of a hovership crash through the hole left by one of Total War’s bombs. Unfortunately, what they find there is a supernatural entity known as the Shadow King, which Dredd and Karyn had already fought in the Megazine (volume 4, issue 5). In the ensuing firefight, Dredd is possessed by the Shadow King’s spirit and turns into a hulking monstrosity, and Karyn takes her whole “Anderson wannabe” character trait to its logical conclusion by knocking Dredd out and absorbing the spirit into herself. Unfortunately, the Shadow King turns out to be too powerful for Karyn, and ends up destroying her mind and taking over her body. She’s eventually subdued by Dredd and judge reinforcements, and the creature once known as Judge Karyn is locked inside a holding cell deep inside Psi Division’s headquarters, never to escape.

It’s a move somewhat reminiscent of Garth Ennis’ treatment of Judge Perrier or Dekker: bring an obscure character back from the depths of oblivion, use them as supporting cast for a couple of years, then kill ‘em off at a later date. And it can definitely be read as a fairly manipulative attempt at getting some emotion out of disposable characters by offing recognizable names rather than complete nobodies. However, the difference between them and Karyn to me lies in Rennie’s very meta-textual idea of her chasing after Anderson’s star. Karyn, much like Janus, was created as a reserve Anderson and swiftly put aside once she returned. They both have their fans, sure, but the general consensus is that try as they might, they just couldn’t match up to the original. Which is exactly what happens to Karyn in this story. She tries to be Anderson but ultimately isn’t as strong as her, and ends up literally erased as a result. It’s still a very heroic sacrifice, as she dies saving Dredd, but it also has a deeper narrative core that was missing from pretty much every other revival of old, forgotten judges.

Rennie sticks around to write the much longer “Blood Trails” (art by Currie, progs 1440-1449, May-July ‘05), which is his own take on the Wagnerian procedural cop show-style mini-epic. As such it features a nice couple of female background judges (only one gets a name: Weisak), including a surprise cameo by Judge Morinta, the inventor med-judge from “Gulag”, although for some reason she’s now blonde instead of brunette. And of course, there’s the by now mandatory final page visit to Hershey’s office, this time to orchestrate a covert retaliatory orbital strike against Anatoli Kazan, War Marshall Kazan’s clone (also introduced in “Gulag”), for siccing a bunch of assassins on Dredd’s niece. Needless to say, it gets carried out quite swiftly.

A few weeks later, Carlos Ezquerra draws another background female judge in “Matters of Life and Death”, also by Rennie (1452, August ‘05). Wagner returns with artist Kev Walker in tow to deliver “Mandroid” (1453-1464, August-November ‘05), and although the main female character in that story is not really a judge, there are still a few proper ones scattered throughout, including a Judge Kowalski who gets a tender little background moment in what’s otherwise one of the absolute bleakest stories of the decade.

Right afterwards, we get a Tek Judge James in prog 1465′s “Everything In The Garden” (Arthur Ranson, November ‘05). Then Rennie and Flint return for a small epilogue to “Blood Trails”, as Anatoli Kazan, now hunted by his own government, arrives in Mega-City One requesting political asylum in “Change of Loyalties” (1466, November ‘05). Of course, Dredd’s having none of it, but since Anatoli could potentially be an invaluable tactical resource and a goldmine of intel, Hershey asks him to at least talk to the creep before calling for his execution. So what we’ve got here is maybe the first example of the main conflict between Dredd and Hershey, one that continues literally to this day in stories like “Harvey”.

(Also of note: this Brendan McCarthy-esque coloring job by Flint. Talk about seeing red!)

On this corner we have the immovable object: Judge Dredd, with a mindset as narrow as his helmet’s visor, never one to double-think himself or back down, apt to following both his sharp gut instincts and his Everestian mountains of experience, and usually very, very right. On the other, we have the irresistible force: Chief Judge Hershey, focused on the big picture, willing to take a chance on a potentially risky idea that could also bring about huge benefits to her city, confident that they’ll be able to handle whatever pitfalls may appear later on, but willing to listen to all parties involved. That last part is important because with any other chief this is the kind of conflict that would lead to some serious fallout, but Hershey is smarter than that, and more importantly, has seen first-hand what happens to Chiefs who don’t listen to Dredd. Her default way, then, of bridging the gap between the two forces is to plainly ask Dredd his opinion and promise to act accordingly to it, in this case, by letting him decide her vote on the council.

Overall it’s a decent way to avoid some very cliche drama, but there’s a couple of problems with it, not least of all that the sheer number of stories like this has turned it into a cliche in and of itself. However, the biggest problem, for me, is that it reduces Hershey to a bit of an echo chamber or political proxy for Dredd, allowing him to make decisions and direct the course of the city without actually leaving his position as a street judge. It lets him play in both arenas at once but doesn’t chain him to anything. From an in-story perspective it makes sense, since despite everything they still have a history together and Dredd is rarely wrong, but it’s annoying from a character standpoint because it stifles Hershey quite a bit. At its worst, she comes off as just a puppet of Dredd’s, although her directly asking for his council and seemingly agreeing with it on some level helps stave that off. And in a sneaky bit of storytelling, when the council does make its decision on Anatoli’s fate we get to see the result but we don’t get to see who actually voted for what. So whether Hershey actually went through with her promise is left, much like the voting hands, up in the air.

Rounding up 2005 we have a forensic judge at the start of “Nobody”, by Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson (1467, November). The new year then kicks off with a nice handful of background judges through “Your Beating Heart”, by Wagner and Patrick Goddard (1469-1474, January-February ‘06) and the return of Judge Lola in Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s “Time and Again” (1475, February ‘06), which makes sense considering it’s a sequel to “Tempus Fugitive”. The same story also features an elderly, unnamed scarred female judge as head of a parole board. 

Things get a little more exciting in our next stop, with newcomer writer Simon Spurrier, artist Laurence Campbell and (awesomely-named) inker Kris Justice’s “Dominoes” (1482, April ‘06), a story that plants some seeds that would take six years to blossom.

(This is also the first time an artist draws the oversized chains holding Hershey’s badge far as I've been able to gleam, which means I owe Campbell a drink because it’s my absolute favorite detail of her uniform)

Ostensibly, the story is all about Dredd going on a diplomatic mission to Neocuba to handle a prisoner exchange with their president. Two pages in, however, we learn that his ship’s pilot is actually a fanatical black ops agent with a mission of her own: assassinating said president in such a way that it looks like either an accident or a covert sov op. Which she does beautifully and without Dredd ever realizing it. And in a final bit of very sharp writing, Spurrier all but screams she did it all on Hershey’s orders.

Overall, a fair lot to unpack for a six page story. We’ve known for a while now that Hershey favours more subtle, underhanded ways of securing Mega-City One’s interests than blunt force of arms, but something about this one feels like pushing it. Maybe it’s keeping Dredd in the dark about it, or directly targeting a foreign head of state, but if it’s not crossing a line, at the very least it’s toeing it. In a way it echoes "The Chief Judge’s Man”, but having the target be an implicitly corrupt foreign leader makes it slightly less damning than murdering rebellious but innocent MC-1 citizens. And, more importantly, Spurrier decides to end the story without confirming nor denying Hershey’s involvement in it, although at the time it seemed like a sure thing.

From a six-pager to a six-episode-er as Gordon Rennie, Ian Richardson and PJ Holden bring us “House of Pain” (1485-1490, May ‘06), and what a treat it is. Right off the bat we open with Judge Alice, a street judge driving a catch wagon on the graveyard shift, being harassed by a couple of punks. Her scene is mostly set-up for Judge Guthrie’s return, but things get a lot better as the story goes along. First, with a small guest appearance by Wally Chief Judge Hollister going undercover with two others as kneepad models in a pretty funny, albeit pretty skeevy scene; then with Judge Corson, a bomb defusal specialist tek who first helps Dredd deal with a perp’s suicide box implant and later with the main villain’s offshore platform’s self-destruct; and there’s still enough space for Hershey to deliver a short lesson on law economics:

By contrast, “Jumped”, by John Smith and Simon Fraser (1491-1494, June ‘06), only has a lone unhelmeted female judge in a panel, although she is seen with a similarly unhelmeted male judge, so maybe all those fan letters about lady judges being allergic to helmets are finally having an effect. “Neoweirdies”, by Simon Spurrier and Paul Marshall, (1496-1498, July ‘06) has a couple of background sightings but also co-stars a Judge Garris as part of a team investigating murders in a pretentious weirdos competition, including a cheeky little panel of her checking out a naked contestant. Avert your eyes, lest the SJS pluck ‘em out. Spurrier also writes the Pete Doherty-drawn “Versus” (1499, August ‘06), a mostly silent tale featuring a female control judge.

Now we reach what’s probably the most important and certainly the longest story of the decade: “Origins”, by Wagner and Ezquerra (progs 1505 to 1535 -with interludes- September ‘06 to May ‘07). The premise is a heavy one: Justice Department receives a note demanding a ransom for the corpse of Judge Fargo, creator of the judge system and father of justice. With the note is a tissue sample that was taken from a living organism, so if it is indeed Fargo, he’s also alive. Chief Judge Hershey quickly sends Dredd and a team of hand-picked judges into the Cursed Earth with one billion credits and a wagon to follow the trail of the kidnappers. The team includes two female judges: the returning Judge Sanchez from “Incubus” and a Judge Waters. Of the two, Waters is definitely the most impressive, a hardened street judge who acts as Dredd’s second in command early on, leading a defensive action against an army of Mad Max extras with a very calm, matter-of-fact badass attitude that feels quite refreshing after years of more troubled, insecure judges. It also helps that Ezquerra draws her as noticeably older than Sanchez, so it’s clear from the get-go that Waters is a veteran. And near the end of the story, Waters gets another chance to shine as she orchestrates and executes the rescue of Dredd and Fargo from the renegade army of the damned. Overall, she proves herself more than worthy of being in a Brian Bolland cover.

