Less than 10 seconds after officers opened the door, police shot Yong Yang in his parents’ Koreatown home while he was holding a knife during a bipolar episode.
Parents in Los Angeles’ Koreatown called for mental health help in the middle of their son’s bipolar episode this month. Clinical personnel showed up — and so did police shortly after.
Police fatally shot Yong Yang, 40, who had a knife in his hand, less than 10 seconds after officers opened the door to his parents’ apartment where he had locked himself in, newly released bodycam video shows.
Now the parents of Yang, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around 15 years ago, have told NBC News exclusively that they are disputing part of the account captured on bodycam, in which police recount a clinician’s saying Yang was violent before the shooting on May 2.
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Got a problem?
Call the cops.
Now you’ve got two problems!
Just to be clear, the family didn’t call the police. The mobile response team did, which is typically done when there’s a weapon.
Ok, that’s fine. We’d need more details about what actually transpired and what the support team told the cops.
But it sure seems like in a situation where the support team calls them, it should be with the understanding that they’re there for backup, not to barge in and fire.
But looking at the report, that’s what happened.
Also:
On May 2, 2024, at 10:58 a.m., Olympic Division uniformed officers responded to a radio call at an apartment in the 400 block of South Gramercy Place to assist the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH) who were attempting to place an individual, later identified as 40-year-old Yong Yang into custody.
Why was the Department of Mental Health “attempting to place him into custody”? They were trying to detain him and take him from the premises, under the law…which sounds an awful lot like an arrest with a different set of paperwork.
So basically these were just cops without guns…who went ahead and called the cops with the guns anyway.
I said it another comment but where was the emergency here? Why did they need to get him into custody immediately? He could not hurt anyone but themselves locked in an apartment alone. He was showing aggression when people tried to enter, but could not hurt them if they stayed out.
Why did they enter and give him someone to hurt? Seeing as how all that was going to do was give them justification to hurt him.
The police also tried to calm him down by whining about how “hard” their job is and tried to bitch about him “making a scene”. They really have zero empathy and probably aren’t even capable of understanding how the entire outcome was their fault. The definition of “why did you make me abuse you?”.
1: They want to hurt themselves or others.
2: They said how they’ll do it.
3: They said they’ll be doing it NOW or at a definitive time.
If these 3 things aren’t answered with any definitive answers, they’ll leave you alone.
You can say who you’ll kill, you can say how, but if you don’t say you plan to do it NOW or on May 23rd, you’re going to stay at home unless you have insurance and plan to go somewhere voluntarily.
=
Use this life hack to never have to deal with police and kill yourself if you want to as long as you’ve exhausted all real options. Pro-Choice all the way. Ain’t nobody but you gets a say on whether you want to live or not.
Set time? Set how? No person? No 51.15.
Don’t know when? Set how. Set kys. No 51.15
Say it’s tomorrow? Don’t know how. Say you’ll kys. Maybe 51.15, just don’t convince them differently.
E: Forgot the obvious. Don’t threaten anyone while you have a weapon in your possession. No, the police can no longer leave you alone. They are not allowed to just let you kill yourself without being sued into oblivion. Yes, if you threaten them with a weapon at close distance, they will kill you. No, it doesn’t matter if you’re mentally unwell, don’t threaten people with lethal weapons. Being unwell doesn’t give you carte blanche to PHYSICALLY threaten and/or hurt people.
Something something, I’d rather be alone with a bear.
I’m telling you, cops work. Anytime I had a problem and I called the cops, boom! Right away, I had a different problem.
(Warning, some graphic imagery)
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You’re right; the cops cured his bipolar disorder /s
Cured it like you’d cure a ham.
Devil’s advocate’s advocate: Or they’ve multiplied…
The /s is the most important 2 characters in your reply.
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Epic
We had this happen in my town a couple weeks ago. Cop got called for a mental health check because a 19year old with a knife was acting erratic. Cop pulls up and gets out the car, the kid runs at him yelling “shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me!” so the cop pulled out his gun and shot him. Didn’t go for the tazer or the his mace, just right to deadly force despite being called over specifically to prevent the kid from dying.
