The Complexities Of Isaiah Trammell

Isaiah was an autistic late-teenager in Ohio. He seems to be living by himself at the beginning of the video I’ll link you in a second, but he recently got laid off or fired from Wal-Mart, so he is concerned about retaining the apartment. He seems to be concerned about a lot of things, actually — when the cops arrive, he says he recently had a phone fight with both his mother and his uncle. At one point, he says he hasn’t a good life and “doesn’t see anything good coming.” (I think sadly many of us have felt that way a few times.) Now, he does have an interview the next day at McDonald’s, but here comes the problem: the cops run his name, and he has a domestic warrant against him. I have read that said warrant was for a domestic on his mother, but I don’t know if that’s accurate. Because he has this warrant, the cops need to bring him in — if they didn’t bring him in, it would be a dereliction of duty.

But, the McDonald’s interview is early in the morning.

So when Isaiah learns that he will be taken to jail and kept overnight, he starts to steadily lose it, because he’s going to miss this interview in the morning. Once he gets to the jail, he loses it even more, and rams his head into the cell wall a couple of times, which does create some noticeable bruising. At one point, two “mental health counselors,” who to me appear just to be 30-something blond women in Crocs, come over and talk to him through the cell, but finally decide they’re “through” with him. He’s still being disruptive, so the cops put him in a retainer chair, and he’s screaming and still being disruptive.

Eventually, he seems to fade out (pass out?) and he is transported to a hospital in Dayton. He later died, I believe about three days after.

You can get all the video and the sequence of events from the initial arrest here:

I have a couple of thoughts about all this and I am currently semi-bored at my primary work, so I figured I would put some out there.

The role of cops

If you watch the above video, portions are absolutely brutal and while the cops don’t seem to be doing anything specifically wrong, there’s a little situational overkill here, including one point where nine cops are holding down one autistic teen. Legally, everyone involved in this was basically cleared. (I am not sure if a civil suit will result.) The cops do not seem to know how to deal with this kid aside from “Shut Up!” or “Pipe down!” or “Behave!” It does seem to lack nuance, but again, he is smashing his head against a door, so I am not sure if you can respond to that with “nuance.” This is all kinda where “defund the police” rubber meets the road. That term was actually supposed to mean “overlap mental health coverage with policing,” but it was seized on as “radical leftist” stuff, and the logistics of bringing a social worker to a potentially-violent domestic situation at a home is also challenging.

I’ve long thought that how we treat cops, and think about cops, is the canary in the societal coal mine. I actually think the cops in this case did the right thing, although the line for what is “right” here is very confusing. If you let him beat himself into the door for longer, that’s bad. But if you can’t ignore it and take immediate action (close to what they actually did), that’s also bad.

My wife sometimes tells me (she’s a lawyer) that jails are the bowl at the bottom of the entire societal funnel. I believe her to be right (on many things, of course).

The role of families

This part does piss me off. Why was this kid living alone? Why were family members going no contact with him? I absolutely understand that certain people in your life get to be “too much.” I am sure I am “too much” for several people, and I’ve actually lost friendships over that principle over time. I totally get it. This Trammell case reminds me a lot of the Cameron Cloward case out of Utah, both in terms of “Mental health and police is a tough intersection” and “What’s the role of a family for someone who is struggling?”

In this article, from last summer, the father seems pretty sympathetic to the whole situation, but the family does not that they will eventually pursue some type of legal action. And you see this often in these situations. I don’t know anything about the Trammell family specifically, but a lot of times, people get abandoned or “no-contact” by their family, and then when something awful happens to them … the family sees dollar signs.

It seems to me like families fail at helping people become adults or integrate into vaguely-functional society, and when a family fails, now we shift the responsibility entirely onto cops and deputies, I.e. the bowl at the bottom of the funnel, expected to catch everything.

I am also not a fan of breaking the law, and I understand why that’s bad, but if the cops had just let this kid go to his McDonald’s interview in the morning, and they had made a plan to pick him up from that interview and take him to court … would any of this have happened? The trigger was the emotional distress, and the emotional distress was because he thought he’d be homeless after missing a job interview.

There could have been a work-around.

Final thought here: when I watched that video above, I thought a bunch about the idea of a “bleeding-heart liberal,” because if you watched that video as such (I often am), you’d be like “Down with all cops!” But in reality, the cops pretty much followed protocol to a T on this one. It does look bad, but it’s what they are supposed to do. This video opened my eyes (at a whopping 44) to some of the drawbacks of bleeding heart approaches to complex social issues.

Anyway, watch the video and read some of my context and see what you think.