Running At Police With A Knife Tends To Lead To A Predictable Outcome

So a fellow, Porter Burks, with known mental issues, and prior run-ins with police, takes a knife and slashes his brother's car tires in Detroit and is roaming around the street.

Brother concerned for safety of Porter and the public considering that Porter  is out wandering the street with a knife and acting psycho, calls the police.

Police then confront the fellow who refuses to drop the knife and who then decides to run towards the officers while still holding the knife and gets to within 6 feet of the nearest officer before being dropped by police, and he dies soon thereafter after being shot multiple times. Most of the incident video available at the link above with the Detroit News, but not the entire event.

So of course Attorney Geoffrey Fieger is suing on behalf of the family. 

The mentally-ill attacker is now, of course, being described as a happy straight-A student that liked to sing and dance (and apparently liked to stab people and things with knives, but that part is being left unsaid, natch).

Fieger is actually and rather very disingenuously suggesting that the police should have let themselves be stabbed rather than stopping the threat:

"Why you can’t figure out a better way to deal with him than executing him by firing squad?” Fieger asked at Thursday's news conference.

"You have all sorts of equipment, all that body armor that police have," he said. "They have helmets, they have arm and chest armor. They have bulletproof vests everywhere. Are you telling me that today, you don't have sufficient equipment to send an officer toward somebody with a 3-inch knife and instead you have to execute him?

"If that’s crisis intervention, God help us all.”

That actually is an effective crisis intervention when dealing with a person psychotically waving a knife around in public that decides to run towards someone with knife in hand after ignoring repeated requests and commands to drop the knife.

It's true that  mental health care services suck and are overwhelmed, and we lack enough in-patient hospital beds to handle all the mentally ill in Michigan and the US for that matter. That was a choice made by politicians to both save money and the quaint idea that the dangerously mentally-ill were just seeing the world different and it was fine for them to be out and about until they kill someone, then politicians act all surprised that that occurred. So the police and jail become the first line of treatment for mentally ill individuals that choose to act out violently.

But, one could still ask why the family didn't have the fellow getting in-patient treatment or at least regular out-patient treatment, considering he had stabbed at least one family member previously (report is unclear if it was multiple family members or multiple incidents), and was known to have what have been described by the family as "psychotic breaks", but that wouldn't help with the chances for winning the ghetto lottery, now would it?