While Boston’s ultra-woke, far left Mayor Michelle Wu was on the city council back in 2020 when she pushed to peel so-called “non-violent” mental health 911 calls over to social workers who ride alongside cops. Since then, she’s de-funded the police and re-directed tens of millions in funding to sending social workers to respond to 911 calls.
Spoiler alert: It isn’t working. Co-response, they call it. Divert from policing. Connect to care. The slogans have survived contact with reality.
Earlier this year, a man called 911 claiming armed people were after him. Officers found him behind a locked door, so they did what Mayor Michelle Wu’s city has spent years congratulating itself for: they sent a mental-health clinician to respond. So they could “talk it out” with a mental case.
After forty-five minutes of conversation, the door swung open. The “patient” raised his sword and attacked. The social worker was knocked to the ground. A cop was stabbed. And the “patient” rode some lightning before other cops conducted a multi-round ballistics test on him.
He died. The “patient” wasn’t in need of a wellness brochure or a good cry. He was in need of force, lethal as it happened, to stop his rampage and protect innocent life.
No one besides Michelle Wu and her woke pals seriously believed a clinician was going to talk a sword out of a lunatic’s hands. The mainstream media sold it because it polled well among the local liberal reader base. The media might have even believed it, too.
Wu’s crowd has spent years treating cops as the problem and social work as the cure. Then the cure got flattened, a cop got stabbed, and the only thing that ended the attack was gunfire.
The only thing that stops a bad person or deranged lunatic with evil in their hearts is a good guy or gal with a gun—not a goddamn social worker.
Boston can — and likely will — keep writing taxpayer-funded checks for its “transformative” program. The street doesn’t read the ordinance or the newspaper stories. When the door opens, ideology doesn’t get a vote. Steel does. And if the good guys aren’t armed, the speech may last 45 minutes and end in an emergency room. Or a morgue.
Utopian dreams rarely survive contact with reality…unless you have a virtually bottomless trough of tax dollars to perpetuate them.