I don't really feel like we've lost anything, with this guy gone. What good was he? It's totally possible for people to have a negative intrinsic value.

No Matt, it is not our fault.

And no, you cannot assert bad things will stop happening forever when people make government throw more money at programs. How many programs was Chasse involved in? How many government dependents are still committing crimes?

Because there are soccer and bridge deals does not mean there will be mentally ill people or criminals. It's not one or the other.

That this is such a logical fallacy-filled rant of yours its hard to figure out what to point out first. I guess my overarching point is what happens when your government money fails people? (as it has in this case and every other you may cite)

Those cops were in part trained by government mental health care workers. How's that work for you?

Short of FORCING people to medicate, or into custody against their will, people are going to do bad things. Dumb things. Illegal and deadly things. Sad but true.

The difference is in the U.S. we believe in free will and not submission to collectivist authoritarianism.

What positive has collective guilt ever provided history?

I have to agree that Portland's failings in mental health are staggering. The first jobs I looked into when I came to town was children's mental health. The pay was $9. Some quick calculating found I wouldn't be able to pay rent. 5 yrs later, the avg. pay is STILL $9. They prefer if you have a Bachelor's & 2 years experience. That's McDonald's pay to keep kids from raping each other.

One of many examples, if you don't believe me: http://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/npo/157…

To be fair D, there will always be crime, so why bother funding the police? I mean, that's a pretty sizable gov'ment program for you. Don't get me wrong, I think they're great and all, but where are the results? They arrest people all the time, and does that fix them?

(An aside: I feel like you would consider your free will somewhat subverted were the police to accidentally send an AR-15 round your way)

Reymont, you mean the guy who was shot had "negative intrisnic value"?

That's some cold shit, dude. You should think about what it says about you to have an attitude like that.

Really Matt? I mean really? You might reconsider your perspective as there are some very real ways. I really hope that you don't continue to abuse your "power" as a Blogger.

@ Blabby - couldn't have said it better myself. Reymont seems to come up with some smart stuff here and there, but that statement is pretty fucked.

Further, no matter how big of a POS this kid may or may not have been is totally irrelevant in light of how he was killed.

Saying that this is somehow our fault is also completely wrong in my opinion too. Yes, the mental health treatment available here is a bad joke, but I had nothing to do with that, nor did anyone that I know. It's a bit too much of a reach for me. A failed MH program doesn't excuse improper police protocol or a bloodthirsty villain masquerading as an officer of the law.

@Blabby and Temblors - Sorry. I know it's not going to be a popular opinion, but I can't wrap my head around your concern for a guy like this. Multiple convictions, history of weapons abuse, yelling at the cops to shoot him, etc etc. At least some of the testimony says he was threatening to kill himself in front of kids. Sure sounds like a waste to me - aren't we better off without him?

Now, society is damaged if due process fails - that's totally true. He deserved a trial, and it's great that people are investigating the shooting, and if the cops didn't act properly they should be punished.

I guess I'm just talking about the emotional response. I think Matt Davis hears this story and starts crying because 'a person' is dead. I was just saying I can't understand those feelings, because he sounds like he was a drain on society.

I've been thinking about it a lot - I think you'd be able to see my point if we were talking about dogs. Of course you shouldn't shoot dogs - they're awesome. Except if they are rabid and have a history of attacking people and are currently about to attack someone. Shooting THAT dog is a good thing, right? I expect the example breaks down for you because he's 'a person,' and you therefore think he has some more intrinsic value than a dog. Possibly true, but doesn't that also lay on extra responsibility? He made a choice to be a fuckup - it wasn't the dogs fault at all.

"Yes, the mental health treatment available here is a bad joke, but I had nothing to do with that, nor did anyone that I know. "

So you're saying you've never told your elected officials how much you care about mental health care?

Because if you haven't, it IS your fault. That's the precise point I'm making. We're all responsible for stigmatizing these issues.

No one is pointing out that earlier in the day, this individual's brother died of natural causes. That alone could cause someone to break. I think everyone is being a little armchair quarterback here in evaluating the circumstances before anyone has all the facts.

@Dieselboi - it's a blog-comments thread. Isn't that what we're supposed to do?

