Police Broke Into Manning's Home With Guns Drawn — in a “Wellness Check”

According to The Intercept (June 5, 2018) Police Broke Into Chelsea Manning's Home With Guns Drawn — in a “Wellness Check”.

Shortly after Chelsea Manning posted what appeared to be two suicidal tweets on May 27, police broke into her home with their weapons drawn as if conducting a raid, in what is known as a “wellness” or “welfare check” on a person experiencing a mental health crisis.

Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower and U.S. Senate candidate, was not at home, but video obtained by The Intercept shows officers pointing their guns as they searched her empty apartment.

“This is what a police state looks like,” Manning said. “Guns drawn during a ‘wellness’ check.”

Welfare checks like this, usually prompted by calls placed to 911 by concerned friends or family, too often end with police harming — or even killing — the person they were dispatched to check on.

Manning was out of the country at the time of the incident, said Janus Cassandra, a close friend who was on the phone with her that night. “If Chelsea had been home when these cops arrived with guns drawn, she would be dead.”

The video is also available on YouTube.
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A Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) study from December 2015 found “people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement.” 

TAC estimated a “minimum of 1 in 4 fatal police encounters ends the life of an individual with severe mental illness.” This was based on real-time databases compiled by the Washington Post and the Guardian. (This remains the case in 2017.)

So far in 2018 (as of June 5th), the Washington Post has documented 73 instances where police shot and killed individuals with mental illness.