Police and Mental Illness: A Deadly Combination
“Let me stress the ‘help’ part, this was a call for help.” –Mary Wilsey
“I didn’t call for them to take him to the morgue, I called for medical help.” –Shirley Harrison
Throughout childhood you were taught that whenever there is an emergency you call 911-you call the police-and they will come and help you. When a family member suffering from a mental illness needs someone to take him to a hospital for treatment, you typically do what society has encouraged you to do. You call 911. You believe and hope that the police would arrive and calmly help you and you loved one to the hospital. The last thing you ever expected was that your loved one would end up dead. Yet, this turn of events is common. Jonathan Guillory, David Felix, Daniel Davis, Brandon Lawrence, Jason Harrison, and Keith Vidal are a handful of mentally ill people that police killed between 2014 and 2015.
The individual officers are not completely to blame for the lack the knowledge and skill to identify and appropriately deescalate situations involving mental disabilities. These officers are ill-equipped to handle such situations and the end result is unnecessarily violent. Police departments should reform training to prevent the avoidable loss of innocent life.
We must face the sad reality that police injure or kill mentally ill citizens because the police are not effectively trained on how to identify mental illness or how to interact with mentally disabled and ill people. The Washington Post released a survey documenting the number of deadly shooting and found that a quarter of the 462 people shot to death by police officers in the first half of 2015 were suffering from a mental or emotional crisis. While the vast majority of these victims were armed, the weapons they used were often knives and fake weapons. Ordinarily these types of weapons do not kill officers as they can keep a distance with a firearm. In these situations, the police were not there in response to a crime report but rather a call for help from a caller contemplating suicide or form people concerned about the victim’s mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
One way of preventing these tragedies is the implementation of a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program in every community. According to CIT International, the purpose of a CIT program is to promote and support collaborative efforts to create and sustain more effective interactions among law enforcement, mental health care providers, individuals with mental illness, their families and communities and also to reduce the stigma of mental illness. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports that CIT programs have helped over 2,700 communities by providing training for officers. While this program have made strives in helping police officers, it has only been implemented in 15% of police jurisdictions nation wide.
Traditional police training teaches officers to gain control of a situation by demanding compliance. This technique is ineffective when involving a person with a mental illness that can often be viewed as a threat by police officers and results in the use of violent or deadly force. According to Laura Usher, a CIT program team manager at NAMI, a large portion of the CIT training involves verbal de-escalation. A survey by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found that police recruits averaged 58 hours of firearm training but only 8 hours of de-escalation training. CIT programs provide a much more through training over the course of 40 hours. With lives at stake, how could we not take action?
Officers trained in CIT approach a person with a known mental very differently then officers who untrained officers. They approach casually, identifying themselves by first name while wearing civilian clothing. They then explain that they work with the police, display their badge, and then explain that they are here to help. CIT training has helped save lives of both citizens and officers.
However, CIT does not provide enough training on how to identifying mental illness. Many of the problems occur when officers do not know they are walking into a situation involving someone with a mental illness or disability or if the person acts in a completely unpredicted way. Officers need training on how to identify mental illness. Training should be a community program. Law enforcement needs to form partnerships with mental health agencies and have ready access to these agencies. It is up to individuals, doctors, hospitals, and officers to help identify people with mental illness and provide them with the ability to get treatment.
A good example is the Crisis Triage Center (CTC) at the HCA Virginia’s Tucker Pavilion at Chippenham Hospital, which was established in partnership with the Richmond Police Department. The CTC provides “medical, psychiatric, law enforcement, and emergency mental health resources in a one-stop shop.” These facilities can further expand by providing workshops and seminars for officers. The events should be lead my mental health experts and explain to officers how to notice signs of mental illness.