Within the epidemic of police killing unarmed Americans there is a group that police have no idea how to deal with (other than people of color, of course). That group is the mentally ill. While not all the mentally ill that the police have killed were unarmed, they were often in need of help:
Nationwide, police have shot and killed 124 people this year who … were in the throes of mental or emotional crisis, according to a Washington Post analysis. The dead account for a quarter of the 462 people shot to death by police in the first six months of 2015. The vast majority were armed, but in most cases, the police officers who shot them were not responding to reports of a crime. More often, the police officers were called by relatives, neighbors or other bystanders worried that a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically, reports show. More than 50 people were explicitly suicidal. More than half the killings involved police agencies that have not provided their officers with state-of-the-art training to deal with the mentally ill. And in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous.
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shawn
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Mayken
Yeah, every time I’ve had to deal with the police and my mentally ill family members, I’ve held my breath. I’ve only ever called when I know the alternative is worse, so that’s few and far between, but still.. I cannot believe that in the decades – literally – I personally have dealt with this there has been no, zero, nada improvement in how police deal with these situations. If I have any alternative, any at all, I do that first.
Police are absolute last resort like when my brother pulled a knife on all of us…
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I feel like a broken record on this, but
It’s the training. It’s the training. It’s the training.
We train our cops to demand instant compliance with their orders, and that they should immediately respond with deadly force if they don’t get compliance. This is a fucking recipe for disaster when it comes to dealing with mentally ill citizens, and sometimes with physically ill ones — it’s not uncommon for people in a diabetic crisis to be beaten and/or Tased by police because they are unable to respond to and comply with orders.
It’s the training. It’s the training. It’s the training.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Our local civilian-killers (who have had some sort of training in dealing with mentally ill people, it obviously was bad training, or more likely, the cops just don’t give a fuck) medicated some poor suicidal bastard behind my house a couple of months ago with a full magazine’s worth of lead.
He did not survive the experience.
Had I been in my backyard at the time I might not have either, judging by the two bullet holes in my fence.
I no longer give a shit what the law n’ order crowd has to say and I tell them that to their craven faces. The police in this nation MUST be bought to heel.
Dave
@Mayken: This is the problem I have when I talk to many officers. A given shooting or act of violence against a civilian may well be legal and approved under department guidelines but they stop there. They rarely take the next step and ask are those laws and guidelines correct? And even if they shouldn’t be changed could we have done better? Having to use force should be viewed as a failure not as a success and too many refuse to look at this. When other first world nations have so many fewer deaths at police hands it tells me that we are systematically doing things wrong. Now given the ubiquity of guns and the higher violent crime rate the US (though still important to realize much much better than it was twenty or thirty years ago) we will probably still have a proportionally higher number of deaths at police hands but the nothing like they currently exist. It’s frustrating because all to often even talking to officers that I know aren’t out for a macho showdown and don’t view themselves as an occupying army they immediately default to well that police use of force was absolutely justified etc etc and their critical thinking seems to short circuit at what they have been told in training. As if they can’t question it. It’s immensely frustrating. And the only reason I can even make that much progress in talking with them is that I’ve been in far more combat than the majority of them will ever see so I can shut down the it’s a dangerous job you wouldn’t understand impulse but being a someone that’s done that shouldn’t be necessary for an honest critique to be taken seriously. And heaven help me if I attempt to bring things like systemic racism and class into play just instant shut down. It’s deeply frustrating.
Dave
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Absolutely. Training and institutional biases and a scary tendency to dehumanize. That demand for instant immediate obedience and turning anything but immediate compliance into a power struggle is a problem. The attitude seems to be if someone doesn’t immediately comply and the situation is resolved without putting that person into “their place” then somehow the officer has lost. It’s honestly completely fucked up and the last attitude that we should be encouraging (edit: or accepting) in people that are entrusted with so much power.
ET
Police are often at the front lines when dealing with the mentally ill and others like Ethan Saylor the Down Syndrome man killed by an officer after a theater incident, who need more careful handling that the drunks and other malcontents they deal with need. That they don’t get the training is likely because for them, everyone is a criminal and is treated like dirt and it doesn’t matter if they have the cognitive abilities to process events. I remember this coming up in NOLA after Katrina. Cops were dealing with way more than you average drunk tourist, dug dealer, and thief. These people had been around but the percentage of them got so much higher and cops and mental health systems were unprepared and completely ill equipped.
Starfish
Police need to learn to deal with neurological issues as well as psychological ones because with an aging population we are going to have a lot more cases where some old person with Alzheimer’s wanders off.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): It may not be just the training. We don’t expect cops to do the work of paramedics or the fire department. It doesn’t make sense to expect the cops to be an all purpose response team. The Supreme Court passed on a case in which the police wounded a mentally ill woman they were called out to help. The plaintiff wanted this to be viewed as an ADA violation. The ACLU supplied data showing that police forces with special training had fewer fatalities when dealing with the mentally ill, but this should just be the start of rethinking this entire thing.
You also have the problem of cops wanting to look at being on the street as being in a war zone where violence rules.
Mayken
@Dave: Yes, very well said.