Of course, as the name suggests, “Origins” is mostly concerned with showing the birth of the Justice Department and the events leading to Dredd’s creation, so there’s not much else there that concerns this post, save for one small but crucial page: when the young Fargo is outlining his plans for the creation of a corps of judges armed with the power to dispense instant justice to the United States senate, he specifically mentions the need for choosing “good men and women.” And on the same page we get a glimpse of an early class of judge cadets in training which also includes a couple of women. So here is confirmation that from day one the judges counted several women in their ranks, although admittedly by now this probably wasn’t terribly in doubt.

The final episode also has a predictable appearance by Hershey, who gets the unexpected privilege of being the second to last person to talk to Fargo before he finally expires. The last one, naturally, is Dredd himself, although both of them lie through their teeth about what his final words to each other were. More on that later.

Now, about those interludes. Prog 1521′s “The Sexmek Slasher” (January ‘07) by Wagner and Vince Locke features a Judge Wyler in a supporting role. And Gordon Rennie teams-up with Ian Gibson to bring us “Judgement” (1523-1528, February-March ‘07), a supernatural revenge story guest-starring Judge Anderson in one of her rare not-Grant/Wagner-scripted appearances.

(Also featuring the return of Teddy Dredd!)

The story is a tightly-written tale about a ghost judge murdering members of a crime cartel known for using psykers to mask their activities. The revenant also murders a judge but spares his partner, a Judge Bunns (could it be the same Bunns from 1983′s “Rumble in the Jungle”?), demonstrating some kind of psychic ability to tell the guilty from the innocent, although how innocent a Mega-City One judge can really be is anyone’s guess. Dredd and Anderson’s investigation reveals that the ghost is actually the enraged soul of a long-dead judge, killed by Rico Dredd before he was sent to Titan. But it’s Anderson who connects the final dot and reaches the real source of the apparition: Judge Edek, a veteran psi-judge ambushed and all but murdered by the aforementioned cartel. Crippled beyond repair and frozen in cryo-stasis in the hopes that some day technology would advance enough to heal her, some part of Edek’s consciousness remained, well, conscious, and reached out in anger to another betrayed judge in order to turn them into a revenant and get her revenge. Ultimately, Anderson reaches Edek’s chamber after fighting her way through a gorgeously drawn horde of ectoplasmic monsters and pulls the plug, while Dredd handles what remains of Judgement on his own.

Overall, “Judgement” is a very strong showing for Anderson and a great psychic/supernatural twist on the old “judge turned vigilante” premise of stories like “The Executioner” or “Raider.” Also on display is Gibson’s slight redesign of the psi judge uniform, as Anderson sports twin straight shoulderpads all the way through. According to Gibson himself, the pads helped him make her more “dynamic.” He also had a spot of trouble rendering Anderson’s new shorter haircut, first shown in Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson’s ongoing Psi Division strip in the Megazine. In his own words:

"Then, when I was back doing a Dredd for 2000ad, on a story called ‘Judgement’ ( I think ), Andy was again in the script. But someone had cut off all her lovely flowing blonde tresses, for reasons of their own. So I had to render her thus.”

Rounding up this post we have a trio of short done-in-ones: “Fifty-Year Man” (Wagner and Patrick Goddard, prog 1536, May ‘07) has a female judge, perhaps a public relations administrator, as head of a team putting together a retrospective of Dredd’s fifty years on the streets, with some predictably disastrous results. In a similar vein, a journalist is arrested by a Judge Socks (maybe, her badge is hard to read) after going insane trying to write a biography of Dredd in “The Biographer”, Rob Williams’ first appearance in this project (with Boo Cook, 1537, idem). And we end in a note of tragedy with “The Incident”, by Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson (1538, idem). The story kicks off when undercover Judge Ferrara has her cover blown and is kidnapped by assassins who use a nano-virus to destroy the high tech implant wire on her brain that she’d being using to spy on their boss. Unfortunately for her, both PSU and Dredd are too slow to reach her, and the virus erases her mind. One seriously bleak story, although we do get to see Elson draw some seriously unique uniforms for the Control judges:

In our next episode: the hardest part to write for me. Also, the most important female judge of the new millennium has her prog debut.

[cepmurphy]

So what if Dredd bought it and Rico became top cop??

The Year One/Two and Third Law ebooks tell us he's already built up a crime empire and isn't subtle with corruption - but only Dredd suspected. Since he makes sure to have a good clearance rate, Justice Dept isn't paying attention. (His assessor Kenner twigged and was murdered) But he's flaunting it, drunk, and (per Wear Iron) erratic. SJS will twig.

But Cal Files tell us Cal, then on the rise, will hush it up because he wants compromised Judges...

So Rico will probably get VERY senior, faster than Dredd, due to 'good stats' & being Cal's boy. Like Dredd, he's off to Euro-City in '89 to rescue the MC1 ambassador. Unlike Dredd, he's going to notice the Organisation forming in the background - and buddy up with De Guerre. Hey, money’s money and it’s nice to have friends who aren’t Cal.

By 2098, Rico's running all sorts of rackets, has fellow goons like Gibson around, and has got onto the Council of Five. The city has rot. Goodman will suspect this and be depressed. He's even easier for the Monkey (Meg 203-5) to control & throw MC1 into chaos.

Cal legally overthrows the 'dangerous' Goodman, with no Dredd to uncover the Monkey (and who’d care if it came out). And that leads to months of Cal... (9)

...disrupted by the completely unexpected Robot Uprising!

This isn't something Cal can handle at all. The death & destruction is immense. Rico defeats Call-Me-Kenneth eventually - let’s be honest - and takes control of the shattered city. Nobody else can do it. Cal’s other Council Judges are either dead or crap. Maybe Mayor Grubb could’ve done it but he never recovered after the Brotherhood of Darkness abducted his son. And so, Chief Judge Rico.

Mega-City One's laws and social balance can now be reformed the way Rico always said he wanted. All sorts of freedoms and licenses are granted to the citizens - no more sex, drug, sedition laws (last within reason) but there's only the most rudimentary law to protect citizens from predation, and the Judges are simply one gang monitoring others

Other megacities freak out. Mega-City Two becomes hostile - and is thus left to die when the plague hits. Texas City finds itself genuinely isolated. East-Meg One no longer see Mega-City One as the number one threat & refocus on Hondo. Captain Skank runs afoul of Judge-Inspector Sadu. On the flipside, Luna-1 decays further & buddies up with Puerto Luminae, Ciudad Barranquilla, and Brit-Cit (corruption no longer seeing a need to hide itself) as Mega-City One’s pals.

The obsessively paranoid Judge Badger has already gone to ground with people like Edgar, McGruder and Smiley to form his "Sector Zero". Here, horrifyingly, Sector Zero are our last hope. You're lucky they've 'spirited away' promising cadets like Giant & Hershey.

And bored, paranoid, and - deep down - guilty about Joe, Rico gets worse and worse and many people have "accidents" in his new city.

It all comes to a head when Judge Death arrives.

Psi-Division were corrupted or purged. Anderson, she got corrupted. Nobody can stop Death or his brothers or the acolytes he makes. Rico goes completely off the deep end as it all slips through his grasp.

Sector Zero make their move and butcher every psi they can find to stop the Sisters of Death coming over. That just about works.

A zzizzed-up, screaming Rico is steered into fighting Death - he loses.

He's converted, Kraken-style.

The valiant Judge Tempest leads the final charge on Death and only Hershey walks away.

Sector Zero take control and turf out Badger. The new Chief Judge, Edgar, uses Cal's old brainwashing chips to bring enough Judges under control and gradually pacifies the city.

By this point, Hondo and East-Meg One have gone to war - Hondo got their retaliation in first. A cabal of Brit-Cit Judges led by a certain Armitage overthrew the Star Chamber after the fall of Rico.

And knowing MC-1 needs a symbol to rebuild, Edgar turns to a prophecy from the last psi shot - and Hershey is sent on a mission.

In 2106, she returns with the Judge Child.

He shall be their Chief Judge in 2120 and all will turn out fine...

[brentrogers]

Podcast: Police Response to Quarantined Mental Health Crisis

What happens when the police are called to handle a mental health emergency? And is the current coronavirus pandemic affecting their response? In today’s podcast, Gabe interviews Sergeant Matt Harris, a supervisor in the Mobile Crisis Response Unit at the Columbus, Ohio Police Department, to shed some light on an officer’s point of view during a mental health call. Sgt. Harris shares his crisis team’s typical protocol during one of these calls and describes what they do when things don’t go as planned.

How does the team handle psychosis? Is a mentally ill person ever taken to jail? Is the COVID-19 quarantine having an effect on the number of calls they receive? Join us to hear the answers to these questions and more.

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

Guest information for ‘Matt Harris- CIT’ Podcast Episode

Matt Harris is a sergeant with the Columbus, Ohio, Division of Police and has been with the department for 22 years.  He is currently assigned to the Mobile Crisis Response Unit where he supervises 5 police officers who co-respond to mental health crisis situations along with a social worker, licensed professional counselor, or other mental health clinician. 

    About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Matt Harris- CIT’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Psych Central Podcast, where guest experts in the field of psychology and mental health share thought-provoking information using plain, everyday language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Psych Central Podcast. Calling into the show today, we have Sergeant Matt Harris with the Columbus Police Department. Sergeant Harris is with the Mobile Crisis Response Unit, supervising five police officers who correspond to mental health crisis situations, along with a mental health clinician. Sergeant Harris, welcome to the show.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Thank you, Gabe. Good to be here.

Gabe Howard: Well, I’m very glad that you can take time out of your busy schedule. You know, right now we live in the age of the coronavirus quarantine. While stay and shelter orders are starting to lift and places are slowly reopening, that’s not the case everywhere in the country. And because here in Ohio, everything closed shelter in place in full effect. And obviously police officers are essential. So from your perspective, Sergeant Harris, everything has been shut down?

Sgt. Matt Harris: It has. The strangest thing that that I feel every day when I’m driving around the city is driving in the middle of downtown Columbus at broad and high on a weekday during business hours. And it feels like a Sunday. And it also feels like it’s third shift. And it also feels like it’s Christmas because there’s just nobody out. And I’ve never seen anything like it before.

