According to a new study by the San Francisco-based Young Minds Advocacy Project (YMAP), as many as 70 percent of the kids in California’s juvenile detention centers are in need of mental health care, and most of them are not getting it. Patrick Gardner, YMAP’s founder and one of the report’s authors, says many of these youth would not be in detention in the first place if there were more home and community-based mental health services available.
So my question is, if law enforcement knows ECWs are too risky to use even in very controlled training circumstance, why the heck would they want to use it on unarmed citizens in uncontrolled street situations? The question I would put to [Police Chief ] Greg Suhr is, are you willing to use these on your own officers in controlled settings to show that they’re safe? If he’s telling the truth, he’s going to say, “No, we’re not going to do that.”
Bottom line: They’re not safe to use on unarmed people and they’re not safe for police to use against armed suspects.
“A repetitive narrative that we found from these students is that they felt like this is what it’s like to be an American Muslim in school. They almost feel defeated. They just feel that there is no way around this, like, having a discussion or bring it up with the teacher is not going to be very effective and that’s what most unfortunate about it, is that they’ve come to just accept it as being normal.”
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