When Jason Harrison’s mother called the Dallas police because her bipolar, schizophrenic son was off his medication and acting erratically, she made sure to let the operator know that her son was mentally ill and requested police that were specially trained. When police came to the door they noticed that Jason was holding a small screwdriver and after yelling at him repeatedly to drop it and alleging that he lunged at them, they opened fire killing him. While the incident occurred in June and the family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in November, this week’s release of the video from one of the officer’s body cam has put the story back in the news.
[The officer’s attorney Chris] Livingston told CNN on Wednesday that [the officers involved in the incident] Rogers and Hutchins are specially trained and certified to deal with mentally ill people, but that Jason Harrison left them with no options. Asked if the officers could have employed nonlethal force, he said no. “This is a deadly force encounter. You respond to lethal force with lethal force. A Taser is a less lethal item,” he said.
This is what happens when officers are “trained” to deal with the mentally ill–they shoot to kill. And this is a house where police were called many times to deal with Harrison, who had never been violent before.
Team Blackness also discussed a white supremacist shooting in Arizona, a possible lynching in Mississippi, and more reasons why we drink.
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Jerzy Russian
I can’t view the video right now. Does it support or refute the story put forth by the police?
Kristin
I would rather get stabbed with a screwdriver than kill another human being. I guess I can’t be a cop.
Cervantes
@Jerzy Russian:
What’s your guess?
(You’re right.)
Brachiator
The police are not really trained to deal with the mentally ill. The sad thing is that the police are also not trained to deal with people who may not be able to fully understand and comply with their commands.
A mentally ill person with a screw driver could plausibly be a threat to themselves, to others, and to police officers. But we don’t send out psychiatric workers to deal with this, and no one would want to expose medical personnel to physical harm. So we fall back on the cops. And even if the cops are not stupid, brutal, racist, their training seems to say that they must consider neutralizing a person with a weapon no matter what that person’s mental state might be.
agorabum
@Brachiator: neutralizing doesn’t mean killing.
When dealing with the mentally ill, it’s all about staying back and giving time to allow the situation to defuse, not rushing in and scaring / agitating the person. Also – tasers. Zapping someone is not great, but certainly better than killing them.
Kylroy
@agorabum: That was my reaction – is this not exactly the sort of situations tasers were designed for? Yes, you’re not gonna hug it out with someone in this situation, but cops need a setting between “ignore” and “shoot to kill”.
Villago Delenda Est
All the training in the world will have little impact on substandard hires.
And America’s Police are appallingly substandard in so many ways.
Mike J
So what’s the point in cops carrying tasers? “Less lethal” was a selling point. Cops should not be trying to kill people except as a last resort.
My choice would be to take away the guns and leave them with tasers and have a special squad for the rare instance a gun might be useful. And give the gun squad ongoing training on not shooting people.
Shakezula
And “lethal force” is whatever the officer says it is. Handy that.
I notice that running away is never an option, just like learning techniques to disarm an assailant is apparently out of the question.
RaflW
Used with sufficient expertise, I suppose a toothpick could be a lethal weapon. But seriously, claiming that meeting a screwdriver with a tazer as being inadequate is bullshit. Especially with two cops.
One can taze while the other stands back a couple feet, gun ready, in case the damn tazer doesn’t sufficiently electrocute (sorry, uh, stun) the dude.
In other words, the cops are spewing crap defenses. But they always do. Only way that changes is to fire their bosses (ie: elect new leaders) and get new bosses who will fire the bad cops. Which is a tall order in Dallas, f’ing Texas.
ETA: we’ve seen how cops react when the boss starts trying for accountability, too. Mayor DeBlasio is being roasted by lots of cops for good reason (from their perspective). Preserve their prerogative to kill at will.
Cervantes
@Mike J:
That’s crazy talk.
(Sign me up.)
Brachiator
@agorabum:
I agree, and maybe there should be special SWAT types teams to deal with mentally ill people (and folks should recall that SWAT also emphasizes special tactics, not just big ass weapons).
But I don’t know that the average cop has any real training to assess a situation when a person is mentally ill. And when a mentally ill person has something that could be used as a weapon, you may not have the time to defuse the situation.
