Ask Lemmy

The university cops are great where I am but the city cops are very hit and miss. The university cops were my backup for violent patients when I worked the medical center and they actually had pretty decent deescalation skills. At the very least they would just defer to me and standby assist unless I specifically told them to initiate a hold. And when they were doing standbys they wouldn't verbally threaten or physically impose they'd just stand loosely at my shoulders and be like "hey buddy we're just here to keep everybody safe." Vs the city cops are only allowed on the unit long enough to serve involuntary admission paperwork like "hey here's your copy of the form signed by the magistrate that says these nurses can't let you off the unit." Which is good because they're like 25% decent, 25% matter-of-fact (acceptable), but like 50% are assholes.

Like some patients are super entitled, yelling racial slurs, spitting, etc and I understand it's difficult to keep your composure if you're not specifically trained to (although they really should be) but a lot of patients are clearly just not with it. Like either wildly delirious and rambling about alien conspiracies or just straight up visibly developmentally delayed. And I've seen officers talking shit to people with like obvious high needs autism, downs, etc and the best I can do is just tell the cops to give them the paperwork in the mousetrap and hurry the patient inside but like. What the fuck.

It's kind of cute though when you get a new one who just recently got the job to Help People™ so they're not a bastard yet and this is one of their first experiences with a psych hold and they're standing there with their body cam on having just unlocked the cuffs and the patient just immediately yanks their pants down and starts screaming about the invisible snakes and spiders on their genitals and the baby cop just 😦