Gabe Howard: It is a bit of an eerie feeling, you know, downtown for people that don’t know Columbus, Ohio, 14th largest city downtown on a business day is busy. It’s not New York City or Chicago busy, but it’s certainly not. Traveling is so easy right now.

Sgt. Matt Harris: That’s exactly right. I’ve never been able to get from point A to point B so efficiently. And it feels good.

Gabe Howard: But the positives, they’re not outweighing the negatives at this point, especially since you’re a C.I.T. officer now, C.I.T. is Crisis Intervention. You work with people who are in well, in the midst of a of a mental health, a mental illness crisis. I guess the question is, is how does that look in the age of the quarantine? Have you been pulled off of that duty or are you getting more calls? What’s your day to day life aside from being able to drive everywhere very efficiently?

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, we haven’t been pulled off of the duties, the mental health calls are still coming in to 911 or they’re coming into the non-emergency number as well. We’re still getting referrals from other officers and community members. As far as the numbers go, I don’t really know. I’d have to look at CAD data to see. But anecdotally speaking, it seems like the mental health calls have been steady and not that much different.

Gabe Howard: I have not ever had to call your unit and I sincerely hope that I never do. But I have to tell you, I like the idea that it’s out there, because if I get sick, if I’m in crisis, unfortunately, the police are who I call it. It’s a little bit backwards, right? It would be like if somebody broke into my house and I called an ambulance. That’s sort of how it feels. Can you talk about that for a moment? Because I think many people are just confused about why somebody who’s having an illness, somebody who is sick, is calling the police in the first place.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Yeah, I think that that is a huge area of discussion, I’ve heard you talk about that on some of your other episodes and I get that it doesn’t necessarily make sense. The best thing I can come up with to try to provide clarity is if you are in a controlled environment, so say you have an illness and you’re in the hospital. Whether that be a physical illness or a mental illness, it is a controlled environment. You have doctors and nurses and techs and people who have every resource at their disposal and training and the ability to help you in whatever way that you need when you are in that controlled environment. It is pretty well assured that you are in an area where there is no access to weapons. And there is a whole complement of staff members that if something goes sideways to the point where a person becomes combative or dangerous in some way, it can be controlled. When you are in an uncontrolled environment such as your apartment or in the middle of the city, none of those things that I just described exist. Right?

Sgt. Matt Harris: So anyone who we encounter, whether that person is suffering from a mental health situation or not, might have a gun in their waistband. They might have a pipe that they picked up. They might try to run out into traffic in front of a car that could hit them and could hit somebody that is trying to stop them from running out in the traffic. So it all has to do with the fact that when we’re responding in the community, you have to be prepared to deal with anything because it is a completely uncontrolled environment. Now, I don’t mean to say or imply that people always want to pick up a weapon. The problem is that it is a possibility. So if we sent folks into the community to respond to these crisis situations without the ability to deal with potentially combative scenarios, it could be it could go sideways real quick. That kind of provides some clarity. Do you think?

Gabe Howard: It really does. And it’s understandable. And this is sort of the this is the struggle of mental health advocacy. So. And I want everybody to love my guest because, you know, he’s a police officer and he’s helping people like me. But when you walk into my house, we’re on different sides. Right? It’s just the way that it is. And this is what scares my community. And I want to kind of give you an opportunity to address it from your point of view, because I think it gets missed. One of the things that I read all the time is that people with mental illness are much more likely to become victims of violent crime than to perpetrate violent crimes. That is 100 percent true. But we don’t need to talk about that because we’re talking specifically about when you walk in and somebody like me who is suffering from psychosis, who is not in their right mind. And when you walk in, I think you’re a blue dragon. I’m not attacking a police officer. I’m not even trying to hurt a police officer. But I am defending myself against a blue dragon. Now, of course, the problem is, is that anything that I do to the Blue Dragon affects you potentially gravely. Sergeant Harris. So that is sort of what sets up the issue. What happens more often than not is that we just get arrested. We don’t get de-escalated. And we’re not acknowledged that we have any sort of illness issue or anything like that. We’re just. Well, you assaulted a police officer and off to jail we go, but your unit is trying to do something about it. What do you do about the person who’s trying to attack you and hurt you? But you know that it’s not they’re not in their right mind. Like, how do you handle that? Because you can’t just let me slay the dragon.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, that’s exactly right. And I completely hear everything you’re saying. I just want to acknowledge that the officers and the clinicians that I work with every day. We completely understand the concept of the blue dragon or maybe maybe we’re the reptilians who are attempting to take over the world or maybe we’re the demons that came out of the drywall. We have been doing this long enough to where, you know, the concept of what you’re talking about has become very clear. So what we try to do is basically not make it worse. So when we get there, the person who called the cops will be directed outside and they will be speaking with the mental health clinician that we work with, that we co-respond with. And that clinician will be gathering information from them, trying to better understand what’s going on. We want to de-escalate the best way that we can, which is normally staying very calm, talking softly, talking slowly and respecting personal space, giving the person in crisis an opportunity to go from that vision of the blue dragon to maybe it clears up a little bit and maybe with some soothing conversation, we can come to the conclusion that it’s actually not the reptilians or not the blue dragons and somebody that’s there to help them. Now, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But that is always the very first goal is to de-escalate, to where the blue dragon, being the police officer, does not need to be slayed. And

Gabe Howard: Right. Right.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Hopefully, hopefully we don’t get slayed and hopefully we can talk this individual into coming with us peacefully if that’s the route that we need to go.

Gabe Howard: My second question in this whole thing is you’re compassionate people, you don’t want anybody to have a bad outcome. But, you know, de-escalation doesn’t always work. This is not always an option. I mean, I know what this is like from my point of view, intimately. And I’m desperately trying to see it from your point of view where somebody is screaming at you, attacking you, yelling at you, they’re breaking the law. The reason that they break the law may be reasonable or understandable, but make no mistake, you were called for a reason and now you have to do something about it. I kind of want to ask you how you feel about taking mentally ill people to jail, but it seems like a mean-spirited question. Can you talk about that for a moment? Because it’s it is a reality.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Yeah, of course. I actually kind of like the slaying of the dragon scenario because it can help people to maybe understand if somebody is attacking or being violent or trying to slay that dragon. The cops are probably the best equipped to be able to handle that. Now in the hospital scenario, like I said, it’s a controlled environment. So, you know, there’s a whole group of people that can handle that. But in the outside world where it’s uncontrolled, this is why the cops are called as opposed to anybody else, because we’ve got training to restrain if need be. We have a whole tool belt. You know, I’ve got a walkie talkie. I can call for help. I’ve got pepper spray. I have a taser. I have a firearm that hopefully I never, ever have to use. But these are some of the reasons why the cops are involved in these scenarios as opposed to to somebody else who probably isn’t in a position where they can really defend themselves as well as what a police officer can. And they may not be able to call for help as efficiently as a police officer can. And I can get people who are driving with lights and sirens to get there fast to help me, whereas somebody else can’t. So I just kind of wanted to paint that picture a little bit.

Gabe Howard: I think it’s a fair point. Thank you.

Sgt. Matt Harris: As far as jail is concerned, I can tell you this. The Columbus police C.I.T officers and more specifically, the mobile crisis unit, my unit, we very rarely take somebody having a mental health crisis to jail. Occasionally, we may get word that somebody that is in crisis, maybe they’ve got warrants for their arrest. And then at that point, we’re obligated by the courts to bring the person in. So that could be one potential scenario where the trip might be to the jail instead of the hospital. However, it’s very rare — that doesn’t happen very often. The other times that this could happen would be, number one, unable to de-escalate a person. It just didn’t work that somebody is in full psychosis. There are often times where there’s no communicating. There’s simply no way to get through. And at that point, what we will do is we will try to restrain in a very humane way without using weapons, preferably. And if we can get that person under our control, probably involves putting cuffs on them and getting them into the back of a police car that has bars where they can’t break the window out. You know, while we’re on the way to the hospital and that’s the preferred course of action. However, if it gets so out of control where we’re unable to restrain a person or if somebody comes out of nowhere and sucker punches an officer, which I have seen happen before, because, again, they need to slay the dragon at that point.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Assaulting a police officer is a felony in Ohio. And generally, we will go with that. And the reason that we’re gonna go with that, Gabe, is because the court system has leverage. In other words, they can say to a person, we understand you have this illness. You’ve got to follow your doctor’s instructions. You’ve got to take these antipsychotics. You’ve got to take this medication. Otherwise, if you don’t, the court can order you into jail. That is leverage that oftentimes we need, because if we go to the hospital, the hospital will stabilize and sometimes they’ll do long term care and keep somebody for a while or they may get sent to one of the long term facilities. But if and when a person comes out of treatment, oftentimes people don’t want to take the medication and we can end up in a situation where we spin our wheels. Right? We end up right back there in that same situation where they’re slaying the dragon again. But there’s no real piece to prevent that from happening again with the hospital system only. So sometimes the courts can actually provide motivation to stay on course to prevent oneself from decompensating to the point of dangerousness, which is really favorable for everybody, because then it keeps the person out of trouble. It keeps other people, neighbors, the police officers that are responding. It’s better for everybody.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Gabe Howard: We’re discussing policing in the age of the coronavirus quarantine with Sergeant Matt Harris. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over again in this debate is I’m not being negative to my loved one. I love them. Do you find that well-intentioned people who absolutely, unequivocally love the person whom they called the police on are also just doing all of the wrong things and creating issues? And then how do you handle that? Because I imagine that it’s really hard to look at somebody who, you know, is well-intentioned and saying what you’re doing is hurting the situation because they’re going to clap back immediately, but I’m only trying to help.

