What do you mean wellness checks? Door to door? How frequently? Is there a non invasive way to perform such tasks?
My understanding is a wellness check is what you do when you have a neighbor, family member, or friend whose health you are concerned about and you can't get in touch with them or visit in person. Like, say, I couldn't reach my elderly mom for several days (she lives in another part of the state). One time, when I lived in an apartment complex, an elderly resident was wandering around with tweezers, asking people to help him "remove something" from his ear. I looked in his ear, and there was nothing there, but he insisted he was going to try to remove whatever it was himself, and couldn't be dissuaded. He seemed rather disoriented, and I was concerned he might injure himself. So I called 911 and told them about the situation, and they sent police officers, not health care workers or paramedics. Police officers are often the "go-to" people they send when there's a situation with someone behaving oddly, or there's a potential health issue that isn't immediately life threatening.
In this case, it ended OK (though the elderly man's family sent him off to a nursing home not long after), but what if he'd been black? What if he'd been acting more belligerent or confrontational, or if he'd gotten freaked out by the cops coming? What if I'd lived in a "higher crime" neighborhood, where cops are more jumpy and on edge? What if they'd gone to the wrong address or apartment? In any of these cases, or a combination of these, it could have ended badly, like it did for
Atatiana Jefferson when neighbors called the police because her front door was open and the neighbors were concerned for her well being.
It would be nice if there were some social workers on call, or people whose go-to mechanism for dealing with problems isn't to pull out their gun and shoot something or someone. Yes, cops are needed to "break into" homes in these situations and to be backup, but if the mental health worker or health care worker is in "the lead," it changes the entire tone of the visit. But we've underfunded everything from animal care to human social services in this country, so the police department often has to step in and deal with situations they aren't really equipped to deal with without direct access to people who are trained to keep situations non violent.
It would also be nice if cops weren't trained with the
assumption that they live in "combat zones" and so should respond with extreme force to any resistance, or even to any uncertainty, as if they were actually soldiers under fire. I am not sure that this even makes it safer for them, since it has turned entire communities against the police and created a level of fear and resentment that makes some perpetrators more likely to fight back or flee. It's very troubling that a highly popular police training system in this country likens the public to being
either sheep or wolves (and law enforcement is the sheepdogs). Not only is that rather insulting, it's dangerously simplistic and does not consider how nuanced most people are. This guy needs to be put out of business.
Policing in this country is
not working for a
large segment of our population, and it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In addition to the long-term issue of institutionalized racism and systematic inequality and personal biases that lead even Black police officers to treat Black suspects differently, we have the fallout from decades of the complete failure known as the
"war on drugs" which has criminalized a social and mental health issue and created a mentality that law enforcement is "at war" with an entire segment of the population.
