I consider myself to be a prison abolitionist, and generally take a position that calling the police will always make a situation worst. A few months ago my neighbors and I were put in a difficult situation where we did feel compelled to call the police and now I just have the opinion that calling the police is useless but also am having a hard time figuring out what could work in the given situation.
At a high level one of my neighbors had a drug fueled potential mental health issue where he began setting fires with a blow torch, shooting his guns, coming up to our doors in the wee hours of the morning naked with a bongo drum, pointing bows and arrows at people etc. that escalated to him setting fire to his wife's Tesla with a blow torch while it was full of loaded guns when she told him she wanted a divorce (they have 3 children preschool age and younger by the way). On three separate calls to the fire department and the police department they came out and said since he was on his own property they couldn't or wouldn't do anything about it.
He eventually went on to threaten some workers in a down town cafe with a knife and was arrested for that and is currently being held on preventative detention for 60 days but it shook my personal beliefs very much, that I was willing to engage with our current justice system for my own personal safety and then nothing even happened.
I feel like I betrayed my beliefs for nothing but I also feel as though I don't have a good answer for what the best option would be to handle the situation.
Okay well first thing first: You did not betray your beliefs. You made a necessary choice in a situation with no available Good choices.
I mean, listen: did you have the societal authority to Go Out and Deal With Him yourself? Absolutely the fuck not. Did you have the training and professional experience to do so effectively? I'm guessing HELL no. Did you have anyone else available to call to help you deal with this situation? No!
You did not betray your beliefs.
You live in a society that has laws, and those laws provide for very limited means of addressing the potential violence of other people. You are simply not allowed, on my Tumblr, to attempt to hold yourself responsible for the failure of those societal institutions.
There, you're absolved of your sins.
Now, feeling frustrated and angry? That's totally different. Those institutions failed you! It's their fault, not yours! What the fuck is "he's on his property, he can do what he wants"? He was on your property when he showed up with a bongo drum and he was generating threats off his property when he was waving around a lethal weapon. Those cops were lazy.
And you didn't really ask, but I'll tell you what they could have done with that situation.
They could have finagled a way to arrest him. Let him get sober in jail or if it's not drugs doing this, require a mental health eval on release and not to return to that address. (This practice is hugely annoying and difficult for defendants who have no monetary resources, I would like to note, but if this guy's psychotic, someone in this process will probably catch a clue and refer him for a competency evaluation.)
And if they were bound and determined not to arrest him, what else could they do?
Well, a good start would be to discuss with his wife a safety plan, and tell her that if she can get the guns out of immediate sight that would be a good idea, as well as knives and other immediately obvious weapons (bows and arrows not usually on this list, but it's a situationally flexible recommendation). They should also have gone through the standardized domestic violence risk assessment that has been adopted by many states at this point, and told her that she comes out high-risk twice simply by virtue of the coexistence of "divorce" and "firearms." At that point, they should have connected her to a hotline with a domestic violence shelter to discuss more elaborate safety planning.
The officers then should have filed a specific report that could be referenced quickly by other officers, put out a warning about that guy, shittalked him on the radio for everyone to hear, and made sure everyone was on the lookout for him doing something weird and violent.
Those police weren't powerless. It just wasn't a slam-dunk and it wasn't a required arrest, so they didn't do anything. Because if they did something, they'd have to follow up on it and do a lot of things that are real pains in the ass, like going to court, filling out paperwork, making reports, etc. But if they didn't do anything, there would never be any personal consequences for inaction (and if there were consequences for other people, like you, or like the downtown workers, they may never hear about it). That may not be the conscious decision they made, but that's the reality that creates police officers like that.