Sgt. Matt Harris: We usually run into one of two scenarios, Gabe. So the first scenario is we show up and the loved ones, the family members are not helping. They are making things worse. Sometimes when we leave after work, it’s all done. We say to ourselves. Oh, my goodness. You know, this person would be so much better off if they didn’t have these people in their lives. We see that a lot. And it’s not that the family members or whoever it is providing the adversity, I guess we would say it’s not that those people mean to do that. It’s not that they’re trying to be difficult. They just simply usually do not understand how to deal with the situation. They don’t necessarily understand the needs of their loved one. They are frustrated. They’ve been dealing with this for a long time. They tend to be pissed off because they feel failed by the system because nobody’s helping them or people show up to help, but then it starts up again and it spins its wheels. So that is a very common theme. So those are the folks that we need to get out of the room. Hey, come talk with us over here. They’re not helping the person in crisis in that moment.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Now, the other side of it is the folks who say go to NAMI meetings, the people who are educated on their loved ones’ condition and who really have taken time to understand what their friend or family member is going through. Maybe they’re self educated. Maybe they’ve gone to support groups. Maybe they have their own therapist that they work through these issues with. But that group of people, they tend to kind of get it and they will practice de-escalation on their own before we get there. And we can actually watch them doing really well with their loved one. And sometimes we need that person to actually help us get the person in crisis to do what you know, whatever the goal is, if we’re trying to get them into a cruiser so we can go to the hospital. And that’s oftentimes we’ll have the loved ones who are in the know can help us and they can kind of coax their family member into going along with whatever the best option is. So I don’t really see a whole lot in the middle, at least not based on my own personal experience. It’s usually kind of one or the other.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that we talked about when we use the slay the blue dragon analogy, is that the person with mental illness isn’t trying to be a problem. They’re a good person deserving of care and respect and love and resources. And that’s what makes this whole thing hard, because you can be all of those things and still be a danger to yourself or others and needing of police intervention. Along the same lines, as you said, there are people who they love their family, they love their children. They love the person that they’re trying to help, but they, too, are hurting them now. Are you allowed to intervene on behalf and get those people some place where they can become a better support system? Caregiver, friend, roommate, loved one?

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, here’s well, here’s what I do. I always I advocate for people to get involved with NAMI because I just have to believe that. If you surround yourself with a group of people who have been there, who have been in a similar way or are in a similar situation with a loved one who suffers from mental illness, that can only be a good thing. You can learn from one another. You can go to meetings. You can go to workshops. You can educate yourself on how do I react in this scenario if my loved one is in the midst of a manic episode and they are posturing and acting out and becoming aggressive? If nobody ever taught that mother or that father or that sibling, what they’re supposed to do, how to better handle that situation, then things are not going to necessarily go well. So I tell people all the time or I encourage people all the time to seek out help in whatever way they want to, to try to better understand what their loved one is going through and how to better respond when they’re in crisis.

Gabe Howard: It does sound to me like you’re saying that education really helps all sides. And I just bring this up because there just is a lot of misunderstanding, really, in all of society. But even when we look at the people who are working through the mental health issues and are advocating for mental health issues and are living with mental health issues or have a loved one with mental health issues or are a police officer, there just seems to be a lot of in-fighting even among us. And I’d really like to see us all get on the same page so that we can move forward. I know this is a big question and please, you are not required to answer it. But do you have any advice for the mental health advocacy community who are often split about the best way to move forward?

Sgt. Matt Harris: The first thing that comes to mind is the global issue of how do we improve? How do we move forward is we have to have reasonable expectations because most people probably think, oh, this person is ill. They have some mental health issues, doctor or hospital, and get it fixed. Right? Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Nobody has a magic wand. The pharmaceutical companies have invented lots of different drugs over the years that can help with symptomology and it can help with mental health issues. But as has been explained to me by many mental health consumers, sometimes it takes a year to figure out the right combination of medications, and sometimes the medications stop working and have to be readjusted. And there’s all of these different factors. You can’t take a person to treatment and expect that overnight the treatment facility is going to fix everything and the problems are going to go away. So I’ve had to adjust my expectations because as you might imagine, many of the calls that my unit responds to, how can I say this? I don’t want to say repeat, customers. But a lot of the same folks that we get to know who are sort of in and out of the system.

Sgt. Matt Harris: And people are always asking us, you know, what can we do? How do we know this has been going on for years? And I’m just honest. And I tell everybody there is no magic answer here. We do the best we can. Meaning that the advocates, you know, people who are in your position, Gabe, you do the best you can. And my team, we do the best we can. We take people to the hospital. They do the best that they can. But we’re limited by resources, we’re limited by the law sometimes we’re limited by all of these different factors. So I always go back to moving forward. What do we do? And the best thing I can come up with is keep doing the best that we can. And hopefully there’s a natural state of progression, maybe in the pharmaceutical industry, maybe in the brain science realm, maybe with the way that we police involving mental health crisis. Everything progresses over time.

Gabe Howard: I really like what you said about, you know, patience and understanding and that we’re all doing the best that we can. I think that so often in this debate, one side believes that they’re doing the best that they can, but they believe that the other side is just intentionally making things worse or they have malicious intent or they’re uncaring when in actuality, what I’ve seen from working on all sides and frankly, from working all over the country is that you’re right, everybody is doing the best that they can in every area except communication. I don’t think that we’re communicating the best that we can because we’re often ignoring people when we don’t want to hear it. I speak to many, many people from family members to people living with mental illness like myself, and they say things like, well, I’m not going to talk to the police. They just want to arrest my son or I’m not going to talk to the police. They just want to arrest me. And I think that’s so sad and so cynical. But more importantly, it’s also not been my experience. I’m not saying that it never happens. I am certainly not saying that there’s not just so many tragic stories out there, but I don’t think they’re coming from a malicious place. I think they’re often coming from a place of misunderstanding. You know, we’re almost out of time. But all over the country, they don’t have crisis response units. There’s not a Sergeant Matt Harris in every single city and every single town and every single state. How did Columbus, Ohio, get one and how can every place get one?

Sgt. Matt Harris: It all comes down to resources and the right people being involved. So there was a group of individuals. I’d like to give Commander Chris Bowling and soon to be Commander Dennis Jeffrey accolades here, because those were two individuals that saw this as something that we needed. And not only did they know that we needed to do something like this, but they actually made it happen by partnering with our local mental health intake agency, crisis agency, Netcare. And put this idea on the table for both sides to talk about. And the police side and the Netcare side were able to come up with this partnership that we have actually not just conceptualize it, but put it into action. And next thing you know, we have social workers and counselors riding in the police car with officers responding to people in the community that need that service. So it’s the right people and it’s resources. So in Franklin County, we’re fortunate enough that there was funding on both sides to provide police officers and to provide mental health clinicians, paid positions as a full time job to do this this work. Many other areas within Ohio and across the United States, likely don’t have the funding or the resources to put this together. And that’s tragic. But that’s kind of the current state of affairs.

Gabe Howard: Sergeant Harris, what do you say to the people who say that, you know, in light of COVID-19 and the pandemic and the economic issues, that this is just something that we can’t afford right now and that it needs to be shut down so that we can use that money in, and I am making air quotes, in a better area? What do you say to those folks that are wondering about that right now?

Sgt. Matt Harris: I would say that whether they’re aware of it or not, there is a need to respond to our community, specifically to people in our community who are suffering from mental health issues, whether there is a pandemic that’s currently playing out or not. That need is always going to be there if we don’t have the correct resources. These situations don’t get better. They tend to decompensate further and get worse. And then you have an even bigger problem. So I advocate 100 percent that we need to to maintain our crisis unit and that we need to respond to mental health emergencies in the community, regardless of what the health crisis situation may or may not be. In fact, I would say that most would agree that the health pandemic has been quite anxiety inducing for many people. If you already have a high level of anxiety or if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, the crisis isn’t making it better. It’s going to make it worse, more likely than not. So these responses that we provide are much needed.

Gabe Howard: I could not agree more. Thank you, Sergeant Harris, for being here, we really appreciate it. And thank you everybody for listening in. If you like the show, please subscribe. Share us on social media. Use your words. Tell people why they should listen. We have a private Facebook group that you can join. It’s absolutely free. Just head over to PsychCentral.com/FBShow and it’ll take you right there. And remember, you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting  BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. And we will see everyone next week.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to The Psych Central Podcast. Want your audience to be wowed at your next event? Feature an appearance and LIVE RECORDING of the Psych Central Podcast right from your stage! For more details, or to book an event, please email us at show@psychcentral.com. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/Show or on your favorite podcast player. Psych Central is the internet’s oldest and largest independent mental health website run by mental health professionals. Overseen by Dr. John Grohol, Psych Central offers trusted resources and quizzes to help answer your questions about mental health, personality, psychotherapy, and more. Please visit us today at PsychCentral.com.  To learn more about our host, Gabe Howard, please visit his website at gabehoward.com. Thank you for listening and please share with your friends, family, and followers.

  Podcast: Police Response to Quarantined Mental Health Crisis syndicated from

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Podcast: Police Response to Quarantined Mental Health Crisis

What happens when the police are called to handle a mental health emergency? And is the current coronavirus pandemic affecting their response? In today’s podcast, Gabe interviews Sergeant Matt Harris, a supervisor in the Mobile Crisis Response Unit at the Columbus, Ohio Police Department, to shed some light on an officer’s point of view during a mental health call. Sgt. Harris shares his crisis team’s typical protocol during one of these calls and describes what they do when things don’t go as planned.

How does the team handle psychosis? Is a mentally ill person ever taken to jail? Is the COVID-19 quarantine having an effect on the number of calls they receive? Join us to hear the answers to these questions and more.

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Guest information for ‘Matt Harris- CIT’ Podcast Episode

Matt Harris is a sergeant with the Columbus, Ohio, Division of Police and has been with the department for 22 years.  He is currently assigned to the Mobile Crisis Response Unit where he supervises 5 police officers who co-respond to mental health crisis situations along with a social worker, licensed professional counselor, or other mental health clinician. 