Cops should neve, under any circumstances, be called in for a mental episode. All they will do is escalate the situation and cause harm.
The family didn’t call the cops in this case. They called a mental health crisis team, and that team called the cops due to the presence of a weapon.
depends where in the world you are.
in the USA, yeah, no argument from me.
At the same time you can call social services and you end up with them being dead instead because someone having a psychotic episode slashed/shot them…
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, you can now take the time to go two replies down for a bunch of examples
That sounds absurd. Please provide one example of that happening.
It’s absurd to think that never happens. It’s not absurd to think that doesn’t happen as often as cops killing someone.
I never claimed it never happened. It’s just not something I ever recall hearing of. I spent 20 years in the medical industry and a few of those in the mental health space. I’ve heard of a lot of violence on mental health professionals but the characterization that the people I replied to didn’t fit with my understanding. I haven’t made it through all the articles but I’m still not convinced it’s a thing that happens enough to consider it anything but rare.
Please provide one example
Kind of implies that you think it never happens…
https://people.com/teri-zenner-social-worker-murdered-widower-honors-memory-7557328
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/01/09/social-workers-field-safety-remains-concern-after-killing/
Yeah, social workers are never put in danger, right?
Cherry picking data does not a compelling argument make.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics in 2022 the total number of deaths for community and social services in the US was… 19. (That’s on page 8, in case you want to check.)
I found a CBS article from 2017 that cited another BLS study which said that social workers were the 20th most dangerous job category in the US, with a fatality rate of 1 per 100,000 people. That’s fewer deaths than architects and engineers, which was the 19th deadliest job.
On the other hand, American police have killed more than 1000 people every year for the past ten years. To put that another way, the police killed more people last year than social workers died of job-related causes in the past decade.
It’s really funny that by almost every metric you can think of, policing in the US is systemically flawed and needs major oversight.
You should compare the number per 100k for the people killed by the police if you want to make a comparison that makes sense
1000 out of 330 000 000, that’s 0.3 per 100k, looks like police officers are less deadly to the population than the population is to social workers!
Also very funny that you would accuse me of cherry picking data when only situations where officers kill people during mental health checks get reported on, right?
So you’re trying to normalize your ass-pulled estimate of the entire population of the US to compare it to the normalized full-time equivalent workers (which obviously isn’t the entire US population)? You can understand why using people who had no interactions with the police would be an inaccurate comparison, right?
My dude, until you get a better understanding of statistics I’m not going to engage with you further.
Ass pulled estimate of the US population… I mean, the number is easy to find my dude if you want to confirm it.
Not all social workers get in contact with people suffering a mental breakdown while armed either, how is that relevant to the situation then?
Interesting that all these are Canadian stories
Didn’t know Illinois and Kansas are Canadian provinces… Also I’m in Canada so not surprising that Google would provide Canadian results for the most part.
It doesn’t happen because the social workers call the police, the paramedics call the police, the fire department calls the police…
The police are the catch all for emergency situations. “I don’t know what’s happening, send the police” is pretty standard practice.
There are some police departments with salaried social workers and “community specialist” officers that are employed explicitly to deal with issues like this. The problem is that a change to law enforcement in this direction must come directly from each individual community and must be supported by those in charge of the local department.
Cops should neve, under any circumstances, be called in for a mental episode
Yea I’m gonna have to disagree with you hard on this one. Just because you dislike police or have had bad experiences does not mean you should let someone having a crisis subject others around them to a very real possibility of imminent danger because “cops bad”.
Do police need more training? Sure. Do they need major reform in many areas? Of course. But are they all bad? No.
The mere presence of a cop, even without a visible weapon, will escalate any situation regarding mentally unstable people. Period.
If you don’t understand why a person going through a crisis would freak out when a figure of (ultimately violent) power appears right after they picked a weapon you have a serious problem with basic empathy.
For the record, I haven’t had any bad experiences with cops, in fact every interaction I’ve had so far has been either neutral or actually pretty nice. I’ve had my fair share of breakdowns as a teenager tho, and I can assure you that a cop would’ve never helped a single time. Even the nicest one.
