Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Mentally ill are not criminals

Letter to the Editor of the Portland Tribune

Glenn Shipman Jr.’s death (Patient dies after being restrained, Dec. 4) is simply one more in a growing legacy of failures by those charged to serve and protect in North America, now long touted as the most advanced civilization of all time.

In October, we saw (literally, accessible worldwide on YouTube) the killing of a clearly mentally disturbed Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver, British Columbia, International Airport.

And last year James P. Chasse Jr., another schizophrenic man, died after an encounter with police, who, according to Willamette Week, claimed he was “doing something suspicious or acting just, um, odd.”

There are other examples, too. Such incidents are becoming all too common, and, in every such case, mentally disturbed people are being dealt with as lethally dangerous criminals, even though in every case unarmed, essentially by those presumably professionally trained to serve and protect.

Were it not so tragic, it would be a farcical drama. Were it not so pathetically reflective of the ubiquitous failure of so-called education in North America, it could be analyzed as intentional terrorization of the citizenry.

At the end of the day, it’s simply one more example of a civilization at the precipice of its fall.

Serious artists now are telling this story more frequently by the day. Major media (present company not excluded) are essentially ignoring it, choosing to pump fatuous feel-good glitz and fluff, which fits the tenor of the epoch perfectly.

The cities are burning, Idols are singing and everyone’s dancing with the stars … awesome!

Jackie T. Gabel - Southeast Portland

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