    About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Matt Harris- CIT’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Psych Central Podcast, where guest experts in the field of psychology and mental health share thought-provoking information using plain, everyday language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Psych Central Podcast. Calling into the show today, we have Sergeant Matt Harris with the Columbus Police Department. Sergeant Harris is with the Mobile Crisis Response Unit, supervising five police officers who correspond to mental health crisis situations, along with a mental health clinician. Sergeant Harris, welcome to the show.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Thank you, Gabe. Good to be here.

Gabe Howard: Well, I’m very glad that you can take time out of your busy schedule. You know, right now we live in the age of the coronavirus quarantine. While stay and shelter orders are starting to lift and places are slowly reopening, that’s not the case everywhere in the country. And because here in Ohio, everything closed shelter in place in full effect. And obviously police officers are essential. So from your perspective, Sergeant Harris, everything has been shut down?

Sgt. Matt Harris: It has. The strangest thing that that I feel every day when I’m driving around the city is driving in the middle of downtown Columbus at broad and high on a weekday during business hours. And it feels like a Sunday. And it also feels like it’s third shift. And it also feels like it’s Christmas because there’s just nobody out. And I’ve never seen anything like it before.

Gabe Howard: It is a bit of an eerie feeling, you know, downtown for people that don’t know Columbus, Ohio, 14th largest city downtown on a business day is busy. It’s not New York City or Chicago busy, but it’s certainly not. Traveling is so easy right now.

Sgt. Matt Harris: That’s exactly right. I’ve never been able to get from point A to point B so efficiently. And it feels good.

Gabe Howard: But the positives, they’re not outweighing the negatives at this point, especially since you’re a C.I.T. officer now, C.I.T. is Crisis Intervention. You work with people who are in well, in the midst of a of a mental health, a mental illness crisis. I guess the question is, is how does that look in the age of the quarantine? Have you been pulled off of that duty or are you getting more calls? What’s your day to day life aside from being able to drive everywhere very efficiently?

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, we haven’t been pulled off of the duties, the mental health calls are still coming in to 911 or they’re coming into the non-emergency number as well. We’re still getting referrals from other officers and community members. As far as the numbers go, I don’t really know. I’d have to look at CAD data to see. But anecdotally speaking, it seems like the mental health calls have been steady and not that much different.

Gabe Howard: I have not ever had to call your unit and I sincerely hope that I never do. But I have to tell you, I like the idea that it’s out there, because if I get sick, if I’m in crisis, unfortunately, the police are who I call it. It’s a little bit backwards, right? It would be like if somebody broke into my house and I called an ambulance. That’s sort of how it feels. Can you talk about that for a moment? Because I think many people are just confused about why somebody who’s having an illness, somebody who is sick, is calling the police in the first place.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Yeah, I think that that is a huge area of discussion, I’ve heard you talk about that on some of your other episodes and I get that it doesn’t necessarily make sense. The best thing I can come up with to try to provide clarity is if you are in a controlled environment, so say you have an illness and you’re in the hospital. Whether that be a physical illness or a mental illness, it is a controlled environment. You have doctors and nurses and techs and people who have every resource at their disposal and training and the ability to help you in whatever way that you need when you are in that controlled environment. It is pretty well assured that you are in an area where there is no access to weapons. And there is a whole complement of staff members that if something goes sideways to the point where a person becomes combative or dangerous in some way, it can be controlled. When you are in an uncontrolled environment such as your apartment or in the middle of the city, none of those things that I just described exist. Right?

Sgt. Matt Harris: So anyone who we encounter, whether that person is suffering from a mental health situation or not, might have a gun in their waistband. They might have a pipe that they picked up. They might try to run out into traffic in front of a car that could hit them and could hit somebody that is trying to stop them from running out in the traffic. So it all has to do with the fact that when we’re responding in the community, you have to be prepared to deal with anything because it is a completely uncontrolled environment. Now, I don’t mean to say or imply that people always want to pick up a weapon. The problem is that it is a possibility. So if we sent folks into the community to respond to these crisis situations without the ability to deal with potentially combative scenarios, it could be it could go sideways real quick. That kind of provides some clarity. Do you think?

Gabe Howard: It really does. And it’s understandable. And this is sort of the this is the struggle of mental health advocacy. So. And I want everybody to love my guest because, you know, he’s a police officer and he’s helping people like me. But when you walk into my house, we’re on different sides. Right? It’s just the way that it is. And this is what scares my community. And I want to kind of give you an opportunity to address it from your point of view, because I think it gets missed. One of the things that I read all the time is that people with mental illness are much more likely to become victims of violent crime than to perpetrate violent crimes. That is 100 percent true. But we don’t need to talk about that because we’re talking specifically about when you walk in and somebody like me who is suffering from psychosis, who is not in their right mind. And when you walk in, I think you’re a blue dragon. I’m not attacking a police officer. I’m not even trying to hurt a police officer. But I am defending myself against a blue dragon. Now, of course, the problem is, is that anything that I do to the Blue Dragon affects you potentially gravely. Sergeant Harris. So that is sort of what sets up the issue. What happens more often than not is that we just get arrested. We don’t get de-escalated. And we’re not acknowledged that we have any sort of illness issue or anything like that. We’re just. Well, you assaulted a police officer and off to jail we go, but your unit is trying to do something about it. What do you do about the person who’s trying to attack you and hurt you? But you know that it’s not they’re not in their right mind. Like, how do you handle that? Because you can’t just let me slay the dragon.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, that’s exactly right. And I completely hear everything you’re saying. I just want to acknowledge that the officers and the clinicians that I work with every day. We completely understand the concept of the blue dragon or maybe maybe we’re the reptilians who are attempting to take over the world or maybe we’re the demons that came out of the drywall. We have been doing this long enough to where, you know, the concept of what you’re talking about has become very clear. So what we try to do is basically not make it worse. So when we get there, the person who called the cops will be directed outside and they will be speaking with the mental health clinician that we work with, that we co-respond with. And that clinician will be gathering information from them, trying to better understand what’s going on. We want to de-escalate the best way that we can, which is normally staying very calm, talking softly, talking slowly and respecting personal space, giving the person in crisis an opportunity to go from that vision of the blue dragon to maybe it clears up a little bit and maybe with some soothing conversation, we can come to the conclusion that it’s actually not the reptilians or not the blue dragons and somebody that’s there to help them. Now, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But that is always the very first goal is to de-escalate, to where the blue dragon, being the police officer, does not need to be slayed. And

Gabe Howard: Right. Right.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Hopefully, hopefully we don’t get slayed and hopefully we can talk this individual into coming with us peacefully if that’s the route that we need to go.

Gabe Howard: My second question in this whole thing is you’re compassionate people, you don’t want anybody to have a bad outcome. But, you know, de-escalation doesn’t always work. This is not always an option. I mean, I know what this is like from my point of view, intimately. And I’m desperately trying to see it from your point of view where somebody is screaming at you, attacking you, yelling at you, they’re breaking the law. The reason that they break the law may be reasonable or understandable, but make no mistake, you were called for a reason and now you have to do something about it. I kind of want to ask you how you feel about taking mentally ill people to jail, but it seems like a mean-spirited question. Can you talk about that for a moment? Because it’s it is a reality.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Yeah, of course. I actually kind of like the slaying of the dragon scenario because it can help people to maybe understand if somebody is attacking or being violent or trying to slay that dragon. The cops are probably the best equipped to be able to handle that. Now in the hospital scenario, like I said, it’s a controlled environment. So, you know, there’s a whole group of people that can handle that. But in the outside world where it’s uncontrolled, this is why the cops are called as opposed to anybody else, because we’ve got training to restrain if need be. We have a whole tool belt. You know, I’ve got a walkie talkie. I can call for help. I’ve got pepper spray. I have a taser. I have a firearm that hopefully I never, ever have to use. But these are some of the reasons why the cops are involved in these scenarios as opposed to to somebody else who probably isn’t in a position where they can really defend themselves as well as what a police officer can. And they may not be able to call for help as efficiently as a police officer can. And I can get people who are driving with lights and sirens to get there fast to help me, whereas somebody else can’t. So I just kind of wanted to paint that picture a little bit.

Gabe Howard: I think it’s a fair point. Thank you.

Sgt. Matt Harris: As far as jail is concerned, I can tell you this. The Columbus police C.I.T officers and more specifically, the mobile crisis unit, my unit, we very rarely take somebody having a mental health crisis to jail. Occasionally, we may get word that somebody that is in crisis, maybe they’ve got warrants for their arrest. And then at that point, we’re obligated by the courts to bring the person in. So that could be one potential scenario where the trip might be to the jail instead of the hospital. However, it’s very rare — that doesn’t happen very often. The other times that this could happen would be, number one, unable to de-escalate a person. It just didn’t work that somebody is in full psychosis. There are often times where there’s no communicating. There’s simply no way to get through. And at that point, what we will do is we will try to restrain in a very humane way without using weapons, preferably. And if we can get that person under our control, probably involves putting cuffs on them and getting them into the back of a police car that has bars where they can’t break the window out. You know, while we’re on the way to the hospital and that’s the preferred course of action. However, if it gets so out of control where we’re unable to restrain a person or if somebody comes out of nowhere and sucker punches an officer, which I have seen happen before, because, again, they need to slay the dragon at that point.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Assaulting a police officer is a felony in Ohio. And generally, we will go with that. And the reason that we’re gonna go with that, Gabe, is because the court system has leverage. In other words, they can say to a person, we understand you have this illness. You’ve got to follow your doctor’s instructions. You’ve got to take these antipsychotics. You’ve got to take this medication. Otherwise, if you don’t, the court can order you into jail. That is leverage that oftentimes we need, because if we go to the hospital, the hospital will stabilize and sometimes they’ll do long term care and keep somebody for a while or they may get sent to one of the long term facilities. But if and when a person comes out of treatment, oftentimes people don’t want to take the medication and we can end up in a situation where we spin our wheels. Right? We end up right back there in that same situation where they’re slaying the dragon again. But there’s no real piece to prevent that from happening again with the hospital system only. So sometimes the courts can actually provide motivation to stay on course to prevent oneself from decompensating to the point of dangerousness, which is really favorable for everybody, because then it keeps the person out of trouble. It keeps other people, neighbors, the police officers that are responding. It’s better for everybody.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Gabe Howard: We’re discussing policing in the age of the coronavirus quarantine with Sergeant Matt Harris. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over again in this debate is I’m not being negative to my loved one. I love them. Do you find that well-intentioned people who absolutely, unequivocally love the person whom they called the police on are also just doing all of the wrong things and creating issues? And then how do you handle that? Because I imagine that it’s really hard to look at somebody who, you know, is well-intentioned and saying what you’re doing is hurting the situation because they’re going to clap back immediately, but I’m only trying to help.

