PKJan 13, 2023
It's Going Down

CW: Death, Police Murder

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets over the last few days, to decry the police murder of Sayed Faisal, a 20 year old CVS employee and student in the #Boston suburb of #Cambridge, #Massachusetts.

Responding to a 911 call, police arrived on the scene to find Sayed cutting himself with a knife and claim that after asking him to disarm himself and then shooting a "less-lethal projectile," he lunged at him, leading police to open fire, killing him.

However, local media reports that "surveillance video and witness accounts suggest Faisal was running from police, trying to hurt himself," when he was shot and killed.

Community members claim that Faisal was in the midst of a mental health crisis and needed support and instead was shot and killed by law enforcement. This killing follows an ongoing pattern of police murdering people in the midst of a mental health episode.

#SayedFaisal #BlackLivesMatter

Jan 13, 2023 at 3:01amWeb
Show threadvorlonJan 13, 2023
@igd_news uh spell check on that name? You have his last name spelled 3 different ways in this one post
Show threadJulietJan 13, 2023
@vorlon @igd_news Also you might want to correct the spelling of Massachusetts
Show threadOlavJan 13, 2023
@igd_news folks that know, know if you have a loved one in any kind of crisis 911 is the *last* number you call. There are promising experiments, but underfunded and are all *on top* of the existing thug department budget
Show thread✨Cosmic Social Worker✨Jan 13, 2023
@olavf @igd_news In NJ, we can call CRISIS, which will send social workers. But they also send police, first. In my limited personal experience, my local police have been calming & courteous. But, as a social worker, it scares me to death that police might be triggering for a client, or may overreact like in all the reports I’ve read
Show threadOlavJan 14, 2023
@mamashizi NYC is experimenting with a system that's triaged by dispatch, but as usual, underfunded, understaffed (last I heard no overnight social workers) and likely too conservative in triage. It's probably the best start I know of, and the funding *would* be there if some police funding were allocated.
Show threadKarl Heinz HäsliprinzJan 13, 2023
@igd_news There is precedence for this attitude towards mental health by cops: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12817666/
The killing of psychiatric patients in Nazi Germany between 1939-1945 - PubMed

Between 1939 and 1945, 180,000 psychiatric patients were killed in Nazi Germany. This paper opens with a brief discussion of the reasons for addressing this issue today; it is followed by the details of the so-called euthanasia program that entailed killing of patients by gas in special hospitals in …

PubMed
Show threadNoctisEqui 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇪🇹🏳️‍🌈Jan 13, 2023

@igd_news

‘Suicide by cop’ is another thing unique to US.