POLICE USE STUN GUN SECONDS BEFORE DEVOTED DAD OF 18 PLUNGES TO HIS DEATH FROM RAIL BRIDGE !
Useless police allow man to delays thousands as he fakes attention seeking suicide attempt on busy rail line.
Both potential newspaper headlines, dammed if you do, damned I’d you don’t.
Or.... Shock! Horror! Man dies while attempting to commit suicide!
Joking aside, I think you raise a serious point, and I'm sure some newspapers would be tempted to print the headlines you suggest. But behind that I think there is a real problem with some of society's attitudes.
The way I see it, whether or not there are any mental health issues, this guy was committing a crime, which was having an impact on many thousands of lives, and overall would be costing many people and organisations a fortune in things like lost earnings (for some workers) or lost productivity (for businesses), delay repay (for the TOCs). Compared to something like burglary or robbery, this particular crime is unlikely to have a devastating effect on any one single person, but does have a huge aggregate effect when you add up its impact on the thousands (tens of thousands?) of people affected by it. And it seems to me that if someone is committing a serious crime, then the priority is to stop the crime, and the safety of the person committing the crime should take second place. Too often, we now expect the police to put the safety of the criminal first, and that simply has the effect of encouraging more crime (look for example at how motorcycle/moped crime has soared, largely (as far as we can tell) because the criminals have realised that the police are reluctant to chase them on their bikes). Obviously you don't want to deliberately injure or kill the perpetrator, and you must still prioritise the safety of innocent by-standers, but I think we really need much more of a sense that, if you commit a crime and refuse to cooperate with the police when they take reasonable and proportionate actions to stop you committing the crime or to apprehend you, and because of that you get killed in an accident that clearly resulted from your non-cooperation with the police, then - that's your fault, not the fault of the police.
I don't blame the police etc. for the caution they showed given the current climate around safety of people committing crimes, but I think we ought to question whether that climate is something we should be perpetuating, or whether some laws need to be changed to put the responsibility for accidents resulting from crimes more squarely on the criminal.