I live in Southern California, and we have had a number of terrible situations where a mentally ill or confused person was killed by the police. And in some of these situations, it really looks as though the situation is more complicated than people want to allow. In one case in Orange County, the cops seemed to go out of their way to brutalize a mentally ill person, and here the situation was likely initiated by an exasperated citizen/business owner who got tired of having a known mentally ill person hanging around his shop or home and who may have lied about the danger posed by the mentally ill person.
But in other cases, it really seemed as though the mentally ill person was either unable or unwilling to comply with the police officers’ commands. And even if you want officers to try to wait the person out, what would you have them do if the mentally ill person has something in hand that could be used as a weapon?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Villago Delenda Est: Sums it up.
Mike G
What the fuck was their special training?
Not mentally ill subject: Shoot to kill
Mentally ill subject: Shoot to kill
No matter the situation, it’s “Instantly Obey or Be Killed”. Because Freedom.
Jerzy Russian
@Cervantes: My guess was “no”.
The Moar You Know
All this sidesteps the actual problem: in America, thanks to He Who Has Shown Us The Way, St. Reagan, we have large numbers of violent mentally ill people (and an incredible number of non-violent but non-functional mentally ill people) on the streets and in people’s homes, none of whom is receiving anything like adequate care or protection. None of their caregivers or the general public have protection from these people either. And you may not like it, but we do need protection from those folks sometimes. It doesn’t help the situation for anybody that lethal weapons are literally more available than candy in the America of 2015, but here we are.
Until you get these people back in hospitals, this will inevitably continue. Cops deal with criminals. They were never supposed to deal with the mentally ill and I’d go so far as to say that the skills that make a good cop are usually the last skills you want in someone who deals with the violent mentally ill. I think you’d all agree that a social worker with a badge and a gun would be an awful cop. We’re asking the cops to be social workers.
Brachiator
@RaflW:
Everything about this video is tragic. The police had been called and deliberately told that the son was mentally ill. The mother mentioned this again and that he was off his medication. She was trying to get him to the hospital. There was no indication in the news story that the man had threatened his mother, but she clearly felt that she needed help in getting him to the hospital.
Why send cops with guns, no matter how well they are supposedly trained to deal with the mentally ill? But I also have to dispute whatever training they supposedly had. They see the screwdriver and demand that the man drop it. But he is mentally ill. They cops created a situation in which any failure to obey them would escalate.
But I am not seeing cops here spewing crap defenses. I am seeing police power used incorrectly. I see them not reacting to the request to take a mentally ill person to the hospital, but reacting to a man with a small screw driver who does not respond to their commands fast enough, and who may not have been able to do so. They react to this man the way they would to someone who had been deliberately threatening someone.
Everything about this was wrong, but I think it is consistent with how most cops are really trained, to react to perceived threats and failures to comply with their commands.
gvg
Frankly I didn’t see anything to be threatened by, let alone shoot. He was fiddling with a screw driver. Mom was calm and kind of exasperated, stepping out of the way with her coat and purse. cops freaked at the sight of a screw driver for no reason I could see. I would have had the cops tested for PTS or drugs myself. Obviously they were unfit for duty and they had no nerve at all. If they say some threat, they had plenty of room to just step out of reach which they pretty much were already. Bizarre reaction on cops part really.
Maybe the guy had behaved more dramatically on prior visits and they had heard stories or otherwise built up more violent expectations but the actual body cam footage didn’t show me any threat.
I do a lot of home fixit myself and frequently have a screwdriver in my hand. Its really not something that I think should be considered threatening.
gvg
I also agree its unfair to expect cops to be dealing with mentally ill patients, however those cops also IMO weren’t fit to deal with the non criminal public. They are a danger to random innocent people
elmo
@Mike J:
To obtain compliance when the cops themselves aren’t physically threatened, without the cops having to get within arm’s reach, or get dirty or tired or uncomfortable or anxious.
And if you suspect that means “as a torture device,” I won’t say you’re wrong.
