On April 23 of last year, the Harford County Sheriff’s office was called around 4pm to respond to a suicidal person with access to firearms. Per wbal.tv, after the whole ordeal was over, John Fauver, 53, unarmed, was fatally shot and killed.
While this was a tragedy for Forest Hill and Harford County as a whole, it was a sobering reminder that police’s mistreatment of situations is a systemic epidemic that continues to spread throughout the country, including Harford County.
According to the Department of Justice, the training that goes into crisis intervention is known as CIT, and it is a universal practice for police departments in the United States. It is taught not by the government, but by a third party.
The third party, known as CIT International, is a nonprofit company working with law enforcement agencies around the world. The training program is a 40-hour course taught throughout one week that is eight hours a day for five days. The CIT is not required in order to become a police officer. The only thing the police department requires is a yearly meeting to give those trained or not in crisis intervention tips on how to handle people in mental health crises, per School Resource Officer Deputy Amy Caviston.
This is interesting for multiple reasons; one being, as the people that are tasked with helping those who need it and are often in crisis are not required to take the Department of Justice’s training course on how to help those who are in crisis. Rather, they only need one day where tips are shared in order to help those who harm themselves or others, at least in the minds of the DOJ.
Maybe it is time to consider the whole system getting scrapped, and a whole new system backed by the federal government could be formed from the ground up, as the issue runs to the very core of the American police system. The only answer is extreme action.
This article is not anti-cop; it is an effort to bring to light the fact that there are major flaws in the American policing system, and many things need to be changed in order to save more lives like John Fauver’s. His situation did not have to end in the death of a human being, and the loss of a loved member in the community.
