Police Gunfire Is Not A Good Response To Mental Illness

In April of 2020, there was a report broadcast on New York's WCBS Newsradio Eight-Eighty about a man who told police he had been diagnosed with COVID-19. After revealing that information, he came at them with a knife, an apparent attempt at suicide by cop. He was shot twice in the torso.

Couldn't the cops have found a better way to subdue this man who was obviously experiencing mental distress? Why weren't less lethal alternatives used such as a taser, pepper spray, stun grenades, a bean bag shooter, rubber bullets, or some kind of fishermen's net?

A Leap Into Eternity

In the introduction to For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough (Magnus Books, 2012), the enjoyable anthology edited by Keith Boykin, he ponders about Tyler Clementi, the gay young man who leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. "As I drive across the George Washington Bridge one night from Manhattan to the CNBC World Headquarters in New Jersey, I looked down over the bridge and imagined what it must have felt like to jump 212 feet into the raging Hudson River below."

Fifty years earlier, James Baldwin no doubt had the same thoughts about his friend Eugene Worth who leaped from the same bridge in the late 1940s. Baldwin recreated that act in his 1962 novel Another Country. In that book, Baldwin had the character Rufus leap from the GWB at the end of Chapter One. Boykin could have put himself in the shoes of Clementi and Rufus as he read the following description by Baldwin: "...and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind,...."

I wanted to include these passages in my online review of For Colored Boys, but I couldn't see how to fit it in seamlessly.