When I was twenty I was almost shot by a police officer because of my mental illness. I was peeling bark off a tree on public property to calm my anxiety.
Two officers pulled up very quietly in a squad car while I had my back turned. They did not announce their arrival. When I noticed them approaching me by the sound of their footsteps, I was frightened and reached for my phone to record them. They thought I was going for a weapon and one reached for his pistol. I put my hands up.
They illegally detained me and took my ID to run a background check. The one who had started to draw his gun on me asked me if I’d had any thoughts of hurting myself or others.
My background check came up clean. They released me and told me I wasn’t doing anything illegal. I went to my car and bawled my eyes out, thinking about how I’d almost died for the crime of “weird behavior.”
Don’t give these pigs a registry of the mentally ill. They’re already trying to kill us for no good reason.
@ all the idiots commenting on this saying I almost got shot because I reached into my pocket for my phone and not because of my “weird behavior”
- For the last time, nowhere in this post did I say my phone was in my pocket. Women’s pockets are too small for that. I was storing my phone in the mesh water bottle pouch on the side of the backpack I was wearing, i.e. an open and see-through compartment too small to conceal a gun and too far off my beltline for a concealed carry
- Did you miss the part where the only reason the cops were interacting with me to begin with was because they thought my perfectly benign behavior warranted law enforcement intervention?
- Stop making excuses for a person who wasn’t committing a crime almost getting killed by the police