Calls for Justice After Another Teen Killed by Police

Two-thirds of likely voters in a recent poll by Data for Progress, a progressive think-tank, and The Appeal, a criminal justice news website, say they’d support reallocating funding that now goes to law enforcement agencies to create non-police first responders who would handle emergency calls dealing with mental health issues, substance abuse disorders, health and safety check-ins and people experiencing homelessness.

That support cuts across party lines, with 80 percent of Democrats, 52 percent of Republicans, and 60 percent of independent or third party voters saying they’d support such a change, The Appeal reported on April 8. Pollsters sampled the opinions of 1,429 likely voters nationally using web panel respondents, for an overall margin of error of 3 percent.

Across the country “momentum is building to prevent these tragedies by developing non-police programs that respond to mental health and substance use disorder crises as well as issues faced by unhoused people and more general safety checks,” pollsters wrote in an accompanying memo.

Madden, the state lawmaker, told the Pocono Record that every police department should have access to a psychologist or psychiatrist.

“We can’t afford that to ensure that people with mental illness don’t get killed because they’re thinking about ending their lives?” Madden told the newspaper

Hall’s parents, meanwhile, are left to pick up the pieces from their son’s death. The young man’s jacket and video game controllers remain where he last left them, the newspaper reported.

“When bullets ended my son’s life, my life ended too,” Fe Hall, Hall’s mother said, according to the Pocono Record. “We eat our meals on the couch, staring at the TV. We cannot sit at the kitchen table or the dining room because there is an empty chair.”

As is the case with every tragedy, the Halls’ pain is uniquely their own. But their story is all-too familiar for far too many American families. It’s within the power of policymakers to break this cycle.

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An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.