I honestly don’t understand why police and law enforcement think victim blaming is ok.

The legal model is to blame someone for a crime even if it’s the wrong person.

Now you’ve destroyed a victim’s life. They don’t care. They see it as a benefit to the victim.

Legal models of domestic violence say that victims are supposed to “realize” it’s so bad that they’re then forced to leave. Legal models based on legal programs forcing victims to “realize” their situations are abuse (when maybe they aren’t) isn’t accurate data.

In my experience, police don’t know what they’re doing and decide it’s better to be wrong and harm someone by overreacting than not react and potentially be wrong. The idea in policing is that the risk of possible harm outweighs the risk of being wrong and any of the repercussions of awarding overzealously false and overstated charges to any victim.

My experience is that neighbors call police on mental health crises.

My experience is police tell the mentally ill person she is violent.

My experience is that no one outside the relationship stops the cycle of blame from happening. People don’t believe the mentally ill woman. The partner to her is often too scared that he’ll look abusive in trying to ask people to stop calling police.

It’s a goddamn fucking impossible situation.

The other wrench in it all is that some people are just trying to make themselves look good for a citizenship application. There’s this law that allows immigrants who are a witness or report specific crimes to basically have a guaranteed citizenship.

This may not be the case always, but this coupled with ableism makes criminal charges against mentally ill people really impossible to get dismissed in court.

As well, what happens if you are arrested for mental health issues is traumatizing.

The court forces you to get a 72-hour psych inpatient hold (minimum) to be evaluated for length of treatment, not for illness. The length is a maximum of 180 to 365 days (depending on if you are deemed a danger to self/others, which is longer, or disabled, which is shorter).

Typically this means the 180 to 365 days are spent in a psychiatric hospital. There are some exceptions to this that allow people to have access to outside treatment as part of the court process.

However, it still involves being held against your will in a hospital for a time period you have no say in, and are at the mercy of a court for.

Either way, you can’t win as a mentally ill disabledhuman being with police.

Either you lose in the mental health battle or you lose in the legal battle.

I would pick a night in jail over forced psychiatric inpatient any day. I don’t recommend it to everyone, but I do think it’s worth considering that it wasn’t a choice made haphazardly.

Because even if the background check shows a dumb criminal charge, I’d much rather explain that I wasn’t believed to be disabled than trying to express that I actively participated in not fighting to get sequestered into inpatient treatment.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.