It's been 7 Years

Dwight it's been many years since you left this world. Not a day goes by that I don't think about you and all the great times we had together. I often think of things and do things that I wish I could call you up and share. I wish you could see my sons grow up. I wish you could have made it. Thanks for being with me for 40 years. It's more than many get to have. You were a great Uncle, friend, and teacher. Rest in Peace. See you on the other side.

Birthday Tribute: Dwight would have been 45

WON'T YOU HELP?

Police Confronting the Mentally Ill

Cops and the Mentally Ill

This is a wonderful article on steps police departments can take to better educate their officers when dealing with the mentally ill.

Exerpt:

From coast to coast, mentally ill people, without reliable access to the costly on-demand care they need, are left to fend for themselves. In the aftermath of the movement in the 1970s to close large mental asylums, many of today's mentally ill are left to their own devices; they are often homeless and without full-time advocates. With government unable or unwilling to properly serve this population, the criminal-justice system is left to pick up the slack.

Contrary to what many assume, the mentally ill are most often the victimized, not the victimizers. A 2005 study by researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University suggested that persons with serious mental illnesses are 11 times more likely than the general population to be victims of violent crime, with perhaps as many as 1 million crimes committed against those with serious mental-health issues each year.

Principled Mental Health Reform

Great Article regarding public policy needed to create "Principled Mental Health Reform"

Vindication for Dwight?

Holmes County, Florida Sheriff Election
Posted: 5:16 PM Nov 5, 2008
(WTVY-Channel 4 News)

A long time northwest, Florida lawman lost his bid for a fourth term in office. In January, one-time Deputy Tim Brown will be sworn-in as Holmes County's first republican sheriff since the civil war.

Brown spent the morning "thanking" voters for his "upset" victory over incumbent Sheriff Dennis Lee. Brown spent 18 years with the department, and the last six with the Florida Department of Corrections.

In 2004, Brown mounted an unsuccessful bid for the office, but this time around, he had two things going for him. He ran as a republican who voted more than three-to-one for Senator McCain for president. Brown also says he knocked on just about every door in the county.

Blog note: Many in town had credited Sheriff Lee (related to Officer Stephen Lee who originally attempted to unsuccessfully apprehend Dwight) with leading the raid that led to the death of Dwight McWaters.

GREAT ARTICLE FROM SEVERAL YEARS AGO

Courtesy of: The Panama City News Herald

Viewpoint - Our View: Mental problem

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Our View

Mental problem

Responding to hundreds of thousands of patients warehoused in psychiatric hospitals, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled four decades ago that the confined mentally ill had a right to treatment and threw open the doors. Society has failed to cope with the problem ever since, culminating in the Saturday morning wounding of Bonifay Police Department Officer Steven Lee.

Lee took a shotgun blast while protecting his community from a deranged man shooting at imaginary people in bushes.

The accused shooter, Dwight McWaters, took a volley of bullets — two to the head, according to his family — because he was exhibiting symptoms of his mental illness and had access to a gun.

Lee is thankfully on his way to recovery. McWaters most likely will die, and he won’t be the first Floridian whose lifetime of mental illness came to an end this year during a confrontation with the police.

Two weeks after being legally forced into a hospital for escalating paranoia, Shawn Paul Fisher was shot in the head on Jan. 20 by a Polk County police sharpshooter after Fisher raised his shotgun and fired at sheriff’s deputies. Fisher had stopped taking his medication for schizophrenia and dialed 9-1-1. Authorities believe he wanted to be killed by police.

Last year, police in St. Petersburg killed 52-year-old marine biologist and Eagle Scout Thomas Albert Wallace after he attacked them from inside an abandoned water tank. His paranoid schizophrenia left him homeless and living in the industrial park. His sister said he was afraid to take his medication.

Seminole County Sheriff Donald Eslinger testified July 30 before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that in the previous five years at least 176 people with mental illnesses and 29 law enforcement officers have been killed in altercations across the nation.

Dealing with the mentally ill is now an everyday occurrence for the police. In some jurisdictions around the country, psychiatric calls outnumber robberies and assaults.

Since 1955, the number of patients in psychiatric hospitals has dropped by almost 500,000. The nation’s jails and prisons now house at least 283,000 mentally ill inmates, and an estimated 770,000 of the single adult homeless population suffers from some psychiatric ailment. It doesn’t take much guesswork to determine where America now warehouses its mentally ill.

The problem has no simple answer, but more people will die until society decides the solution takes more than putting an officer’s life on the line and a bullet to the head.