Look at the report for this case, for example:
The officers met with DMH personnel outside the residence who indicated that the DMH were called to the scene due to Yang’s erratic and threatening behavior. The officers were also advised that Yang did not live at the location, and had attempted to assault one of the DMH employees when they attempted to speak with him. Based on their assessment, DMH determined Yang was a danger to others.
In their efforts to assist DMH personnel, the officers requested additional units, a supervisor, and notified the Department’s Mental Evaluation Unit. Several attempts were made to communicate with Yang and encourage him to exit the residence; however, he refused. After formulating a plan and obtaining a key to the residence, the officers ascended a narrow staircase leading to the front door. The officers announced their presence and then utilized the key to open the front door. As they did so, Yang was observed standing in the living room several feet away, armed with a large kitchen knife. Moments later, Yang advanced toward the officers and an Officer Involved Shooting occurred.
Here’s the singular question:
What was the rush?
They needed to take him in, but they are afraid of him acting erratic and wielding a knife.
Why the fuck do they push to enter the building? There was no one in there. He could not hurt anyone while he remained hold up inside other than himself.
Why couldn’t they just wait him out?
By pushing to resolve the situation immediately and forcing their way in, they *exacerbated the situation.
I think they should have been called, but they should be there as backup in case someone is getting attacked. But no one was in danger here until they entered. There was no reason to push this. All they did was create a reason to kill him in self defense.
You missed the options of using “less lethal” force as well, why go for live ammo immediately?
Because when someone is rushing at you with a deadly weapon, you may only get one shot, and not all ‘less lethal’ options are effective, especially on someone in a mental health crisis.
I agree that the cops never should have entered the premises in the first place, but in this instance they did and the victim had already been a direct threat to others. This one instance really isn’t a case of cops murdering an innocent person for absolutely no reason.
That really depends on how you look at it. They did murder an innocent person exactly because they made the wrong decision to engage in the first place. You can’t put yourself in harms way when it isn’t necessary then blame the danger you knew about in advance.
My opinion would be different if there was someone else in the apartment for them to defend, but there wasn’t.
The cops made a bad call and now someone is dead.
One of my biggest complaints with police and why things escalate unnecessarily is because they are fucking impatient. They give “orders” and if you don’t comply immediately you are met with force.
They are insecure, poorly educated bullies. Everything makes sense once you realize this about police in the US.
In my town having gone and served in Afghanistan basically allowed you to become a cop once you returned states side. No degree or special training needed.
TBF, I’d rather a soldier show up at my door than a cop. At least soldiers are usually better trained in discipline, situational awareness, and appropriately evaluating threats. They are also trained on rules of engagement and usually aren’t terrified about every single engagement they find themselves in.
Maybe our police would be better if they received the same level of training as soldiers. And maybe that’s it. Soldiers are more confident in their abilities because they’ve received adequate training.
Dude a soldier in this case is a 20 year old grunt that joined at 18. You’re not getting 30 year old officers joining the cop force.
1 good cop isn’t gonna stop the other 20 from shooting your family and pets.
Exactly how much training do you think someone needs to not unload a gun on someone within 10 seconds of seeing them? Somehow every other non-cop present managed to not use him for target practice.
The bastard in question is even a repeat offender:
Lopez had been involved in a 2021 nonfatal shooting of a man who had a replica firearm.
Cops are bastards because the non-bastards either get fired, harassed out, or murdered. Being nice to people while you turn a blind eye to the shit your coworkers do is still being a bastard.
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According to the report, the dude had already attacked a mental health worker with the knife. Yeah, it sucks that they were in a mental health crisis, but they were absolutely a threat to others.
The cops absolutely should have been there, but they should have only been there protecting the mental health workers instead of entering the premises and confronting him. .
According to the report, the dude had already attacked a mental health worker with the knife.
That’s interesting, because it’s not what the health worker said.
“He just tried to attack me and the father,” a clinician, whose face is blurred, says in the video as Min Yang, whose face is also blurred, walks into the conversation. “He became very aggressive. He tried to kick me. I walk away. He had some physical altercation.”
