A 21-year-old man stabbed a sheriff's deputy in the neck after the deputy grabbed his arm trying to detain him. The young man had not committed a crime but was being detained under Florida's "Baker Act", which allows persons to be detained for mental health reasons. This Florida law was passed in 1971 sets out the criteria that the person in question has refused a voluntary examination due to their mental illness, and that without treatment, the person is likely to suffer from neglect or to harm himself or herself or someone else in the near future. Officer Charles Williams assisted a Gracepoint Mental Health Clinic staff member with the involuntary mental health evaluation of Nicholas Furgason at a home in the Fish Hawk neighborhood of Lithia. Furgason ran from the home onto a trail after he found out he would be admitted to Gracepoint by the Florida Baker Act, police said. Williams chased after Furgason, who eventually stopped running on the trail, investigators said. The video shows Williams talking to Furgason, telling him that he was not in trouble and that he needed to go with the officer. When Williams tried to take Furgason's right arm to detain him, the video shows Furgason stabbed the officer in the neck, and then run away. Williams was unaware that the suspect had a knife. For 100 yards, the officer chased Furgason, who ignored Williams' commands to stop, and used a taser to subdue Furgason, investigators said. A video can be seen here: Suspect stabs Hillsborough County Deputy in neck during pursuit - YouTube Suspect stabs Hillsborough County Deputy in neck during pursuit, HCSOSheriff, October 12, 2020 The Hillsborough County Office said Furgason was arrested and faces the charges of (1) Attempted felony murder of a law enforcement officer, (2) Resisting an officer with violence, (3) Resisting an officer without violence. Now, many people will have many different perspectives on this story, and there are a number of different issues that could be brought up. But I would just like to focus on one perspective: What if that young man is not really in the wrong and the law or certain decision-makers are what is really to blame for this incident? Why don't people ever blame the laws themselves when violent encounters like this happen? Yes, sure, there are situations people need to be arrested, but what about in situations where they did not? I would like to know why (the exact reasons) they thought they were justified in forcibly bringing that person to a "mental health examination". All the news articles about this story seem to disingenuously and dishonestly brush over this, merely saying that they were bringing him to a "mental health examination". To many people, that would seem to give the impression that this just involves a little visit to an office. More often what it actually involves is bringing that person inside a secure locked facility. The word "examination" implies that they are actually going to somehow examine that person, once there, to see if they should be held there. When in reality, the examination of the person once there has almost nothing to do with whether they are going to be held there. By the time they arrive, it's pretty much already a foregone conclusion that they are not going to be allowed to leave. The decision is based on reports from other people, and the decision-makers in these places almost always decide to keep the person there. If you look at the "Grace Point" place they were going to bring him to, from the outside it does appear to be just a relatively small place in a strip mall, but if you look at the pictures it does have a door marked "Involuntary Patient Entrance" with a key code lock, indicating that this place was equipped to hold people against their will. When someone tries to forcibly grab you and detain you, it is pretty instinctual to fight back. If then, adequate reason did not actually exist for that person to be detained, then (in some way) the blame really is on the decision-maker(s) who decided to detain them. I do wonder if law enforcement could have handled this situation differently. Perhaps inform the young man what was going to happen to him if he was not going to be willing to cooperate, and then if he agreed, take him to visit a normal office for treatment, in some place that did not have prison-like conditions. But law enforcement chose to use force. These are difficult types of situations, but (especially from a Libertarian perspective) I do see some big issues with trying to use physical force and arrest in the name of helping people against their will. Arguably what they did here might have made this 21-year-old's life much worse. He might never have attacked that deputy if it was not for the instinct to self defense. And now the young man will be facing criminal charges and lots of prison time. My question is, do these type of situations ever get weighed in the balance when discussing the pros and cons of these types of laws? Because they really should. I am mostly of the opinion that we should limit physical force (violence is what it really is) to situations where it is really needed. It may well not have been needed here. Yes, the young man stabbing that deputy is violence, but grabbing someone to put them in handcuffs and forcibly detain them is also a form of violence, and resulted in the other violence. I will leave with a quote from C.S. Lewis's "God in the Dock": "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ... This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
To preemptively address one of the possible responses to this: Some people are going to say that the Baker Act only allows a person to be held for three days for evaluation. While this point is technically true, it is false in its essence, and the reasons why will be explained below. It is very misleading statement. As soon as he would have been brought in, they would have decided to hold him for longer. Even if he had acted completely normal and displayed no violent tendencies while being held for evaluation. Once anyone has been involuntarily admitted to a secure facility, it's almost always a foregone conclusion that the decision-maker there is going to determine to keep them longer. The decision-maker mostly makes their "evaluation" based on a prior report of the person, not what they observe from the person during the three days they are there. Anyone claiming that they were likely to only hold him for 3 days is being unrealistic and disingenuous. That's very often not how it works (in this type of situation). What many of you may not understand, there really does not exist any need to even bring the person in to be able make the evaluation, in most cases. That's kind of just a false pretext, making it seem like they need to bring the person in to "evaluate" them, before deciding they should be kept there for longer. In most of these cases they could just as well completely toss out the "3 day evaluation" part and everything would really be completely the same. The doctors also routinely lie and claim they "observe things" in the patients while they are there to help make sure that they will get a court order to hold them longer. These alleged observations and "professional opinions" can't really be proven or disproven in any way. Once the patient is in custody under observation, it makes it much easier to falsely insinuate that the doctor's determination has something to do with what they have actually observed. Basically, once they bring the patient into the secure facility, it then makes it much easier to hold them for longer than the initial 3 days.