Freemark
What is funny, in a very sad way, is that police used to be ‘officially’ trained to only use as much force as necessary to subdue a suspect. I was just watching a movie from 1947 where the heroine is going through cadet training. Since it just after the war most of the recruits are fresh out of the military. Paraphrasing the trainer ‘in the military you are taught to kill the enemy, but the public is not the enemy so here you’ll be taught how to use just the force that is absolutely necessary to subdue the suspect’. It was so unintentionally funny I laughed out loud. Not that police followed that at any time in reality. But it is nice to know that, at one time, police training actually recognized that not every physical ‘threat’ needed to be responded to with lethal force.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
Yep. Well said.
However, another problem here is that treating the mentally ill is still primitive. Sometimes this does not involve anything resembling treatment, but warehousing people, sometimes against their will. I don’t know if there are currently good choices here, only the best of bad choices.
Paul in KY
They are going to hang their hat on the fact that they were armed with guns & they can never allow anyone to gain control of that firearm.
Remember, in a confrontation with the police, there is always a gun involved. Usually it is their gun.
rea
Just a bizarre reaction on the part of the cops. The guy has a screwdriver, but he’s making no threatening gestures with it, done nothing aggressive, just fidgeting. And they give him just a couple of seconds to comply, with no sign in the video that he’s understood a word that they’ve said to him.
patrick II
@Brachiator:
…but reacting to a large black man with a small screw driver who does not respond to their commands fast enough…
Do you think it makes a difference to the police reactions? Do you think it makes a difference to adjudication? If it had a smaller white man from an upscale neighborhood, would Texas public reaction be different?
Bobby B.
The Soviet Cheka organization used to recruit violent scumbags. But torture? That couldn’t happen here…
JustRuss
@Brachiator:
I went through our local force’s citizen’s academy–one night a week for a couple months–and one of the scenarios we dealt with was an armed unbalanced individual. Real cops should be able to deal with it. Of course, our police force is one of the small minority in the country that is actually accredited
Cervantes
@gvg:
Yes.
@rea:
Yes again.
celticdragonchick
@patrick II: An officer here in NC blew away an underweight mentally ill white kid holding a jewlers screwdriver while he was already being restrained by two cops.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/04/us-usa-northcarolina-shooting-idUSBREA131FX20140204
Brachiator
@patrick II:
I’m from Texas (and luckily escaped). I don’t have any automatic love for stupid cops or for stupid Texans (and Lord knows there’s tons of stupid Texans).
Cops don’t know how to deal with mentally ill people, period. They can be a threat to, and have killed mentally ill people of all genders and races. If you watch the tape, you see the cops go into cop mode. They give a command for the man to drop the screwdriver and react based on their own bad training and fear, because the guy is not obeying them or not obeying fast enough.
When you send cops out with guns or even tasers to deal with a person who has been described by the dispatcher as being mentally ill, you increase the risk of the cops killing or seriously injuring the person. I know that some here believe that the Texas cops would have given a white mentally ill person the benefit of the doubt, but this is not necessarily true. And in the Orange County California case of Kelly Thomas, the cops used a taser on and beat to death a white mentally ill man because they wanted to teach him a lesson to stay away from the property of “good residents” of the community.
Cervantes
@celticdragonchick:
Awful.
And that police officer was indicted a month or so later.
And now more than a year later, there is still no trial date.
Doug r
Cops here killed an agitated man at our airport with Tasers. They shocked him 5 times. At least the second cop involved in this case got convicted of perjury today.
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/british-columbia/story/1.3002771
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@patrick II:
If it had been a NON mentally ill white man, he probably wouldn’t have been shot. But being a mentally ill person who encounters the police vastly increases your chances of dying regardless of your race or ethnicity. There aren’t very good statistics, but the current estimates are that at least half of the people killed by police every year are mentally ill.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator:
MUCH more like it.
PIGL
Local and state police forces should be disbanded, and replaced by federals.
Brachiator
@JustRuss:
Yep, but I have been seeing too many incidents where the cops clearly do stupid stuff when a person is mentally ill, or drunk, or in one case deaf. They react badly when the person fails to comply to their demands when it is clear that the person is unable to comply or is confused.
I think that proper training is essential. But I wonder how good this training really is, and how well it enables cops to act as other than tough guys with guns.
