Especially autism. Extremely dangerous.
You should also still think twice about calling the emergency number on a suicidal friend if you live in a country with universal health care and unarmed cops.
You could be subjecting them to forced institutionalisation, forced medication, an isolation cell. And even if none of those things happen, police ‘first responders’ can often behave violently and cause intense new traumas and often if someone is too ‘weird’ first responders will – not – help.
Some examples of experiences from me and people close to me:
- Police ‘first response’ to a suicidal transgender person: They spend hours in a police cell, being interrogated by cops who were consistently using the wrong pronouns and asking them to confirm if they were really ‘Ms. BirthName’ and why they would ‘lie about their identity’.
- Ambulance workers respond to a person living in a neglected household: they refused to enter the house and send in a security employee instead who hours asking him whether he was ‘drunk’ or ‘on drugs’ and why he ‘lived like this’.
These things only pile a new trauma on what was already there. This does not make people feel better. This does not save lives in any meaningful way.
This is also why you will never see me reblogging suicide help lines or ‘report suicide to Tumblr’ posts if the post does not specify whether the people you are contacting might at some point involve the cops and those that work with them.
And don’t EVER call the police on a Deaf/deaf/Hard of Hearing person unless they are actually an active danger to other people. Remember: we can’t hear what the police are saying, they shine bright lights in our faces so that we can’t lipread, and fucking none of them sign. Police kill a lot of DdHoH people because we “fail to comply” (because we don’t know what the instructions fucking are) or because we “resist arrest” (we can’t sign if our hands are cuffed behind our backs, so OF COURSE we’re going to resist).
Don’t call the police on a DdHoH person unless they’re attacking someone/breaking in somewhere, actually committing a fucking crime that is hurting someone. Because whatever we’re doing, if it’s anything other than directly harmful to other people, the punishments the police will give us for being DdHoH will be highly traumatic at best and most likely fatal.
Calling the police on a DdHoH person except when necessary to keep other people safe (if we’re a danger to ourselves then don’t call the police. Consider instead an ambulance, but only as a last resort) is not a gamble. It is far more certain than that. Call the police on us and you’re as good as shooting us/bludgeoning us to death. Don’t fucking do it.TRUTH. & Really, there are so many more risk factors like this. And we could list all of them and it still wouldn’t add up to the total risk because cops do not exist to protect us.
So a good rule of thumb is ‘Don’t call the cops unless you are okay with everyone in that place, including yourself, dying’.
Which really means ‘don’t call the cops ever’.
Forced institutionalization does not only happen outside of the US. I’m not sure if that’s what @queeranarchism meant in their part or not, but just to make sure, yeah, that happens here. I was stuck in the hospital for a month without my consent, and in the United States.
Oh no, definitely not what I meant.
I just meant in the US you have forced institutionalisation AND ridiculous ambulance bills AND extremely trigger happy cops with a military arsenal.
And here in the Netherlands we have forced institutionalisation, no ambulance bills and slightly less trigger happy cops with regular guns.
But you still shouldn’t call the cops here.
QueerAnarchism 