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What happen to Aaron Campbell, James Chasse, and others like them obviously show us the inherent problem with asking a militarized force to contain crisis situations rather than creating resources that deal with the underlying causes of these issues or even resources that are better trained and not armed with weapons to deal with crisis situations.

Many community alternatives already exist across the United States. Two specifically in the northwest are Cahoots in Eugene and CARA in Seattle, WA. In Eugene, when you call 911, if someone is having a mental health crisis of any kind, Cahoots is dispatched instead of the police. (their website:http://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots.html). Cahoots is a group people trained as to intervene in crisis situations funded through the city.  If Portland had a similar resources, Aaron Campbell and James Chasse would still be living today. 

The Scanner is right. We would do much better to use the funding of the police towards actually dealing with the causes of crisis's such as providing decent jobs, mental health, drug abuse, and domestic violence services that are culturally appropriate and don't pathologize or stigmatize people, and schools that actually engage our children rather than making them fit into standarized testing boxes.

posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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