The Public Private Face

It's all the disabled guy's fault.

Some selected quotes with my reactions:

Though Campione never threatened her family, Neri said she called police between October and January because she felt he needed help.

Really. Because that's totally your decision to make. Right?

He was later shot to death by police after pointing a pellet gun that looked like a handgun at officers at the Regional Transportation Center.

And that's all the context we get. Nothing to say why or even whether there was any interaction leading up to this, or why the police were there in the first place. (For non-locals, the RTC is a bus and train station. Do the police in *your* town hang out at the local commuter public transit hubs? Most places I've lived, they were conspicuous by their absence, even when said hubs were known for shady or downright criminal activity.)

An expert said Campione's death highlights the difficulty of finding help for the mentally ill while protecting their liberty and free speech.

Because obviously he needed help. After all, someone else shot him. It must be his fault.

"The days of depriving people of liberty to protect their own safety is largely absent today," said Shane, a former Newark, N.J. police captain.

Yes. That's called progress.

Shane said it's going to take a difficult, long public discussion to decide how police and other agencies address mental health issues if the victim doesn't want to get help.

I'm sorry progress is so disappointing to you, Mr. Shane. Pro tip: shooting them doesn't help. (On the bright side, at least the victim is correctly identified as a victim.)

She said she called the cops on three occasions when Campione:

1. shone the high beams of his car into her living room window, scaring her children.


2. stood under a street lamp in the early morning hours in his black outfit, swaying back and forth, smoking a cigarette and moving his ski mask off and on his face.


3. was lying in the middle of a side street, punching the air, then later banging on a metallic object in his front yard.

Okay. 3, I can see a call for maybe disorderly conduct. 2 ... would seem plausible if it were a stranger, but that's not the case. (Earlier in the article she claims to have considered him "her friend." But 1? I can't imagine this would have resulted in a call to the police for anyone not known to be mentally ill unless there was a long history of antagonism, which is contraindicated (see 2). That seriously smacks of harassment.

Neri said her neighbor left few possessions. "He had no curtains," she said. "He had a TV and one chair, no other furniture. I felt bad."

"You are charged with being insufficiently materialistic. As you can't respond to the charge due to your current deadness, this court finds you guilty. And weird."

I'm terribly afraid any comments made will be even more ableist than the article itself. I have no intention of trying to engage or even read there, because I really don't have that much room for more anger in my life.

ETA: Context! This explains why the police were there. I'm not sure if I feel any differently about it, because it isn't clear from this that he did anything wrong -- besides being insufficiently like other people.