The suspect in the Florida State University shooter, who faces first degree murder charges for killing two and injuring five on Thursday was a member of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, a fascist youth group around the Republican Party, and is a registered Republican voter in Florida. The 20-year-old suspect, Phoenix Ikner, is the stepson of Leon County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jessica Ikner, who has been with the department for 18 years.
Disarming the police does sound like an excellent idea. Police cause more problems than they solve with firearms.
I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of my coworkers are predictably bootlickers.
I can’t even tell you how many calls we get all day everyday where we’re all just left scratching our head going “Why did you call 911,about this? This isn’t a police issue.” But since usually the only tool we have in our toolbox is police, that’s what we end up having to send.
But they’ll balk at any suggestion that maybe our police don’t need a new armored truck and a new police station, and whatever other stupid shit they’re spending tax dollars on, and instead maybe we should spend that money to beef up our mental health services, public works, homeless outreach, animal control, code enforcement, and other services that we could be providing instead of just sending police out to deal with non-police issues.
Luckily, my local police are pretty good as far as police go, not too trigger happy, generally make a decent effort to handle mental health issues carefully, they usually manage to not make things significantly worse, though they often don’t do much to improve the situation either.
I think even with the best of intentions, if two people with guns show up to some sort of crisis, it’s easy to see how that might not be, like, the right vibe at the moment.
Edit: word
It’s definitely the wrong vibe a lot of times, but it’s also a weird balancing act.
I like to think my county has our shit together about as well as anywhere in the country (which is admittedly a fairly low bar) We do have some other resources available to us that we try to make use of, like a mobile crisis team (which is technically some sort of private non profit entity that receives county funding and works with us and our police departmens very closely, but it’s not something that we can directly dispatch in the same way we can send police/fire/EMS)
And they do a lot of good, they go out and respond to calls from people who need their assistance, and often handle things just fine on their own.
But a lot of times we find ourselves getting calls from those teams because they went out to make contact with someone, who they spoke with and who requested their assistance, but started getting aggressive so they need police to assist them.
And I’ve been on the phone with a lot of situations that have taken some crazy turns, where it starts out sounding like a totally boring, routine call for an officer to come out and take a report or address some minor issue, and suddenly everyone is yelling, punches are being thrown, something is on fire, etc.
So in the interest of safety, a lot of non-police calls probably should still have police respond as well, they just need to strike a happy balance where they’re waiting outside or something, ready to bust in if needed, but otherwise they’re not directly involving themselves in the situation.
But overall, a whole lot of my calls would probably be best resolved if we could force people to sit down with a middle school guidance counselor and learn how to take a deep breath, count to 10, use their inside voices, and listen to each other.
As the saying goes, if you have a problem and you call the police you now have 2 problems.