Also of note is that his father disputes that even that happened:
Min Yang added that he was standing between his son and a clinician and never witnessed any kicking or physical violence, only shouting.
As someone who struggles with mental illness, but has been lucky enough to not need intervention or hospitalization in my life so far, this seems like another good time to say ACAB.
It’s never a bad time to say ACAB. Occasionally, one does something decent, but even a serial killer might occasionally hold the door open for somebody at the post office or whatever.
Every time I see a positive police story, I suspect copaganda. They are class traitors, restricting our liberties in order to protect capital, and it’s by design.
I’ve dealt with cops during bad mental health episodes. Honestly I’ve been extremely lucky - assuming ALL cops were bastards I’d 100% be dead right now.
ACAB
Please do not spread misinformation.
If you have a pit with a hundred snakes, and only two of them are aggressive and venomous, would you climb into that pit?
I sure as hell wouldn’t
It doesn’t matter if there are good cops, the few bad cops ruin all of them because it’s a dice roll who you get.
If you have 100 doctors and 2 of them are incompetent would you never go to hospital? Trusting any unknown person is a dice roll.
Doctors are held to a higher degree than our police officers are, so yes. I’d take my chances with getting those two incompetent doctors.
Expecially since if I’m unhappy with my care, I can choose a different one.
Can I do that with a police officer?
No, no I cannot.
Even if something goes wrong with that doctor, if I’m still alive, I’ll be able to take action against them, taking action against a police officer?
Goodluck.
They aren’t literally saying anything about the marriage status of anyone’s parents. More that cops are all offensive or disagreeable persons
I’ve never heard of anyone intending the “B” to mean anything but “Bad”.
I have always known B to be bastards
That’s funny, because I’ve never heard of anyone intending the B to mean “Bad”.
The usual expansion of it is “Bastards”.
Step 1) Find out the name of the cop who shot your son
Step 2) Call a mental health check on the cop
Bonus step) Call the cops over the previous cop’s mental health
/s
Step 1) Find out the name of the cop who shot your son
Step 2) Become a cop
Step 3) ???
Step 4) Enjoy a paid vacation
I feel like I’m reading this same story once a month. There are so many people that need help and then the police show up and murder them. All the time.
That’s not entirely true.
Sometimes they just shoot the family dog(s) for barking and go back to work like nothing happened.
There are countless stories of people cradling their dogs as they bleed out from bullet wounds weeping as the cops write up a ticket or something. Just constantly, all the time, and for some reason we don’t DO anything about it. Like, as a group, we could end this nightmare tomorrow if we could all cooperate for one goddamn day without horrible shitty people trying to politicize and subvert every community action we try to do to make the world a little better.
So damn true on all points. And yeah we could do so much if we could organize but trying to get Americans off their ass just once to stand up for something is damn near impossible. I wish I was in France. Those mofo’s start a riot the moment the government does anything even remotely stupid.
This is one of my biggest (hopefully irrational) fears. My dog is not violent but she is reactive, there’s no way she wouldn’t be shot dead if police ever had occasion to come into our house.
It sounds like the family did the right thing. They did NOT call the police, they contacted LA’s mental health team, who sent a mobile response unit.
The issue with mobile crisis teams (which most cities have by now) is that they won’t do anything if there’s a weapon besides call the police. That’s where things went south.
There needs to be more collaboration between mental health response teams and police to prevent this sort of thing. Also, wtf is the point of carrying a taser if you pull out your gun on a dude who is barely moving and holding a knife? Probably didn’t even need to be tased.
No repercussions, so they shoot to kill
Less chance of liability. A lawyer friend of my parents said to never use a taser or pepper spray for self defense at a home. Just use a gun and empty it into center mass, anything else increases a chance of a lawsuit. Trying to shoot to injur vastly increases your chance of losing a suit, because they can argue if you had the time to do that you didn’t really think you were in danger.
So the legal system is promoting killing people.
Don’t call police unless you want someone to die.
Google called police on their own employees. I keep saying this.
When? And why?
It was during a quiet sit-in in protest of Google abetting genocide. They also fired everyone in the area, even people who weren’t directly involved.
“Don’t be evil” was a canary clause. There’s a reason it doesn’t appear in any of their documents anymore.
