8:59pm August 15, 2013

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": More police scanner WTF

feliscorvus:

WOW. Just literally heard a report of a “hysterical female” at Target. o_0

Between this and the thing about “2 black males (gasp) walking around inside a 7-11” the other day I am definitely getting an interesting look at the sorts of things people actually and for-seriously…

I do actually hear some of that. Though it is more dispatchers repeating what 911 callers, etc., have told them than actual police conversations. I hear references to “5150” a lot which is code for involuntary psych hold (or something like that). And I hear a LOT of absolute shit-flipping over stuff like disabled people in day programs “wandering off” at Great America and whatnot. 99% of the time it ends up being “the person just went around the corner to look at something”. Because being disabled means you need constant supervision I guess. :(

I’ve been picked up in Santa Clara County for wandering off more times than I can count and most of the time I was just walking around in public. There were only a couple times I was doing anything worth calling anyone over.

But that would get me PUT ON a 5150, which is a 3 day hold (a 5250 is a 14 day hold, I got put on lots of those too but not right off the street) . Technically you have to be “danger to self” or “danger to others” or “gravely disabled”.

But what they’d do is write me up as a danger to self or gravely disabled entirely because I was wandering around alone. I get so pissed when people are naive enough to think that doesn’t happen. “You must’ve done SOMEthing.” No, really, you don’t have to have done anything. They don’t check out the stories the people who sign the papers tell. They can say whatever they want. They just write a couple lines of text and then check off one or more boxes. Sometimes they checked off all three in mine for no good reason.

Another time they picked me up after I ran off from a day program, took me to the police station, and locked me in a room until my mom got there. At one point I heard this conversation:

OFFICER 1: She’s on the floor. Do you think she’s okay?

OFFICER 2: Don’t worry about her unless you look in there and her feet are level with the observation window.

(Both of them laughed their asses off like making suicide jokes about disabled kids is the funniest thing in the world.)

I also overheard them saying horrible things about mentally ill adults they were hearing about on the scanner.

My mom was shocked because the whole thing had been handled as a missing person case but when she found me I was in a locked room, hadn’t been given food or water, and there were two armed guards at my door.

Also the very first thing they did when she called them to go out looking for me, was ask her for dental records. I had only been missing an hour.

(I bolted out of my day program because a fight broke out. I kept running until I was exhausted, then had a meltdown because I had no clue where I was and was completely overloaded. Then someone asked me if I needed help and called the cops. But they treated me more like a criminal than a missing kid.)

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