> The response to people in psychiatric distress should not be police, especially not armed police. A uniformed response to an assault, even if that's just tak

> The response to people in psychiatric distress should not be police, especially not armed police. A uniformed response to an assault, even if that's just taking an official police report, is absolutely a reasonable expectation. You're probably envisioning a specific kind of psychiatric incident. I understand that inference. Let me try to clarify here. You seem to be speaking more abstractly, but I have personal experience with this sort of thing happening on a small church campus without professional security. Churches are somewhat special in this area because they don't refuse service just because someone is different, homeless, or strange. And they don't generally consider it someone else's problem and just evict people who aren't lucrative clients or whatever. But they also have to say 'no' or address conflict at times. For example, a true one, a mentally ill person might be refusing professional help, asks for money for rent from the church, and then gets agitated at the conditions attached to the money (see a doctor, take your pills, join a program for the drugs, etc.). Also you have things like relationship counseling happening on site (domestic-disturbance-type situations, but at church). Schools (mom wants to pick up kids, doesn't have custody, etc.). And lot of this stuff is all volunteer-staffed. Churches are holistic and generally have to deal with any given problem any particular visitor or member might have. And they have to be sensitive to people who are healing while protecting everyone around. People are just messy, and at scale, there are absolutely advantages to having a public servant in good standing on the scene. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but it's a lot more complicated and acute than people in these comments seem to realize. Bottom line is that, despite what people watch on TV shows, churches tend to be for people that need healing of various types. They are often people with issues. Wealthy, balanced, fulfilled people often decide they don't need church, correctly nor not, so there are significant selection effects going on here. Due to the law of averages, the larger churches probably have significant security incidents happen on a regular basis.