Police body-camera footage of the apprehension of former Donald Trump campaign director Brad Parscale in Florida captured what experts say is a bleakly familiar incident and outcome. Police were called about someone in crisis and responded with a sudden burst of force. Parscale is seen standing still, talking lucidly and not reaching for anything. He was tackled four seconds after first being told to drop to the ground, the Washington Post reports. “What are cops trained to do?” said Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. “They’re trained to use force.” Authorities took Parscale to a hospital under the Baker Act, a Florida law that allows authorities to detain and treat someone believed to be a threat to themselves or others.
Critics of policing practices argued that the Parscale case supported their complaints about law enforcement being too quick to use force at times when physical aggression might not be necessary. “This would be a very useful image for everyone to see,” Slobogin said. “Because it’s a white guy being treated the way we’ve seen a lot of Black individuals treated by the police in recent months.” Experts say the episode highlights how frequently police respond to calls about people in crisis, and how some of the calls can have violent results. Since 2015, more than 1 in 5 people who were fatally shot by police officers were suffering a mental health crisis, according to a Washington Post database. Policing experts say officers might not be the best-equipped to handle many cases of people in crisis. Calls to cut police funding have urged diversion of money to social services, including for mental health. On Sunday, police were called to Parscale’s Fort Lauderdale home “in reference to a suicide attempt” in which a woman reported that her husband “possibly shot himself.”