Sgt. Matt Harris: We usually run into one of two scenarios, Gabe. So the first scenario is we show up and the loved ones, the family members are not helping. They are making things worse. Sometimes when we leave after work, it’s all done. We say to ourselves. Oh, my goodness. You know, this person would be so much better off if they didn’t have these people in their lives. We see that a lot. And it’s not that the family members or whoever it is providing the adversity, I guess we would say it’s not that those people mean to do that. It’s not that they’re trying to be difficult. They just simply usually do not understand how to deal with the situation. They don’t necessarily understand the needs of their loved one. They are frustrated. They’ve been dealing with this for a long time. They tend to be pissed off because they feel failed by the system because nobody’s helping them or people show up to help, but then it starts up again and it spins its wheels. So that is a very common theme. So those are the folks that we need to get out of the room. Hey, come talk with us over here. They’re not helping the person in crisis in that moment.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Now, the other side of it is the folks who say go to NAMI meetings, the people who are educated on their loved ones’ condition and who really have taken time to understand what their friend or family member is going through. Maybe they’re self educated. Maybe they’ve gone to support groups. Maybe they have their own therapist that they work through these issues with. But that group of people, they tend to kind of get it and they will practice de-escalation on their own before we get there. And we can actually watch them doing really well with their loved one. And sometimes we need that person to actually help us get the person in crisis to do what you know, whatever the goal is, if we’re trying to get them into a cruiser so we can go to the hospital. And that’s oftentimes we’ll have the loved ones who are in the know can help us and they can kind of coax their family member into going along with whatever the best option is. So I don’t really see a whole lot in the middle, at least not based on my own personal experience. It’s usually kind of one or the other.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that we talked about when we use the slay the blue dragon analogy, is that the person with mental illness isn’t trying to be a problem. They’re a good person deserving of care and respect and love and resources. And that’s what makes this whole thing hard, because you can be all of those things and still be a danger to yourself or others and needing of police intervention. Along the same lines, as you said, there are people who they love their family, they love their children. They love the person that they’re trying to help, but they, too, are hurting them now. Are you allowed to intervene on behalf and get those people some place where they can become a better support system? Caregiver, friend, roommate, loved one?

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, here’s well, here’s what I do. I always I advocate for people to get involved with NAMI because I just have to believe that. If you surround yourself with a group of people who have been there, who have been in a similar way or are in a similar situation with a loved one who suffers from mental illness, that can only be a good thing. You can learn from one another. You can go to meetings. You can go to workshops. You can educate yourself on how do I react in this scenario if my loved one is in the midst of a manic episode and they are posturing and acting out and becoming aggressive? If nobody ever taught that mother or that father or that sibling, what they’re supposed to do, how to better handle that situation, then things are not going to necessarily go well. So I tell people all the time or I encourage people all the time to seek out help in whatever way they want to, to try to better understand what their loved one is going through and how to better respond when they’re in crisis.

Gabe Howard: It does sound to me like you’re saying that education really helps all sides. And I just bring this up because there just is a lot of misunderstanding, really, in all of society. But even when we look at the people who are working through the mental health issues and are advocating for mental health issues and are living with mental health issues or have a loved one with mental health issues or are a police officer, there just seems to be a lot of in-fighting even among us. And I’d really like to see us all get on the same page so that we can move forward. I know this is a big question and please, you are not required to answer it. But do you have any advice for the mental health advocacy community who are often split about the best way to move forward?

Sgt. Matt Harris: The first thing that comes to mind is the global issue of how do we improve? How do we move forward is we have to have reasonable expectations because most people probably think, oh, this person is ill. They have some mental health issues, doctor or hospital, and get it fixed. Right? Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Nobody has a magic wand. The pharmaceutical companies have invented lots of different drugs over the years that can help with symptomology and it can help with mental health issues. But as has been explained to me by many mental health consumers, sometimes it takes a year to figure out the right combination of medications, and sometimes the medications stop working and have to be readjusted. And there’s all of these different factors. You can’t take a person to treatment and expect that overnight the treatment facility is going to fix everything and the problems are going to go away. So I’ve had to adjust my expectations because as you might imagine, many of the calls that my unit responds to, how can I say this? I don’t want to say repeat, customers. But a lot of the same folks that we get to know who are sort of in and out of the system.

Sgt. Matt Harris: And people are always asking us, you know, what can we do? How do we know this has been going on for years? And I’m just honest. And I tell everybody there is no magic answer here. We do the best we can. Meaning that the advocates, you know, people who are in your position, Gabe, you do the best you can. And my team, we do the best we can. We take people to the hospital. They do the best that they can. But we’re limited by resources, we’re limited by the law sometimes we’re limited by all of these different factors. So I always go back to moving forward. What do we do? And the best thing I can come up with is keep doing the best that we can. And hopefully there’s a natural state of progression, maybe in the pharmaceutical industry, maybe in the brain science realm, maybe with the way that we police involving mental health crisis. Everything progresses over time.

Gabe Howard: I really like what you said about, you know, patience and understanding and that we’re all doing the best that we can. I think that so often in this debate, one side believes that they’re doing the best that they can, but they believe that the other side is just intentionally making things worse or they have malicious intent or they’re uncaring when in actuality, what I’ve seen from working on all sides and frankly, from working all over the country is that you’re right, everybody is doing the best that they can in every area except communication. I don’t think that we’re communicating the best that we can because we’re often ignoring people when we don’t want to hear it. I speak to many, many people from family members to people living with mental illness like myself, and they say things like, well, I’m not going to talk to the police. They just want to arrest my son or I’m not going to talk to the police. They just want to arrest me. And I think that’s so sad and so cynical. But more importantly, it’s also not been my experience. I’m not saying that it never happens. I am certainly not saying that there’s not just so many tragic stories out there, but I don’t think they’re coming from a malicious place. I think they’re often coming from a place of misunderstanding. You know, we’re almost out of time. But all over the country, they don’t have crisis response units. There’s not a Sergeant Matt Harris in every single city and every single town and every single state. How did Columbus, Ohio, get one and how can every place get one?

Sgt. Matt Harris: It all comes down to resources and the right people being involved. So there was a group of individuals. I’d like to give Commander Chris Bowling and soon to be Commander Dennis Jeffrey accolades here, because those were two individuals that saw this as something that we needed. And not only did they know that we needed to do something like this, but they actually made it happen by partnering with our local mental health intake agency, crisis agency, Netcare. And put this idea on the table for both sides to talk about. And the police side and the Netcare side were able to come up with this partnership that we have actually not just conceptualize it, but put it into action. And next thing you know, we have social workers and counselors riding in the police car with officers responding to people in the community that need that service. So it’s the right people and it’s resources. So in Franklin County, we’re fortunate enough that there was funding on both sides to provide police officers and to provide mental health clinicians, paid positions as a full time job to do this this work. Many other areas within Ohio and across the United States, likely don’t have the funding or the resources to put this together. And that’s tragic. But that’s kind of the current state of affairs.

Gabe Howard: Sergeant Harris, what do you say to the people who say that, you know, in light of COVID-19 and the pandemic and the economic issues, that this is just something that we can’t afford right now and that it needs to be shut down so that we can use that money in, and I am making air quotes, in a better area? What do you say to those folks that are wondering about that right now?

Sgt. Matt Harris: I would say that whether they’re aware of it or not, there is a need to respond to our community, specifically to people in our community who are suffering from mental health issues, whether there is a pandemic that’s currently playing out or not. That need is always going to be there if we don’t have the correct resources. These situations don’t get better. They tend to decompensate further and get worse. And then you have an even bigger problem. So I advocate 100 percent that we need to to maintain our crisis unit and that we need to respond to mental health emergencies in the community, regardless of what the health crisis situation may or may not be. In fact, I would say that most would agree that the health pandemic has been quite anxiety inducing for many people. If you already have a high level of anxiety or if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, the crisis isn’t making it better. It’s going to make it worse, more likely than not. So these responses that we provide are much needed.

Gabe Howard: I could not agree more. Thank you, Sergeant Harris, for being here, we really appreciate it. And thank you everybody for listening in. If you like the show, please subscribe. Share us on social media. Use your words. Tell people why they should listen. We have a private Facebook group that you can join. It’s absolutely free. Just head over to PsychCentral.com/FBShow and it’ll take you right there. And remember, you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting  BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. And we will see everyone next week.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to The Psych Central Podcast. Want your audience to be wowed at your next event? Feature an appearance and LIVE RECORDING of the Psych Central Podcast right from your stage! For more details, or to book an event, please email us at show@psychcentral.com. Previous episodes can be found at PsychCentral.com/Show or on your favorite podcast player. Psych Central is the internet’s oldest and largest independent mental health website run by mental health professionals. Overseen by Dr. John Grohol, Psych Central offers trusted resources and quizzes to help answer your questions about mental health, personality, psychotherapy, and more. Please visit us today at PsychCentral.com.  To learn more about our host, Gabe Howard, please visit his website at gabehoward.com. Thank you for listening and please share with your friends, family, and followers.

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Podcast: Police Response to Quarantined Mental Health Crisis

What happens when the police are called to handle a mental health emergency? And is the current coronavirus pandemic affecting their response? In today’s podcast, Gabe interviews Sergeant Matt Harris, a supervisor in the Mobile Crisis Response Unit at the Columbus, Ohio Police Department, to shed some light on an officer’s point of view during a mental health call. Sgt. Harris shares his crisis team’s typical protocol during one of these calls and describes what they do when things don’t go as planned.

