Quote:
Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower
I think most agree that some form of public safety mechanism is necessary, although it is not entirely clear people want that from the confused messaging on this subject, and I have not see a lot of specifics on what that looks like. Adder?
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One thing that has bothered me for a long time from a privacy perspective is the welfare check. There are a lot of instances when I'd love to authorize our people to call for a welfare check on either a student or a patient, but I don't because the only avenue is calling law enforcement, and there are very proscribed rules in both HIPAA and FERPA for disclosing protected information to law enforcement. Most of the time the law enforcement exceptions do not apply, because the threat is not imminent. If there were a crisis intervention welfare agency that could do those sorts of checks, it'd benefit our populations greatly.
There are so many things we shove over to law enforcement that they're not really the best people to do. We run and staff the psych hospital. So many of our patients come from someone having called the police because someone was acting erratic or otherwise off. Some of them are event violent. But the criminal justice system is not equipped to handle them.
There are something like 18 overlapping police departments in the med center. I've never really understood why so many are necessary, especially the forces for private entities like the Med Center itself or Rice University. One of my closest friends, a Ph.D, in economics from Cal Tech and an undergrad in math from Harvard, was hauled to jail by one of the Med Center cops after she rolled a stop sign and didn't pull over fast enough for the cop's liking. I think the charge was "evading arrest" in a fucking parking garage. I'm sure that her brown skin had absolutely nothing to do with it. Cop was so irritated with her he called her boss in some sort of misguided effort to get her fired. They're fucking mall cops with arrest power, and they are itching to use it. A lot of them end up on the smaller forces when they can't cut it in the bigger forces.
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