[HPN] San Diego: Wm Miller shooting - Allison statement via FCuro of Street Light Street Light

[Tom Boland]

FWD  Fri, 18 Feb 2000 - CALIFORNIA, USA
     CC REPLIES TO Street Light's
     "Forrest Curo" <forest@cts.com>


MAJOR STATEMENT ON WILLIAM MILLER SHOOTING [Glen Allison via Forrest Curo]

SAN DIEGO - Two days after the shooting of William Miller here, there was a
scheduled police/community meeting at a local school. The people there did
not on the whole want to hear the planned police department presentation;
they wanted to talk about police shootings.

Today I transcribed the portion of my tape containing the statement made by
Rev. Glen Allison, Executive Director of San Diego's Ecumenical Council, at
that meeting. I also phoned him, read him the bulk of what I'd recorded and
got clarification of everything I hadn't been able to follow on the tape.


	"I was there on Tuesday. I saw this event going down. I'm a trained
professional in mental health. I can tell you that man was seriously
mentally disabled. And you didn't have to have a board of psychiatrists to
tell you that. The police officers knew it; the citizens standing around
knew it; and what they did was entirely unnecessary and uncalled for. And it
could have been prevented! That's a fact.

"Less than 8 blocks away, at Midway and Rosecrans, is a County Mental
Health facility where they have a team trained for this kind of situation;
they could have talked the man down. Instead they called in the swat team.
The swat team for a man who was mentally disabled and had a little tree
branch in his hand! [The swat team did not arrive in time, but had been
called.] The police were at least 40 feet from him when this started. They
closed in [when the dog was brought out of the car. Miller, afraid of the
dog, then bolted toward the officers] and that's when he got to be somehow
regarded as 'endangering their lives.' I would think that a 10 year old kid
who'd had a karate class would have been able to take that man down.

"I want to say to you that what's happening in this town and this county in
relation to mental health issues is a scandal. This kind of death is
preventable. And we all ought to be preventing it, not just the police. But
they need to know a lot more than those officers knew, or behaved as if they
knew. They drove up in four police cars and stood behind their doors with
their guns drawn. This man was forty feet away. No threat to anybody! I'm
just telling you that we need to use this occasion and to not have it happen
again.

"We need to review the force that we use on people, and use the proper
force; what was used on Tuesday was improper. I don't know this man, though
I've seen him a hundred times, but I want to make sure that he gets a decent
burial.

"As far as I'm concerned, he was a victim, a victim of the police's brutality.

"What I read in the newspaper this morning is that the Mayor is calling
some kind of hearing to review police policy. I think that we all ought to
turn up at that, and that the policy ought to be changed. And first in line
with the [new] policy, it ought to be the Chief of Police! It ought to be,
second in line, you! [Assistant Chief John Welter, chairing this somewhat
tumultuous meeting.]

"You're out here hearing these people. This is a symptom! Not a cause, a
symptom,  and you need to be addressing it. As far as I'm concerned, this
should be the last time. And you, first of all, should be wanting it to be
the last time and not again! The whole mental health community ought to rise
up, and the homeless ought to rise up with them, and say: 'Stop it! Stop it
today. Make this the last one!'"


Despite the prominence of the speaker, his authority as a witness, the
cogency and passion of his words, the Union-Tribune's account neither
mentioned his presence nor quoted him.

Forrest Curo
Street Light
San Diego

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