How does the team handle psychosis? Is a mentally ill person ever taken to jail? Is the COVID-19 quarantine having an effect on the number of calls they receive? Join us to hear the answers to these questions and more.

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

Guest information for ‘Matt Harris- CIT’ Podcast Episode

Matt Harris is a sergeant with the Columbus, Ohio, Division of Police and has been with the department for 22 years.  He is currently assigned to the Mobile Crisis Response Unit where he supervises 5 police officers who co-respond to mental health crisis situations along with a social worker, licensed professional counselor, or other mental health clinician. 

    About The Psych Central Podcast Host

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Computer Generated Transcript for ‘Matt Harris- CIT’ Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Psych Central Podcast, where guest experts in the field of psychology and mental health share thought-provoking information using plain, everyday language. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Psych Central Podcast. Calling into the show today, we have Sergeant Matt Harris with the Columbus Police Department. Sergeant Harris is with the Mobile Crisis Response Unit, supervising five police officers who correspond to mental health crisis situations, along with a mental health clinician. Sergeant Harris, welcome to the show.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Thank you, Gabe. Good to be here.

Gabe Howard: Well, I’m very glad that you can take time out of your busy schedule. You know, right now we live in the age of the coronavirus quarantine. While stay and shelter orders are starting to lift and places are slowly reopening, that’s not the case everywhere in the country. And because here in Ohio, everything closed shelter in place in full effect. And obviously police officers are essential. So from your perspective, Sergeant Harris, everything has been shut down?

Sgt. Matt Harris: It has. The strangest thing that that I feel every day when I’m driving around the city is driving in the middle of downtown Columbus at broad and high on a weekday during business hours. And it feels like a Sunday. And it also feels like it’s third shift. And it also feels like it’s Christmas because there’s just nobody out. And I’ve never seen anything like it before.

Gabe Howard: It is a bit of an eerie feeling, you know, downtown for people that don’t know Columbus, Ohio, 14th largest city downtown on a business day is busy. It’s not New York City or Chicago busy, but it’s certainly not. Traveling is so easy right now.

Sgt. Matt Harris: That’s exactly right. I’ve never been able to get from point A to point B so efficiently. And it feels good.

Gabe Howard: But the positives, they’re not outweighing the negatives at this point, especially since you’re a C.I.T. officer now, C.I.T. is Crisis Intervention. You work with people who are in well, in the midst of a of a mental health, a mental illness crisis. I guess the question is, is how does that look in the age of the quarantine? Have you been pulled off of that duty or are you getting more calls? What’s your day to day life aside from being able to drive everywhere very efficiently?

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, we haven’t been pulled off of the duties, the mental health calls are still coming in to 911 or they’re coming into the non-emergency number as well. We’re still getting referrals from other officers and community members. As far as the numbers go, I don’t really know. I’d have to look at CAD data to see. But anecdotally speaking, it seems like the mental health calls have been steady and not that much different.

Gabe Howard: I have not ever had to call your unit and I sincerely hope that I never do. But I have to tell you, I like the idea that it’s out there, because if I get sick, if I’m in crisis, unfortunately, the police are who I call it. It’s a little bit backwards, right? It would be like if somebody broke into my house and I called an ambulance. That’s sort of how it feels. Can you talk about that for a moment? Because I think many people are just confused about why somebody who’s having an illness, somebody who is sick, is calling the police in the first place.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Yeah, I think that that is a huge area of discussion, I’ve heard you talk about that on some of your other episodes and I get that it doesn’t necessarily make sense. The best thing I can come up with to try to provide clarity is if you are in a controlled environment, so say you have an illness and you’re in the hospital. Whether that be a physical illness or a mental illness, it is a controlled environment. You have doctors and nurses and techs and people who have every resource at their disposal and training and the ability to help you in whatever way that you need when you are in that controlled environment. It is pretty well assured that you are in an area where there is no access to weapons. And there is a whole complement of staff members that if something goes sideways to the point where a person becomes combative or dangerous in some way, it can be controlled. When you are in an uncontrolled environment such as your apartment or in the middle of the city, none of those things that I just described exist. Right?

Sgt. Matt Harris: So anyone who we encounter, whether that person is suffering from a mental health situation or not, might have a gun in their waistband. They might have a pipe that they picked up. They might try to run out into traffic in front of a car that could hit them and could hit somebody that is trying to stop them from running out in the traffic. So it all has to do with the fact that when we’re responding in the community, you have to be prepared to deal with anything because it is a completely uncontrolled environment. Now, I don’t mean to say or imply that people always want to pick up a weapon. The problem is that it is a possibility. So if we sent folks into the community to respond to these crisis situations without the ability to deal with potentially combative scenarios, it could be it could go sideways real quick. That kind of provides some clarity. Do you think?

Gabe Howard: It really does. And it’s understandable. And this is sort of the this is the struggle of mental health advocacy. So. And I want everybody to love my guest because, you know, he’s a police officer and he’s helping people like me. But when you walk into my house, we’re on different sides. Right? It’s just the way that it is. And this is what scares my community. And I want to kind of give you an opportunity to address it from your point of view, because I think it gets missed. One of the things that I read all the time is that people with mental illness are much more likely to become victims of violent crime than to perpetrate violent crimes. That is 100 percent true. But we don’t need to talk about that because we’re talking specifically about when you walk in and somebody like me who is suffering from psychosis, who is not in their right mind. And when you walk in, I think you’re a blue dragon. I’m not attacking a police officer. I’m not even trying to hurt a police officer. But I am defending myself against a blue dragon. Now, of course, the problem is, is that anything that I do to the Blue Dragon affects you potentially gravely. Sergeant Harris. So that is sort of what sets up the issue. What happens more often than not is that we just get arrested. We don’t get de-escalated. And we’re not acknowledged that we have any sort of illness issue or anything like that. We’re just. Well, you assaulted a police officer and off to jail we go, but your unit is trying to do something about it. What do you do about the person who’s trying to attack you and hurt you? But you know that it’s not they’re not in their right mind. Like, how do you handle that? Because you can’t just let me slay the dragon.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, that’s exactly right. And I completely hear everything you’re saying. I just want to acknowledge that the officers and the clinicians that I work with every day. We completely understand the concept of the blue dragon or maybe maybe we’re the reptilians who are attempting to take over the world or maybe we’re the demons that came out of the drywall. We have been doing this long enough to where, you know, the concept of what you’re talking about has become very clear. So what we try to do is basically not make it worse. So when we get there, the person who called the cops will be directed outside and they will be speaking with the mental health clinician that we work with, that we co-respond with. And that clinician will be gathering information from them, trying to better understand what’s going on. We want to de-escalate the best way that we can, which is normally staying very calm, talking softly, talking slowly and respecting personal space, giving the person in crisis an opportunity to go from that vision of the blue dragon to maybe it clears up a little bit and maybe with some soothing conversation, we can come to the conclusion that it’s actually not the reptilians or not the blue dragons and somebody that’s there to help them. Now, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But that is always the very first goal is to de-escalate, to where the blue dragon, being the police officer, does not need to be slayed. And

Gabe Howard: Right. Right.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Hopefully, hopefully we don’t get slayed and hopefully we can talk this individual into coming with us peacefully if that’s the route that we need to go.

Gabe Howard: My second question in this whole thing is you’re compassionate people, you don’t want anybody to have a bad outcome. But, you know, de-escalation doesn’t always work. This is not always an option. I mean, I know what this is like from my point of view, intimately. And I’m desperately trying to see it from your point of view where somebody is screaming at you, attacking you, yelling at you, they’re breaking the law. The reason that they break the law may be reasonable or understandable, but make no mistake, you were called for a reason and now you have to do something about it. I kind of want to ask you how you feel about taking mentally ill people to jail, but it seems like a mean-spirited question. Can you talk about that for a moment? Because it’s it is a reality.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Yeah, of course. I actually kind of like the slaying of the dragon scenario because it can help people to maybe understand if somebody is attacking or being violent or trying to slay that dragon. The cops are probably the best equipped to be able to handle that. Now in the hospital scenario, like I said, it’s a controlled environment. So, you know, there’s a whole group of people that can handle that. But in the outside world where it’s uncontrolled, this is why the cops are called as opposed to anybody else, because we’ve got training to restrain if need be. We have a whole tool belt. You know, I’ve got a walkie talkie. I can call for help. I’ve got pepper spray. I have a taser. I have a firearm that hopefully I never, ever have to use. But these are some of the reasons why the cops are involved in these scenarios as opposed to to somebody else who probably isn’t in a position where they can really defend themselves as well as what a police officer can. And they may not be able to call for help as efficiently as a police officer can. And I can get people who are driving with lights and sirens to get there fast to help me, whereas somebody else can’t. So I just kind of wanted to paint that picture a little bit.

Gabe Howard: I think it’s a fair point. Thank you.

Sgt. Matt Harris: As far as jail is concerned, I can tell you this. The Columbus police C.I.T officers and more specifically, the mobile crisis unit, my unit, we very rarely take somebody having a mental health crisis to jail. Occasionally, we may get word that somebody that is in crisis, maybe they’ve got warrants for their arrest. And then at that point, we’re obligated by the courts to bring the person in. So that could be one potential scenario where the trip might be to the jail instead of the hospital. However, it’s very rare — that doesn’t happen very often. The other times that this could happen would be, number one, unable to de-escalate a person. It just didn’t work that somebody is in full psychosis. There are often times where there’s no communicating. There’s simply no way to get through. And at that point, what we will do is we will try to restrain in a very humane way without using weapons, preferably. And if we can get that person under our control, probably involves putting cuffs on them and getting them into the back of a police car that has bars where they can’t break the window out. You know, while we’re on the way to the hospital and that’s the preferred course of action. However, if it gets so out of control where we’re unable to restrain a person or if somebody comes out of nowhere and sucker punches an officer, which I have seen happen before, because, again, they need to slay the dragon at that point.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Assaulting a police officer is a felony in Ohio. And generally, we will go with that. And the reason that we’re gonna go with that, Gabe, is because the court system has leverage. In other words, they can say to a person, we understand you have this illness. You’ve got to follow your doctor’s instructions. You’ve got to take these antipsychotics. You’ve got to take this medication. Otherwise, if you don’t, the court can order you into jail. That is leverage that oftentimes we need, because if we go to the hospital, the hospital will stabilize and sometimes they’ll do long term care and keep somebody for a while or they may get sent to one of the long term facilities. But if and when a person comes out of treatment, oftentimes people don’t want to take the medication and we can end up in a situation where we spin our wheels. Right? We end up right back there in that same situation where they’re slaying the dragon again. But there’s no real piece to prevent that from happening again with the hospital system only. So sometimes the courts can actually provide motivation to stay on course to prevent oneself from decompensating to the point of dangerousness, which is really favorable for everybody, because then it keeps the person out of trouble. It keeps other people, neighbors, the police officers that are responding. It’s better for everybody.