The Moar You Know
@PIGL: We did that in one instance, the TSA.
NO THANKS
I’m not saying I’ve got all the answers but that is not one of them. Putting them all under federal oversight, as was done with the LAPD post-Gates, would be a great idea though.
PurpleGirl
@agorabum: Tasers are not an answer UNTIL cops learn that a tased person CANNOT comply or respond for several minutes while the brain storm stabilizes. Cops are trained to ask for and look to get IMMEDIATE compliance, something which a tased person cannot do. Therefore, cops retase the person repeatedly and the person is either hurt or dies.
We need new protocols and procedures for the situations where cops are told to be mental health workers.
Tenar Darell
@Kylroy: Yes, this! Digby has pointed this out regularly. She has also spent a long time cataloging the abuse of tasers: basically using them as punishment/torture after a person has been subdued. You should search her site for “tasers;” it’s depressing, but enlightening.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: I know a guy who was an EMT in the 70s. They had frequent calls for schizophrenics causing mayhem. One night they get called out to a restaurant and one of their regular customers is stark naked and brandishing a big kitchen knife threatening to stab himself if they didn’t call the news crew down there. The EMTs aren’t supposed to approach until the cops neutralize the situation but the cops were at a standoff with this guy.
It was a much more patient time.
The cops come up with a plan to shoot this guy up with tranquilizer, so they convince him that the EMT is going to shoot him up with something else, not-tranquilizer. Man falls for the ruse, takes a nap, happy ending.
I keep seeing mentally ill people with knives in public places getting shot to death by cops. You know why? NO PATIENCE. This person is not rational and you have to work with the not rational. But our cops today don’t have time for that. Comply and/or die.
Another Holocene Human
@The Moar You Know: It’s not just Reagan. The law has also swung in the direction of total autonomy. The problem is that some of these folks may be intellectually capable of self care but are not in fact capable of responsible decision making. There’s a couple in Massachusetts who sued to get their daughter sterilized as she kept having babies (anti-psychotics and birth control pills don’t mix) which she was totally incapable of caring for and the increasingly aged couple was finding themselves the parents of this brood. They felt like they couldn’t keep taking responsibility as they became senior citizens for more abandoned babies. But the judge ruled that the young lady had a right not to be sterilized. Even though every time she had a child the state took the child away (and dumped it with the grandparents).
I know why the judges rule this way. There have been too many abuses in the past. It just seems like given the entire situation and her inability to be responsible for herself, not by choice but because she is mentally ill, that they could have used a reversible sterilization procedure. An IUD or something.
We do need those hospital beds back, though, if only for the suicidally depressed and so on. But it’s not legal to just toss schizophrenics in bedlam and throw away the key anymore. It’s a very, very difficult situation. (And we put way too much burden on these families.)
Roger Moore
@PIGL:
Just wait until there’s a Republican president, and then you may not be so happy with that idea.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator:
It’s hard to train a cohort that has been SELECTED for low IQ. Low IQ people have difficultly learning things. It’s also connected to impulsivity, which is a trait that is shared by low IQ cops and low IQ prisoners.
Cops should be screened for intelligence, empathy, and impulsivity. They should be high on the first two, and low on the last. When testing for intelligence they should use a test that is not culturally biased. Abstract pattern matching or what have you. Cops should also be a mix of local and non local. You should never have a situation where all or most of the cops or all of the commanders are not from the community served. Xenophobia dwells in all of us which is why you need those community ties. (I don’t think they should be 100% from the community either, that way lies corruption.)
Teeny tiny police forces need to be disbanded and replaced with better trained, better paid regional forces.
Focus should be on crime solving, disrupting patterns of criminality. As far as traffic goes the role should be preventative. Policing is a basic service and needs to be funded with property taxes, not dipshit traffic fines. (If someone is driving recklessly, yeah, fine their ass. Hell, take their license away.)
You know why clearance rates for homicides were so much higher in the past? Well, aside from the rise in stranger homicide vs not, in the past they used to flood the streets with cops after a homicide knocking on doors to identify witnesses. Now they have the cops reassigned to narcotics or counter terrorism and they haven’t grown numbers when the community grew because it’s GOP mantra to spend money on equipment and not personnel, so less cops, more gear. Well, relying on somebody to come forward is a shitty way to solve a homicide and it shows.
