"Alien" is the term referring to the person. "Illegal" is merely a status.
It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.
Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.
Unicode is complex because human language is complex. If you want someone to blame, blame God:
> Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Perhaps attempting to build one character set for all languages is just another Babel-like act of hubris, and the security vulnerabilities are God's judgment upon us for not sticking with the mess of incompatible local encodings that preceded it.
The video was posted hours early, quickly deleted (but not before being reshared), and then posted again at the proper time. The link in your comment is not the first release of the video
If it's just a phone call, why involve the police at all? But if that doesn't work, and it's critical that someone is woken up and no one is near, I could see the police as a reasonable option.
I agree with GP that my first instinct would be "lawyer", but I'm imagining the police at the door saying something like "hey we're here to inform you there's an urgent xyz, we'll now be on our way" and leaving. At that point that's the police matter resolved, no?
There is a difficult balance to strike in these types of calls (e.g. mental health crisis). On the one hand, the presence of police can escalate tensions and cause a situation to spiral out of control when it might not have otherwise. On the other hand, when a situation does get out of control, police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe. It can be a tough judgment call for responders to make
The Eugene CAHOOTS team has existed since 1989 until it was shut down recently. Dispatchers make the call as to whether or not to send police officers along with CAHOOTS responders on a per call basis.
Quoting vera.org: “ Of the estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police backup, and in Eugene, CAHOOTS teams resolved almost 20 percent of all calls coming through the city’s public safety communications center.”
To the best of my knowledge, no CAHOOTS staff have died or been seriously injured on the job. I’m not sure the evidence shows that finding the right balance is dangerous. Hard for sure, CAHOOTS put a lot of effort into building the right relationship with the police, but the risk to responders is overstated.
I lived in Eugene previously and CAHOOTS is (seems they are still operating in Springfield) quite effective in the limited response work they do, particularly de-escalation and triage of mental health crises. These are classic situations that (American) police are not needed nor are most properly trained for, and several crisis intervention teams modelled after CAHOOTS have been stood up elsewhere in the US in the past several years (e.g. BCR in Minneapolis) with seemingly good results.
However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.
But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.
> police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe
Are they, though?
Increasingly, in the US, police are being trained to respond to any hint of danger with hair-trigger reflexes and lethal force. They are being taught to see themselves as constantly under siege, and every member of the public who's not a wealthy, able-bodied white person as a potential enemy, actively seeking to kill them.
If I knew there was someone with a mental illness nearby that made them sometimes violent and unpredictable, the person I would want around wouldn't be a police officer. It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
Sure, it might also be helpful to have someone who's physically strong enough to temporarily (safely) restrain the person having a psychotic episode, or a PTSD flashback, or just a plain old panic attack, to ensure they can't harm themselves or anyone around them while they are being helped.
But if someone has one of those kinds of problems, and I'm nearby, the last thing I want is for a heavily-armed member of the Aryan Brotherhood with a badge to shoot them dead and then boast about it online.
> It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
This is great when it works. But sometimes, people having mental health crises just don't want to be de-escalated, you try all the techniques and it doesn't work. (Just like with other medical calls—sometimes you do all the appropriate interventions, but the patient keeps getting sicker anyway.) Physical force should be the last resort, but sometimes there is unfortunately no other choice. (Source: I am an EMT)
Yes, that would make no sense, that's why it's not what I said.
It takes time for responders to arrive on scene. Even if police end up not usually not being needed, there can be value in calling for them ahead of time so that they are available in case they do end up being needed. On the other hand, their presence alone can cause issues even if they don't do anything. That's why it's a tough call
I thankfully live, and worked as a paramedic, in a very progressive area of the country.
But still, sadly, I can relate multiple instances where we had a patient in MH crisis, who was doing well, until police not only arrived but actively escalated the situation.
Get called to an obviously mentally disturbed person who is agitated and such. Successfully talk to him over a period of time, calm him down, start a plan for getting him some assistance. And then had a cop march back over (who was on scene, saw the initial incident, the de-escalation), and start shouting at the patient over the destruction of property. The patient's property. "Who the fuck do you expect to clean up that broken glass? Selfish asshole. I should make _you_ get on your knees and clean it". Note that at the time, the patient's father was actually standing by with a trash can and a broom, ready to take care of exactly that.
End result? The patient who was compliant and willing to go for evaluation in the back of my ambulance needed to be sedated and narrowly avoided being tased. In the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened. But this was a situation actively under control. And a situation this officer, and only this officer, actively worked to make worse.
That incident resulted in a complaint, though I have no idea what the resolution was.
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