Let’s pretend my next-door neighbor is. (dangerous, I mean) What happens next is he acts on it, or he threatens to; or else he doesn’t.
If he doesn’t, the world keeps spinning on its axis and nothing in particular happens. My next-door neighbor may be, as Ian Anderson once put it, “eyeing little girls with bad intent”, perhaps from his apartment window, but insofar as he hasn’t done anything yet (not even downloaded kiddie porn as far as we know), we don’t do anything, even if both you and I are convinced that Mr. Neighbor is Evil in the Making®.
That’s the American justice system, that’s its basic premise. We intervene when people actually do something, in order to stop them from doing more of the same; but we do not intervene when we think someone might do something.
So if what happens next is that Evil Neighbor confronts some little girls and asks them things like if they’ve ever seen an adult guy’s parts, maybe that’s enough to take some action, yes? I’d think at least an Order of Protection making it a crime for him to approach them again, and now we can open a file on the dude. Mister Child Sexual Abuse Waiting to Happen, we got your number. As of yet, though, I doubt that he’s committed an arrestible crime.
That’s the gist of it with regards to “danger to others”.
Danger to self works a bit differently. It is a victimless crime but common law says you dont have an unimpeded right to bleed all over my rug or litter up the streets or rivers with your corpse, and that you or I or Society in the form of its uniformed representatives are within our rights to intervene if you threaten suicide or engage in action that looks rather specifically geared towards killing yourself.
But suppose we’re worried about Joseph, the young 20something guy down the block. He seems to have a death wish. He’s joined one of those clubs where folks climb trees and mountains using ropes and not much in the way of safety equipment, he rides a motorcycle in rush hour city traffic and weaves in and out of lanes, and perhaps more to the point in conversations with us at parties and such he says provocative things about preferring to live a short electrically charged life full of risk and dare because whenever he is safe he is so bored that the prospect of remaining alive for years to come makes him wish he were dead.
What comes next is, he either does something overtly and immediately self-destructive like playing Russian Roulette with a loaded revolver or he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t we don’t get to intervene against his wishes. (We can berate him and plead with him to take some safety precautions, that’s about it).
Then there’s Tom who is walking out into the midst of the West Side Highway and attempting to lay his hands upon the hoods of the rushing cars and says he is “blessing” them, which would seem to constitute “danger to one’s self”, don’t you think? We can call the police to get him out of the road (or drag him to the curb ourselves if we’re so inclined) and if this kind of thing happens often we can initiate a competency hearing to see if he is so out of touch with reality that he meets the legal criteria for “lacking capacity”. If he doesn’t, though, he’s in a grey area and what happens is that we err on the side of respecting his right to make stupid judgments and engage in silly behaviors as long as it seems that he knows what he’s doing and understands the risks and issues.
How about Laura, though? She’s extremely nearsighted but refuses to wear her glasses, and fumbles around when she travels, needing to get within inches of signs to read them and otherwise has to ask questions of strangers; when we last went to visit her, she was lying face down in the garden in back of the house. Later the same evening, she says she is profoundly unhappy about something but won’t tell us what, and she asks you to step on her chest and put nearly your full weight on it because it makes her feel better because it matches how she feels inside. Oh, and she has something she wants to show us in her room, and when we go to her room it looks like she has every piece of paper she’s ever owned since she was in 3rd grade lying in piles on the floor, and she crawls around blind as a bat on her floor peering at different piles until she comes up with a petition she thinks we should sign. And she has lots and lots of clothing, some folded in piles and some kind of wadded up, also on the floor, along with some blankets and pillows and it looks like she sleeps on the floor too. She has this really intense way of talking, like she’s coldly angry, talking very fast and clipped and moving from one subject to another often with very little warning. Oh, and she has a psychiatric history but is not taking any medication and does not see a psychiatrist. She says they try to poison her. What do you think we should do about her?
What I did was work with her and try my best to keep up with her, as she is one of the hardest-working and efficient leaders in the movement. She’s one of us and this is how she is and she is entitled to be left alone. Protection and advocacy groups and conference leaders and workshop leaders in the movement all across the country and internationally know of her and her work.