@Matt Davis - Way to pick out one poorly-phrased sentence from his great reply, and completely ignore his actual point.

@Reymont: Lets hope you never suffer any stress in your life and say some things you regret later.

As for people "making a choice to be a fuckup" are you seriously going to argue that without proper treatment in the first place he might have been a productive member of society? Using your dog example: They make a rabies vaccine, it is required by law in a lot of places. Yes, you are right, if the owner can't be bothered to get the vaccine, get treatment when the dog gets bit, put the dog down [humanly] when it is too late, then yes, the only choice is to shoot it just before it attacks someone. Note all the things that should have happened along the way, but didn't, and not just the instant it got shot. Now full blown rabies is untreatable, the dog has to be put down, but mental illness is very treatable, many people that are minutes away from suicide can calm down and be normal productive members of society in about 3 days with about $20 worth of pills. (There is a reason it is called a 72 hour hold.) Once they are stable they'll probably use $200/year in medication, which is far cheaper than this investigation...

I'd like to go back to the stigma issue.

Many people seem to view mental illness, or mental health problems, as a sign of weakness. Often it is a sign of weakness. But this society tends to judge weakness in the worst ways. Whatever happened to protecting those who couldn't stand up for themselves?

There's also the separate issue of "mad pride," where folks with mental health issues like Will Hall are starting to reclaim the ground. Marjorie Skinner wrote a feature on this last year:

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/ma…

@ Reymont - I understand where you're coming from about this guy and I will admit that to an extent I agree. But, as you pointed out, society is going to suffer greatly without due process, and that is what concerns me. No matter how big of a douchebag a person is or how awful someone's record is, they deserve that due process or we are all going to end up as slaves living under unmitigated tyranny. We will be lucky to avoid that as it is, the way things are going now.

@ Matt Davis - It's not that I don't see your point about talking to an elected official, it's that I don't agree with you that it is truly an effective way to bring about real change. I sincerely wish this wasn't the case, but I personally don't have the same faith in our system that you seem to have. I am willing to concede that, sure, it's worth a try and wouldn't hurt to do so, but saying that we are all collectively to blame is absolute bullshit in my opinion.

@ Matthew D - Good points! But we can't force medication or treatment on someone, right? In your example, the failure is on the dog's owner for not vaccinating his dog. Here, isn't the blame also on this human? And while drugs might have kept him from flipping out this day, they wouldn't have necessarily have prevented his previous convictions.

And if I ever do get stressed out and do something I regret, I'll be the first to say I deserve the consequences. No one else should ever have to suffer because of me.

The Merc even printed a letter from me with the same position, way back in the day. I wonder...does that mean I have seniority over Matt Davis? :)
http://www.portlandmercury.com/columns/let…

"many people that are minutes away from suicide can calm down and be normal productive members of society in about 3 days with about $20 worth of pills. (There is a reason it is called a 72 hour hold.) Once they are stable they'll probably use $200/year in medication, which is far cheaper than this investigation..."

Whoa, that simple, fast and cheap scenario is a tremendously inaccurate understanding of how mental health crisis and stabilization actually works.
Also, there is little effective treatment if one has a personality disorder such as anti-social.

You can’t predict how systemic change is going to affect any single case. But you can use single cases as rallying points for systemic change. Any excuse for better mental health care is a good one. This message board is a great example of how little our community knows about a very common ailment.

Mental illness often has a neurological cause that’s only exacerbated by psychological factors. That is, it is primarily a physical ailment—it just happens to be in the brain and not, say, your left knee. If your brother or sister contracts an illness that hits the knee or belly or eyeball, do you hope someone puts them down or do you hope they get treatment?

@Night Moves - As I've tried to say above, I sure hope they get treatment. But if they are about to hurt someone, either because they chose not to receive treatment or because it's not working at that particular instant, I hope they're put down before they succeed.

@Reymont: True, but nobody asked him if he wanted to get treatment: talk to a therapist, take some pills, etc; they just shot him. He couldn't* get treatment without going into custody anyways, and he got shot after flinching when he was hit with 8 beanbag rounds, he wasn't actually given a chance of that option. There is a middle ground between forcing medication and denying* it, and Matt Davis' point is that we shouldn't deny* it like we do now.

