Having specialized police units to deal with the mentally ill is good — disarming the police is better. Before you go off about how crazy that is, just about every developed country operates this way and they don’t have thousands of police shootings annually. I lived in China and their average beat cops don’t carry guns. You can count on one hand the number of police shootings they have.

SA started their program in 2015 . Have the cops killed any mentally ill people since? A quick search shows they have.

“Protect and serve” Protect who? Serve who? The police exist primarily to protect property. Go look up the history of the police. The first modern police forces were slave patrols and glorified security guards for Boston shipping companies.

Life, especially the life of disposable unpersons like the homeless and the mentally ill, will always be secondary to police.