One thing that always frustrated me about my co-workers when it came to dealing with people with mental illness or disability was how so many of them communicated with them as if they were not with a disability.  By this I mean, when trying to communicate with these people, these officers would fail to take into account the person's disability.  The best comparison I can give is when a sober person tries to argue with a highly intoxicated person as if the person was not intoxicated.  Or as if trying to explain trigonometry to me and getting frustrated when I can't follow the explanation.

In police encounters, another thing so many officers fail to take into account and greatly appreciate is that people largely are responding to the uniform and not the person in the uniform, which then promotes an officer's feeling of any resistance is of a personal nature.  That is why so many decent police officers will trust in the mantra that police encounters "are not personal."

Watching that video of the elderly woman really pissed me off because any person with half a brain can immediately tell that woman had some sort of mental issue going on (and to add to the anger, any decently trained officer might have even thought she was having some sort of health issue as well - like a diabetic episode - in our department's annual training EVERY year the issue of diabetic behavior was discussed in first aid classes and how people having a diabetic episode could act angry, combative or confused).

One thing that officer could have done was just follow the woman until another officer arrived.  He should have also realized this was an elderly person which means their bones are brittle and the person could be very easily injured.  She should have also been talked to calmly and the officer should have been more patient with her.  Like I said - she had an obvious mental condition and that guy completely ignored it, as did the second officer.

Now, if she had to be physically restrained, measures should have been made to delicately restrain her -  like holding her arms against her body - so as not to break bones or create a long long-lasting injury.

A year or two before I retired, another officer and I had to arrest this 65 plus intoxicated man only in his underwear on a hot summer night.  It actually is an amusing story (this guy became so excited when resisting arrest that he dropped a clay-like turd out of his underwear on the hallway floor and there was the two of us wrestling this sweaty guy while trying to avoid stepping on this turd), but he was a wiry, tough old bird, and the hardest part of the arrest was using just the right amount of force without hurting him.  He also ended up stepping on his own turd and then kicked me on the shit getting feces on my pants.

My point is that one needs to only use the right amount of force on an elderly person.  And these two officers clearly had a case of the "contempt of cop" with this elderly woman and it was just disgusting and inappropriate. 

I had an Alzheimer's resident home I used to go to quite a bit and from time to time you would have patients that would become violent.  One time an elderly man tried to hit us with a cane and when that happened we all knew he wasn't responsible for his actions and our response was not to hit him with our nightstick.  My point being, I don't think hardly any officer would hit a combative patient in an Alzheimer's resident home, so why would one wrestle an elderly woman to the ground with obvious mental issues alongside a road?

Another thing that cop could have done was express to the woman that he would gladly take her home and if he had to, issue her some sort of notice to appear in court instead of sending her to jail.