And while I disagree with your letter, I'm glad you are consistent about it. A lot of people seem to have the policy that it isn't them getting shot, so it isn't their problem.

*It isn't denied per say, in theory you can get it. It is just very difficult: Missing rent payments level of difficulty in the lower income brackets. And getting a depressed person to seek help is hard even if they have insurance, making it worse doesn't result in higher success rates.

@gloworm: You admit you don't actually bother to read my posts, so why do you keep responding to them? In this case, you need to pay attention to the first word of the quote. "Many" It doesn't mean "all", it doesn't mean "most", it means more than a few.

If we're going to rally behind this cause of getting people help and removing the stigma of illness, the first thing we need to do is bring mental health treatment in this country out of the dark ages. Treatment that is ineffective or that exacerbates the condition isn't exactly a solution that we can count on. Medicating someone to the point of being in a zombified stupor isn't really viable either. It's going to take a fundamental overhaul of the way we go about diagnosing and treating mental health issues, and that has to be done without the interference of big pharma or other dollar-driven entities that profit off of sickness. Unfortunately doing so would mean revamping a hell of a lot more of our society.

By the way, instead of a round from an AR-15, why didn't they shoot him with a tranquilizer or some such thing? You can't tell me that we don't have the technology to implement more effective means of non-lethal pacification.

@temblors - That's a good question, but no - I don't think we do have the technology. They thought he was reaching for a gun, so the current policies, apparently, are that they can't tazer him because that would cause him to reflexively fire the weapon. They tried the beanbag gun more than once, and it didn't work. Pepper spray wouldn't prevent him from firing. And we don't have tranquilizers that work fast enough to prevent him from firing...

What else? Glue gun? Microwaves? I don't think we have anything that works, unfortunately.

@ Matthew D. : I agree I should stop responding to your postings, but that last one I thought needed to be addressed. I know what 'many' means, but this is absolutely not true. I would say for someone to
"calm down and be normal productive members of society in about 3 days with about $20 worth of pills." does not exist, but that would be really cool.

@gloworm: You second sentence of your last post implied otherwise. You seemed to disagree with me based on the fact that you can't treat certain personality disorders at all. (I disagree with you on that point: Most things are treatable, we just don't try very hard, but that is another story.)

But in any case you are wrong. Why don't you test your reading comprehension skills elsewhere? Google 5150 and Clonazepam.

has our local Lolly Men (Adams & Saltzman) weighed-in with comment on this latest Citizen-Killing by PPB Killer Kop as yet? I haven't heard word one from these creatures! I suspect we know Randy's take on it all, and left wondering if Fritz has swung over to the Lolly Men on this one and if Amanda is more worried about something else than such issues? Our boy's on the Council need to quit all their Lolly play and get down to the people's very serious business....like the fucking cops are out of control and need the oversight of a strong person like Randy, not weak Lolly Men!

@Matthew D: I completely agree with you that Campbell was not given a chance to choose whether or not he wanted medication
@Reymont: While I agree with you that if someone is about to hurt someone else and lethal force is the only option then so be it, but in this case, had you done the proper research, you would see that Campbell did NOTHING to insinuate that he was a threat to anyone but himself. He HURT no one, was supposedly armed and even text-messaged his girlfriend, who was with the police that "I have a gun, I'm not playing" again, no threat to ANYONE. As a person who has suffered from mental illness since I was 5 years old, I can say that that sounds to me like the desperation of a man who is merely trying to imply that he is serious about wanting to kill himself, not merely seeking attention, and if he truly wanted to kill himself he was not being thinking rationally and needed help, not a bullet in the back. Also lacking in this discussion is that fact that Officer Frashour, who fired the deadly round, was involved in an incident in 2006 where he tased a man video-taping a police search that Frashour was involved in. The man, Frank Waterhouse sued for $30,000 plus the price of his camera and was awarded $55,000! Should Frashour have EVER been put into the position he was in with Campbell where the decision to fire a lethal shot rested with him after showing that he is incapable of properly using force? You make some decent points, but they don't apply to this situation and you would have known that had you done a bit more thorough research before making such inflammatory statements in regards to the death of human being.