As a whole, people with mental health issues are more likely to be abused and harmed than those who don't. The rate of violence in those with mental health issues is the same as the general population.
The first is mental health issues are a very wide umbrella. This includes anxiety, depression, and things like eating disorders which all parties can agree are probably not associated with increased rates of violence.
But if we limit it to diagnoses like bipolar or schizophrenia I'm sure there are increased risks of violence.
My mother (who had schizophrenia) for instance was fine 364 days a year. But on the 365th she'd try to claw my grandmother's eyes out because she thought she was the devil. And EMTs and other people who aren't being called out to deal with my mother on the 364 days a year she's fine.
The other issue with those studies is they control for a host of other factors to get the conclusion it's not correlated with violent crime.
If you just look at a bland, we separate people into two buckets, mentally ill and non mentally ill. Which bucket commits more violent acts per capita, the mentally ill do. You have to do a lot of statistical correction before you found that mental illness isn't correlated with violence.
As someone with a family member with schizophrenia I can support this, things tend to turn violent during a psychotic event. Bed restraints in hospitals aren't just decorations.
> The rate of violence in those with mental health issues is the same as the general population.
But what about the rate of violence among mental ill people who are committing some action that warrants a 9-11 call? What exactly leads to someone calling 9-11? It isn’t that someone is sitting in their house mentally ill — they are doing some action that is concerning enough to warrant a callout. So among that group of mentally ill, what’s the violence rate compared to the “general population.” It’s going to necessarily be higher.
I honestly think most people opining on the subject have never worked as a front line first responder before. It’s like news pundits talking about battlefield tactics when they have never been in combat. Lethal force should obviously be a last option, but when some literally insane person starts lunging at you with a knife all that theory of “the best way” goes out the window. There are thousands of mental health “dangerous” 9-11 calls happening every day and the vast majority end peacefully. Police on-duty firearms discharges are very rare but people act like it’s an epidemic because these incidents get magnified and broadcast to make people think it’s a frequent occurrence. How many mental health 9-11 calls end violently? 1 out of 10,000? 1 out of 100,000? Without knowing that number, any implication that this is a systemic problem is grounded in emotion rather than data. There are also unintended consequences. Saving that 1 out of 10,000, could result in an increase in risk that would offset any gains from such policies.
If NYC wants to experiment, good for them. I am not opposed to a better way. I am concerned about unintended consequences of policies — consequences that are often ignored.
> So among that group of mentally ill, what’s the violence rate compared to the “general population.” It’s going to necessarily be higher.
This doesn't follow. People don't call the police for mentally bill people being violent, they call for them being disruptive, or in the best case, perceiving the mentally ill person as a threat.
Neither of those implies any violent action on the part of the mentally ill person. People are primed to assume that any sort of abnormal behavior is dangerous or implies potential for violence. That doesn't really follow.
Not do we even touch on second order effects like how escalating aggression with mentally ill person will lead to more aggression in response.
What we do have, already, is fairly conclusive data that these policies do work, in other nations and our own.
Suicide rates are a separate issue.