Today is Part 7 in a five-week, 25-part series exploring solutions for police brutality in America. The problem of police brutality is actually deeply entrenched and amazingly complicated. Most of the factors that ultimately lead to fatal encounters happen long before the actual incidents ever take place. Police brutality has no quick fixes. No one single solution will solve the problem. Instead, it must be tackled from dozens of different angles, but as a part of one comprehensive plan. This series will lay out that plan with reasonable, achievable solutions that will drastically reduce police brutality in this generation.
The United States has a genuine crisis in how it treats and cares for the mentally ill. This is widely accepted by both political parties, and by people of all ethnic, economic and religious backgrounds. Our current systems of care are too often sloppy afterthoughts instead of expertly crafted beacons of compassion. We widely accept health problems of every single part of the human body, but struggle to fully accept mental health problems.
This crisis goes far beyond law enforcement, of course, but perhaps no other group in the country has been tasked to manage and interact with the mentally ill more than our police. Honestly, it's unfair to everyone, including them. This, on its face, is an enormous problem that will be addressed in a later solution.
[For more of this story, written by Shaun King, go to http://www.nydailynews.com/new...ns-article-1.2736007]
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