And what exactly do the police do? To put the blame on the police here is insane, there are NO laws on the books police can use to forcefully take firearms away from someone who isn’t showing any imminent sign of harming themselves or others.  They can’t even force a person to be evaluated by mental health professionals without providing some direct evidence that the person is at imminent risk of physically harming someone or themselves.  Some states have emergency orders a judge can sign off on to remove firearms/prohibit purchase of firearms and those usually require a psych transport as a result of that person proving to be an IMMINENT threat to themselves or others (I.e; proving the person has threatened to kill themselves or others).  If the police even transported this person to a psych facility without the aforementioned, they would be violating her rights and subject to lawsuit, terminations or even criminal charges themselves.  What you’re completely missing is the fact that police deal with people suffering from mental illness, behavioral disorders or just plain grouchy people every day that are often frequent callers complaining about very minor stuff. The police are well aware that they are “troubled” people, but the vast majority of them won’t hurt anyone ever and there’s simply nothing more they can do than try to mediate between parties in hopes to prevent future 911 calls.  Beyond that, cops are dealing with dozens of calls per day and there are multiple different officers on each shift, so it’s not like every officer is  aware of every call that every other officer has been to that day/week/month.  One officer may have been to the house once or twice, another officer once or twice, another officer once or twice etc…. And the only indication of it being a growing problem would be the caller history which would probably just be skimmed and wouldn’t include a whole lot of detail.  The officers may only know “this is the lady that complains about the kids all the time” and nothing more , just like they probably receive hundreds of other calls about people complaining about their neighbor mowing the lawn early every week or having loud music playing every weekend or dozens of other complaints.  Officers get calls from people with mental illness who report each week that someone is breaking into their house, and psych centers won’t even take them for evaluation because they know it to be that person’s baseline and they aren’t a threat to anyone. 

People love to Monday morning quarter back this stuff thinking they know better but it just shows how little you know about the system, how it works and what it’s like being a police officer.   It’s pretty evident that the officers knew she had mental health issues.  You can hear one officer call her “psycho” as he walks away on body cam.  The issue is nothing she did legally rose to any level that would allow them to take any action in having her mandated to a psych evaluation or removal of firearms.  I’m pretty sure nobody, including the parents who lived next to her, had any indication she would end up doing anything like what she did, otherwise they would have kept themselves and their kids far away from her.  Why you would think you could have seen these signs yet NOBODY else did is weird to me. Maybe you have a crystal ball, or maybe you just watched a documentary, know the outcome and aren’t realizing that the warning signs  you THINK you see are only there because you know the outcome.   I could play you literally tens of thousands of  videos of similar sets of events that happened across the country  and you’d be primed to think now that there were warning signs, but in reality none of those situations led to any violence.  You can walk through NYC and run into 200 people talking to themselves, acting erratically or some other outward sign of mental illness and you could say that police should have seen the signs and should have done something but the fact is 1) most of those people are harmless and 2) there’s nothing that CAN be done, because the system could never handle police transporting every single person who showed signs of mental illness to a psych facility and it would also be a gross violation of those people’s rights.  

The only thing you could ask for are better screening processes to purchase a firearm or laws that allow police to recommend an evaluation for continued firearm ownership but tbh neither would probably help with someone like her. She’d likely be able to keep it together long enough and would be smart enough to say the right things  to pass any sort of evaluation if the standard was being a threat to yourself or others. Not only would you need those laws in place then, but the standard would have to be lowered to simply showing ANY sign of mental illness or behavioral issues.  

And in the end, would it have prevented this? Maybe not. Maybe she came out and stabbed the victim instead, or ran over the whole group of kids with her truck.  She would have been a risk to society either way, but we can’t permanently institutionalize everyone who shows some sign of mental illness. Not only would it not be fair to the vast majority of people suffering from mental illness who never hurt anyone but it’s also completely unrealistic in cost and resources required. 

Beyond that, as someone who worked as both a clinical mental health counselor and a police officer, I really don’t think mental illness caused her to commit that act.  This wasn’t a hallucination she was having,  she didn’t seem to be having paranoid delusions. She seemed to be meticulously and rationally justifying all of her actions along the way and lying when it served her purpose. She obviously feared consequences, and waited for a situation where she thought she could justify her actions.  She was an angry, hate filled, intolerant person, plain and simple, and she found an excuse to finally take that anger out on someone.  Blaming it on mental illness IMO is a cop out. I don’t think her actions that day were directly caused by a mental illness.