Public Meeting Post

1.       How did the public meeting on Violence and Mental Health change your ideas on violence, murder, and its causes? In other words, what were your old ideas, and what did you learn that changed or added to your earlier ideas.

a.       I always thought that mental health caused people to commit crimes, but I never realized just how serious and frequent mental health is in people. Some of the statistics are just mind blowing when you get to thinking about them.

2.       Which speaker impressed you the most and why?

a.       The speaker that impressed me the most would probably be Mr. Tweety. I thought that his stance on mental health was very interesting. Another thing that I enjoyed about him was his talk about BRAVE. I liked his ideas on that they are going to focus on one of the worse parts of the city and start fixing that and then expand to the entire city. I think that this idea is good because I think that if you were to try and start BRAVE all over the city at first its impact wouldn’t be as powerful/successful.

3.       What do you think about the BRAVE method of fighting crime that we’ve begin in Baton Rouge (a partnership of community groups, social services and law enforcement working together in a target area of concentrated crime).

a.       Like is stated in question 2 I think that it is a good idea. I like mindset that they took when approaching the situation.

4.       What is the educational value of attending a meeting in this way –not to watch a documentary or a news story but to actually be there? What insights and knowledge can you can from directly experiencing such an event? What is the value in participating –taking notes, formulating questions, discussing issues on the way back, etc.

a.       This entire experience was extremely valuable. Since we attended the meeting we gained valuable insight that might not have been included in a documentary or on T.V. You can see people’s facial expressions and reactions better when you are actually at an event. Especially when you were as close as we were. When you take notes you can remember some of the important information that is stated at the meeting and by formulating questions it causes you to think on important issues at hand.