Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

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Amid shootings, police should receive training on dealing with mentally ill

Fatal shootings of blacks by police officers, including the death of Keith L. Scott last week in Charlotte, N.C., are appropriately national news. But generally unreported is the number of people with mental illness who have met with fatal outcomes with police.

When I got my first car, at 16, my father sat me down to talk about one the most important rules of the road: how to interact with police officers. He kept things pretty simple: Don’t ever talk back to or argue with an officer. Use “ma’am” and “sir.” Keep my hands visible at all times, and move slowly when getting my license and registration.

“They have guns,” he said. “And they’re trained to use them. They’re trained to kill. Many police officers are ex-military, with military mentalities, and they like to use guns.”

I remember that conversation from 30-plus years ago, especially when there is news of yet another police officer fatally shooting an unarmed individual, usually a black person. Racial profiling leading to the deaths of innocent people is a serious problem in America. So is the killing of those afflicted with mental illness, who often are shot for no other reason than they act out in erratic, frightening ways. Angry, swearing, talking to imaginary people or doing things like driving a car into the White House gates, which is what a 34-year-old woman named Miriam Carey did in October 2013. Police officers involved in the resulting stop-and-go, wreckage-strewn car chase shot her multiple times before the pursuit ended, her vehicle atop a median, her 1-year-old daughter unharmed in the back seat. Family members said the woman had been suffering from postpartum psychosis.

I can only wonder if this and similar episodes of police encountering mentally ill people acting irrationally could have been resolved more peacefully. When former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who is open about his bipolar disorder diagnosis, took medication one night in 2006, then put on a suit and tie and went for a joyride in the middle of the night in downtown Washington, D.C., his outcome was far different from Carey’s. He went zooming toward the Capitol and crashed into its gates, believing he was late for a congressional vote. He was stopped by a police officer, who provided Kennedy a police escort home instead of taking him to jail.

Then there was the sad case in New York City in which a family called for help; their mentally ill son was threatening them. They wanted police to forcibly take him to a mental hospital because they couldn’t do it; their son was too strong. Two officers who were trained in how to deal with the mentally ill showed up and were doing their best to calm him down when another officer who had heard the radio call burst into the house, first Tasering the man and then killing him.

The excuse for profiling mentally ill people who often end up dead is always the same: police officers say that their lives were endangered. But police are trained for far more dangerous scenarios. There have been cases in which mentally ill people have been ordered to drop what was in their hand — a plastic toy, a stuffed animal — and if they didn’t, the encounter ended in death.

Many states have developed teams of police officers trained in dealing with the mentally ill. Not all departments require this, not all officers have the training, and the outcomes are not always pretty.

In 2015, The Washington Post investigated the killings of mentally ill people nationwide in its report “Distraught People, Deadly Results.” It found that officers frequently are untrained in how to approach someone who is mentally unstable, and that out of 462 people shot to death by police in the first six months of 2015, a quarter of them were experiencing emotional or mental crises.

I’ve always heeded my father’s instructions. In 2011 I was pulled over by police one night after weaving between lanes. I was exhausted and shouldn’t have been driving. So there they were: two police cars, four officers and me being peppered about my nonexistent drug use. I kept looking at their guns. Four guns, one me.

Police academies should be required to train police recruits in the skills of crisis intervention, including how to deal with the mentally ill. And all deaths of mentally ill people at the hands of police should be examined as closely as fatalities that spring from racial profiling.

Kim Palchikoff, a Nevada Humanities grant recipient, writes about mental health. Her Facebook page is NVMindsMatter.

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