one study tested whether interacting with a gun caused any significant changes in behavior compared to people who interacted with a children's toy the researchers found that people who interacted with the gun were far more aggressive and had higher levels of testosterone compared to others so simply having a firearm present can make a difference in how both the police and the mentally ill act additionally take it from the perspective of the person interacting with the police you're already in a bad headspace and now a cop shows up with a gun it's not that hard to imagine a person feeling trapped scared and engaging their fight-or-flight response and likewise even if you haven't committed any crime having the police respond to a mental health call implies that you did something wrong or that you're dangerous and will be punished it's extremely stigmatizing and can unnecessarily escalate situations plus on a personal level it just makes me really sad that we live in a world where police are so afraid of the citizens that they serve that they're often so quick to assume that a person that they know is in distress is out to harm them but that says more about modern policing and police training in america in general than it does about mental health crisis response in NUMBER_TOKEN different countries around the world including iceland ireland norway and the united kingdom police typically don't carry firearms and somehow they manage to address mental health crises without them resulting in very few deadly incidents involving police officers when you combine all of this with what we understand about systemic racism and the reality that black americans and brown americans tend to be treated more harshly by law enforcement you can see how those who have been most marginalized by society are also the ones most likely to face violence or death at the hands of police officers instead of receiving the care that they need this puts people's lives at risk and it also leads to distrust and fear of law enforcement something needs to change and the injustice of situations like alfred alongo's killing should not happen but i also think that we've placed too high of expectations on our law enforcement officers we're simply asking police to do too many different things and as a society we have underfunded mental health services and simply say let the cops handle it like that's a reasonable response but even the police don't want to deal with mental health crises in addition to being incredibly time consuming and costly many police don't feel properly equipped to respond to these events so what can we do obviously something needs to change but what are the options well i'd like to go through three different levels of change that i'd like to label retrain reform and replace
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