The suspect in the Florida State University shooter, who faces first degree murder charges for killing two and injuring five on Thursday was a member of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, a fascist youth group around the Republican Party, and is a registered Republican voter in Florida. The 20-year-old suspect, Phoenix Ikner, is the stepson of Leon County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jessica Ikner, who has been with the department for 18 years.
I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of my coworkers are predictably bootlickers.
I can’t even tell you how many calls we get all day everyday where we’re all just left scratching our head going “Why did you call 911,about this? This isn’t a police issue.” But since usually the only tool we have in our toolbox is police, that’s what we end up having to send.
But they’ll balk at any suggestion that maybe our police don’t need a new armored truck and a new police station, and whatever other stupid shit they’re spending tax dollars on, and instead maybe we should spend that money to beef up our mental health services, public works, homeless outreach, animal control, code enforcement, and other services that we could be providing instead of just sending police out to deal with non-police issues.
Luckily, my local police are pretty good as far as police go, not too trigger happy, generally make a decent effort to handle mental health issues carefully, they usually manage to not make things significantly worse, though they often don’t do much to improve the situation either.
I think even with the best of intentions, if two people with guns show up to some sort of crisis, it’s easy to see how that might be, like, the right vibe at the moment.