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human: Right now it may be a little pie-in-the-sky, but part of the issue is that calling someone out to help get a mentally ill son to the hospital is not a criminal or crime solving issue. I don’t think that what you train a cop for is the same as what you would train another type of peace officer for. Paramedics ain’t cops, and ain’t necessarily fire fighters either.
And here, also, it is not just a matter of better-trained, it’s type of training. Right now, cops are the people who are called out on general purpose calls. This might not be the right approach.
I agree with some of what you suggest about cops and training to deal with criminality. However, I don’t see regional or national forces as the answer.
WaterGirl
@Brachiator: I think real accountability for cops is the answer.
TriassicSands
To defuse a situation cops yell and scream repeatedly. That always works.
These cops are incompetent. Killing has become so acceptable in this country that situations like this one, where no one should ever die, prove to be lethal. Somewhere in the Master Cop Manual of Shooting First it must tell them that backing up or moving out of the way is never an acceptable response. Stand Your Ground (or be a wimp). Shoot to Kill. Period.
To me, one of the most obvious problems in cases like this is that police routinely behave like the situation must be resolved instantly. As a result, they quickly push the situation to become a crisis. Another problem is that their highest priority is that no police officer die. Their highest priority should be that no one dies.
So, “resolve the situation quickly with no police deaths” should be replaced with resolve the situation, however long it takes, with no loss of life.
grandpa john
@Another Holocene Human: Probably because the current training seems to only involve instant compliance or else, No patience allowed no negotiation, nothing but a total authoritative demand
WaterGirl
@TriassicSands:
THIS.
blueskies
It appears that many posters here have not viewed the video. Understandable. It’s upsetting. I watched it. Small screwdriver, maybe four inches long. The victim in no way — in no way — makes a threatening move, nor says anything threatening. The cops either panicked (that’s the most charitable interpretation I can make) or they just wanted to shoot someone that morning.
The panic may have come from one cop yelling and scaring the other cop, who then shoots. Now remember, the first cop is YELLING at someone who he was previously told was having a mental event. And the second cop loses it and starts blasting away. Because the first cop was yelling. A couplah real Einsteins we got here.
You just cannot make this stuff up.
blueskies
@Brachiator: Consequences. Training is needed, but being held responsible for your actions is what will ultimately correct this activity. Hell, as it stands, if you’re sadist, why WOULDN’T you join your local police force?
Rafer Janders
@The Moar You Know:
Um, the TSA kills a lot less people than local police do. And, whatever problems they have, they are not irredeemably corrupt and pseudo-gangsterish the way so many local police and sherriff’s departments are.
I would, at the least, disband all local and small town PDs and put them under the control of the state police in each state. As a general rule (with exceptions) the larger the organization, the more professional and the less cronyism there is.
Brutusettu
@gvg:
Cops put themselves and everyone else into a confined space, the cops were primarily concerned about their own safety once they saw the screwdriver, the person they were called to help seemed possibly not have not fully complied (hard to tell what happened before the homicide) and at the very least closed the distance between a cop either by going at them or trying to walk past them to his mother.
Once the fatal shooting ended and they shooters realized the person they were called in to help was lying bleeding in his driveway, the cops seem to mainly concerned about getting any blood they spilt on them, rather than helping the person they were called in to help, the person they shot dead.
Clean shooting.
Brutusettu
@Brutusettu: too many typos
mclaren
Can we just start calling our “police” death squads now?
Rich
I used to argue with friends here that concealed carry was a bad idea since it allows untrained yahoos to walk around with loaded guns. At least the cops have training, and should have better judgement when it comes to using deadly force. How wrong I was.
I am increasing thinking that Americans are becoming assholes. Just look at some examples: Republicans, Tea Baggers, neo-confederates, open carry Texas, anyone from Texas for that matter. The cops are just a reflection of our society. They believe that they are at war, and that their only job is to protect each other. It is no longer to protect and serve. The quote on their cars should read “comply or die” because that is what they are about.