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.
I will say, I work ambulance for a very right wing rural community. I have done this for a number of years now.
While I do have issues at times with our local LEO, they do a good job with not shooting my patients, or their dogs.
They have done a good job in my community with securing the scene without escalating and then standing back and let us deal with medical/mental health crisis.
These stories do happen to often, and there are policy changes that need to happen, but there are a significant number of communities that have law enforcement who are acting appropriately and therefore get no news coverage.
The problem is not with the police organizations who are doing everything right, the problem is that much of the time we wouldn’t know if they are doing things wrong, because they cover for each other, because they are not incentivised to uphold their own standards, and run without enough supervision from local and federal bodies.
I’m sure there are millions of great police teams working in good communities out there. I think most people know that as well. We’re not calling for the good cops to be run out of town, we’re calling for the good cops to hold each other accountable.
The number of good cops doesn’t balance the equation here. If a major auto manufacturer announced that 2% of it’s millions of cars on the road had a fault where they may suddenly and spontaneously run off the road and seek out run over pets and dark skinned youths, but it’s okay because the rest of the 98% of the cars are just fine, well the public would be outraged and rightfully so. We don’t accept “some bad apples” in a lot of industries like doctors and pilots, so why are we accepting bad apples in police, the one organization that holds our society to account to follow laws and who’re we’re supposed to turn to in times of need?