It does, akshually.
They removed it from the preface of the Code of Conduct to being a footnote in that document no one will read.
Five months later I log back into Lemmy, so sorry for the ancient reply, but I wanted to thank you for correcting my misconception.
this is why SWATing is so freaking scary.
Police have 1 job…
And it’s to uphold order for the ruling class.
Police are class traitors. ACAB.
And they are trigger-happy like barbaric IDF personnel.
Can’t have mental health issues if you’ve been shot dead. It’s the police way
No no no, it’s “fatally shot”!
“Shootalyzed”
A Psyshootogist
So he’s deader now?
Police should NOT be involved in the mental health process.
Currently they are legally required.
They should, they just need to be competent.
I doubt medical personel would be too keen to go alone in situations like these.
I think the point is that we have appropriately trained crisis response professionals, and those people should not be law enforcement. Cops have their role, and it is enforcing the law. They are not not should they be tasked with becoming mental health professionals.
I don’t want cops showing up when I really need an ambulance.
I thought this was a repost from a while ago, but USA gonna USA.
I do that all the time. I go “oh there’s an update on this case, cool. Wait, these names aren’t familiar. Am I remembering wrong?” one google later “no this is a second time, and I also found a third and fourth that didn’t make their way to me.”
Would be curious about stats on how many wellness calls end in the person being checked on dying.
Off the top of my head ~50 or less officers in the US die from violence every year if you exclude traffic fatalities. At least according to this (178 killed in 3 years) that means police are killing the people they’re called to help at a higher rate. Would seem to point to a person calling the police for help is in more danger than the police are on any random call.
Can always trust the cops to show up and make everything infinitely worse.
Yup. The way I like to phrase it is “there’s no problem that cops can’t make worse.”
Cops aren’t your friend. They aren’t there to help you or protect you. They are there to oppress you.
Very genuine question: why do cops never use taser guns for situations like this? Presumably they knew the weapon was a knife, so no risk of a shootout.
Honestly this is what infuriates me when 2nd amendment enthusiasts say “UK cops should carry guns” - fuck off mate, we de-escalate and use non-lethal way more effectively than your wanker cops who only have a hammer and everything is a nail.
Give your cops a toolkit instead of just a hammer and you’ll see the difference.
You’re responding to someone asking why they don’t use their tasers. They have a toolkit. They choose to only use the hammer from it.
Yeah my comment wasn’t intended to be critical of the person I was replying to - it was infact highlighting their point.
American cops don’t tend to use tasers when the suspect is wielding a knife because it’s seen as a lethal weapon, to which they have a lethal response for. Or as another responder replied - the training is the issue, US cops are hardly short of equipment.
The typical service worker has more training time before doing their job than a cop gets before getting a gun and a badge. That’s the other side of the coin.
very genuine small penis.
HEY! Civilian, stop talking about stuff you know nothing about!
In dangerous situations and non-whites (same thing , right) we need LETHAL FORCE to control the situation. If someone us murd…I mean, fatally shot, so be it.
Tasers are just for torture. It’s fun but we can’t be always playing! We’re working here!
/s
Tasers kinda suck.
Dunno man. Gunshot wounds suck pretty bad too.
“police recount a clinician’s saying Yang was violent before the shooting on May 2”
Yeah, they knew that surely.
They knew they were going into an environment where someone with diminished mental capacity had access to bladed weapons.
They likely knew he was actively wielding bladed weapons.
They had access to less than lethal methods of self defence, tasers, body armour, mace, tranquilizers, superior numbers, training in hand to hand combat, fucking nets etc.
They chose to use firearms in lieu of these and shot a mentally ill person to death unnecessarily.
Guns should be a last resort, not a first resort
American cops are such fucking pussies
Acab tho but especially American ones
They likely knew he was actively wielding bladed weapons.
I watched the full video. They were repeatedly told he didn’t have any weapons. The clinician just said the man was violent and kicked him.
I have no idea why they didn’t use less than lethal first, they talk about it but I don’t know which officer was tasked with it. It seems like they didn’t expect him to be armed when they entered.