Gabe Howard: We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Gabe Howard: We’re discussing policing in the age of the coronavirus quarantine with Sergeant Matt Harris. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over again in this debate is I’m not being negative to my loved one. I love them. Do you find that well-intentioned people who absolutely, unequivocally love the person whom they called the police on are also just doing all of the wrong things and creating issues? And then how do you handle that? Because I imagine that it’s really hard to look at somebody who, you know, is well-intentioned and saying what you’re doing is hurting the situation because they’re going to clap back immediately, but I’m only trying to help.

Sgt. Matt Harris: We usually run into one of two scenarios, Gabe. So the first scenario is we show up and the loved ones, the family members are not helping. They are making things worse. Sometimes when we leave after work, it’s all done. We say to ourselves. Oh, my goodness. You know, this person would be so much better off if they didn’t have these people in their lives. We see that a lot. And it’s not that the family members or whoever it is providing the adversity, I guess we would say it’s not that those people mean to do that. It’s not that they’re trying to be difficult. They just simply usually do not understand how to deal with the situation. They don’t necessarily understand the needs of their loved one. They are frustrated. They’ve been dealing with this for a long time. They tend to be pissed off because they feel failed by the system because nobody’s helping them or people show up to help, but then it starts up again and it spins its wheels. So that is a very common theme. So those are the folks that we need to get out of the room. Hey, come talk with us over here. They’re not helping the person in crisis in that moment.

Sgt. Matt Harris: Now, the other side of it is the folks who say go to NAMI meetings, the people who are educated on their loved ones’ condition and who really have taken time to understand what their friend or family member is going through. Maybe they’re self educated. Maybe they’ve gone to support groups. Maybe they have their own therapist that they work through these issues with. But that group of people, they tend to kind of get it and they will practice de-escalation on their own before we get there. And we can actually watch them doing really well with their loved one. And sometimes we need that person to actually help us get the person in crisis to do what you know, whatever the goal is, if we’re trying to get them into a cruiser so we can go to the hospital. And that’s oftentimes we’ll have the loved ones who are in the know can help us and they can kind of coax their family member into going along with whatever the best option is. So I don’t really see a whole lot in the middle, at least not based on my own personal experience. It’s usually kind of one or the other.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that we talked about when we use the slay the blue dragon analogy, is that the person with mental illness isn’t trying to be a problem. They’re a good person deserving of care and respect and love and resources. And that’s what makes this whole thing hard, because you can be all of those things and still be a danger to yourself or others and needing of police intervention. Along the same lines, as you said, there are people who they love their family, they love their children. They love the person that they’re trying to help, but they, too, are hurting them now. Are you allowed to intervene on behalf and get those people some place where they can become a better support system? Caregiver, friend, roommate, loved one?

Sgt. Matt Harris: Well, here’s well, here’s what I do. I always I advocate for people to get involved with NAMI because I just have to believe that. If you surround yourself with a group of people who have been there, who have been in a similar way or are in a similar situation with a loved one who suffers from mental illness, that can only be a good thing. You can learn from one another. You can go to meetings. You can go to workshops. You can educate yourself on how do I react in this scenario if my loved one is in the midst of a manic episode and they are posturing and acting out and becoming aggressive? If nobody ever taught that mother or that father or that sibling, what they’re supposed to do, how to better handle that situation, then things are not going to necessarily go well. So I tell people all the time or I encourage people all the time to seek out help in whatever way they want to, to try to better understand what their loved one is going through and how to better respond when they’re in crisis.

Gabe Howard: It does sound to me like you’re saying that education really helps all sides. And I just bring this up because there just is a lot of misunderstanding, really, in all of society. But even when we look at the people who are working through the mental health issues and are advocating for mental health issues and are living with mental health issues or have a loved one with mental health issues or are a police officer, there just seems to be a lot of in-fighting even among us. And I’d really like to see us all get on the same page so that we can move forward. I know this is a big question and please, you are not required to answer it. But do you have any advice for the mental health advocacy community who are often split about the best way to move forward?

Sgt. Matt Harris: The first thing that comes to mind is the global issue of how do we improve? How do we move forward is we have to have reasonable expectations because most people probably think, oh, this person is ill. They have some mental health issues, doctor or hospital, and get it fixed. Right? Well, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Nobody has a magic wand. The pharmaceutical companies have invented lots of different drugs over the years that can help with symptomology and it can help with mental health issues. But as has been explained to me by many mental health consumers, sometimes it takes a year to figure out the right combination of medications, and sometimes the medications stop working and have to be readjusted. And there’s all of these different factors. You can’t take a person to treatment and expect that overnight the treatment facility is going to fix everything and the problems are going to go away. So I’ve had to adjust my expectations because as you might imagine, many of the calls that my unit responds to, how can I say this? I don’t want to say repeat, customers. But a lot of the same folks that we get to know who are sort of in and out of the system.

Sgt. Matt Harris: And people are always asking us, you know, what can we do? How do we know this has been going on for years? And I’m just honest. And I tell everybody there is no magic answer here. We do the best we can. Meaning that the advocates, you know, people who are in your position, Gabe, you do the best you can. And my team, we do the best we can. We take people to the hospital. They do the best that they can. But we’re limited by resources, we’re limited by the law sometimes we’re limited by all of these different factors. So I always go back to moving forward. What do we do? And the best thing I can come up with is keep doing the best that we can. And hopefully there’s a natural state of progression, maybe in the pharmaceutical industry, maybe in the brain science realm, maybe with the way that we police involving mental health crisis. Everything progresses over time.

Gabe Howard: I really like what you said about, you know, patience and understanding and that we’re all doing the best that we can. I think that so often in this debate, one side believes that they’re doing the best that they can, but they believe that the other side is just intentionally making things worse or they have malicious intent or they’re uncaring when in actuality, what I’ve seen from working on all sides and frankly, from working all over the country is that you’re right, everybody is doing the best that they can in every area except communication. I don’t think that we’re communicating the best that we can because we’re often ignoring people when we don’t want to hear it. I speak to many, many people from family members to people living with mental illness like myself, and they say things like, well, I’m not going to talk to the police. They just want to arrest my son or I’m not going to talk to the police. They just want to arrest me. And I think that’s so sad and so cynical. But more importantly, it’s also not been my experience. I’m not saying that it never happens. I am certainly not saying that there’s not just so many tragic stories out there, but I don’t think they’re coming from a malicious place. I think they’re often coming from a place of misunderstanding. You know, we’re almost out of time. But all over the country, they don’t have crisis response units. There’s not a Sergeant Matt Harris in every single city and every single town and every single state. How did Columbus, Ohio, get one and how can every place get one?

Sgt. Matt Harris: It all comes down to resources and the right people being involved. So there was a group of individuals. I’d like to give Commander Chris Bowling and soon to be Commander Dennis Jeffrey accolades here, because those were two individuals that saw this as something that we needed. And not only did they know that we needed to do something like this, but they actually made it happen by partnering with our local mental health intake agency, crisis agency, Netcare. And put this idea on the table for both sides to talk about. And the police side and the Netcare side were able to come up with this partnership that we have actually not just conceptualize it, but put it into action. And next thing you know, we have social workers and counselors riding in the police car with officers responding to people in the community that need that service. So it’s the right people and it’s resources. So in Franklin County, we’re fortunate enough that there was funding on both sides to provide police officers and to provide mental health clinicians, paid positions as a full time job to do this this work. Many other areas within Ohio and across the United States, likely don’t have the funding or the resources to put this together. And that’s tragic. But that’s kind of the current state of affairs.

Gabe Howard: Sergeant Harris, what do you say to the people who say that, you know, in light of COVID-19 and the pandemic and the economic issues, that this is just something that we can’t afford right now and that it needs to be shut down so that we can use that money in, and I am making air quotes, in a better area? What do you say to those folks that are wondering about that right now?

Sgt. Matt Harris: I would say that whether they’re aware of it or not, there is a need to respond to our community, specifically to people in our community who are suffering from mental health issues, whether there is a pandemic that’s currently playing out or not. That need is always going to be there if we don’t have the correct resources. These situations don’t get better. They tend to decompensate further and get worse. And then you have an even bigger problem. So I advocate 100 percent that we need to to maintain our crisis unit and that we need to respond to mental health emergencies in the community, regardless of what the health crisis situation may or may not be. In fact, I would say that most would agree that the health pandemic has been quite anxiety inducing for many people. If you already have a high level of anxiety or if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, the crisis isn’t making it better. It’s going to make it worse, more likely than not. So these responses that we provide are much needed.

Gabe Howard: I could not agree more. Thank you, Sergeant Harris, for being here, we really appreciate it. And thank you everybody for listening in. If you like the show, please subscribe. Share us on social media. Use your words. Tell people why they should listen. We have a private Facebook group that you can join. It’s absolutely free. Just head over to PsychCentral.com/FBShow and it’ll take you right there. And remember, you can get one week of free, convenient, affordable, private online counseling anytime, anywhere, simply by visiting  BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral. And we will see everyone next week.

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