Once upon a time, you could be pretty much as strange as you wanted to be in public and people generally left you alone. Police might accost you to move along, but you never had to fear for your life from the police just for being homeless, weird, or acting erratically. Sure, they might take you in and lock you up for a day or two, but inevitably they’d either release you back to the streets, or to a psychiatric facility for an evaluation.
You worried about where your next meal was going to come from. You worried about what you’d do at night when the freezing temperatures set in. You worried whether you’d have enough will to survive yet another day.
The one thing you generally did not worry about was being shot by the police because of your odd behavior.
The times, they have changed. Now, more than half of police shootings, according to one recent investigation, involve people who are mentally ill.
Worse yet — no one seems to care.
Gone are the days when police worked hard to try and talk a man or woman down from whatever strange behavior they were exhibiting. Now any failure to cooperate with police directives combined with anything even resembling “threatening” behavior could result in your being shot:
There are no federal statistics on police shootings of mentally ill people, but according to the investigation published this week , “a review of available reports indicates that at least half of the estimated 375 to 500 people shot and killed by police each year in this country have mental health problems.”
You know the kind of “threatening” behavior I’m talking about, right?
In Saginaw, Mich., six police officers gun down a homeless, schizophrenic man in a vacant parking lot when he refuses to drop a small folding knife.
In Seattle, Wash., a police officer fatally shoots a mentally ill, chronic alcoholic as he crosses the street, carving a piece of wood with a pocket knife.
In Portland, Ore., police check on a man threatening suicide and wind up killing him with a single gunshot in the back.
And from another article on this report:
In September […] police in Houston shot dead a wheelchair-bound double-amputee diagnosed with severe mental health problems when officers saw him wave a shiny object (which turned out to be a pen) in the air.
Seriously? People are dying because an armed police officer is concerned about the danger a small pocketknife might pose? Or a pen??
Don’t get me wrong, I have the highest respect for police officers and those who serve our communities and our countries. But when statistics show that half the people you’re shooting are people with a mental health problem, not a criminal problem, that’s really eye-opening.
People care so little about these acts of violence, nobody is even tracking this data. “A Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram investigation found no federal accounting of or reliable national data on police shootings of mentally ill people. State and local statistics are spotty and inconsistent…” Neither any of the national mental health associations — such as NAMI or Mental Health America — nor the U.S. Justice Department seem to care or have ever raised this as an issue. It took a newspaper’s reporting to bring this issue to light.
And perhaps more folks with mental illness are roaming the streets because of the relentless state budget cuts for those who are in the most need in our society:
At the same time, there’s broad agreement that an inadequate public mental health care system, further eroded by $4.53 billion in state-level budget cuts since 2009, has put police on the front lines of a crisis in our society that few officers are adequately trained to handle.
As a result, police officials across the country report spending more time and money responding to calls for service that involve mentally ill or emotionally disturbed people, but little data has been gathered to quantify the strain on public resources.
I’m dumbfounded by the findings of this investigation. Obviously there’s been a serious disconnect in recent years in helping to curb this growing problem — good officers making innocent mistakes because of inadequate training and lack of alternative resources in the community.
It’s time this problem started being addressed, so that more people don’t die simply because a police officer feels he or she has no other choice other than to fire their weapon.
For further reading…
Across nation, unsettling acceptance when mentally ill in crisis are killed
Half of People Shot by Police Are Mentally Ill, Investigation Finds
11 comments
I am so deeply disappointed in this blog post. This blog almost lost a very faithful reader until I realized that more than one author writes for this page. I’ll just be sure to check before I start reading next time.
I wrote about my own thoughts here: http://johnson54.blogspot.com/2012/12/this-may-be-controversial.html
I won’t be upset if no one reads it, but I didn’t want to leave anything inflammatory on someone else’s page. Better to do it on my own.
Well, I’m not really sure what you’re disappointed in or how sharing scientific data perpetuates some sort of stigma. This blog entry is specifically disseminating the results of a data analysis. Do you disagree with the data analysis? The data? If so, you have other data to support your view?
(All reader and even our contributor comments are moderated. It means no spam appears in our blog comments. Sorry if you believed that meant something more insidious.)
Dr Grohol
I’ve been following this disturbing trend for some time. Currently, the best ongoing covrage of these ongoing tragedies is at MHA Portland’s website.
http://www.mentalhealthportland.org/
Thankfully, courts are holding police and jails accountable for some of these deaths, even requiring CIT. Alas this does not help the dead or even many survivors.
But the real culprit is the current style of police training. When officers follow training protocols, they’re exonerated. But these protocols need to change with respect to use of force, mandatory de-escalation, and other aspects of today’s police service. Everyone needs to be safe.
Paul, you nailed it…Police Training. What a sad commentary on our society.
Nowadays, everyone appears to be quick to jump to conclusions…w/o considering all the facts.
I live in Portland, OR, where, as your piece notes, there have been multiple incidents involving police violence against people with mental illness. Our police situation was so dire that the DOJ actually did investigate. They’ve started to implement CIT training, but not nearly enough. It’s heartbreaking and shameful.
I agree with the previous comments regarding CIT training. I also feel that Elderly gal hit on a huge point — people are too quick to judge these days. People look at you for two seconds and have a whole list of inaccurate things about you in mind already. For anyone dealing with a mental illness especially, feeling this constant judgment is not good, or safe.
Yeah, you would think tasers would be used more often, the shooting statistics are disturbing.
I suffer from mental illnesses and am getting threatened to be put behind bars then to get proper treatment. I need help!!! Please someone help before I become answer number for the system.
Doctor,
Have you ever been cut or stabbed with a small pocket knife. If these mentally ill people possess a weapon, I hardly think the police have time to diagnose their mental illness or take the chance of being stabbed in the throat or killed. If a mentally ill man with a knife approaches you on the street would you be willing to confront him? The police only have a moment to make decision and don’t have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterback time. It is tragedy that some many mentally ill people are shot by the police. Society as a whole is to blame when someone cannot get the help they need because they are not insured and the hospitals put them on the streets.
Someone who is brandishing a non-lethal weapon, such as a pocketknife, doesn’t deserve lethal force as a response, resulting in an unnecessary and tragic death.
I know drawing your weapon is something most officers rarely do (in most parts of the country) — and when they do, it’s with the intent to use it. That’s why CIT training is vital for officers to understand that if someone who is in emotional distress is brandishing a small knife or what-not, it’s not because they want to hurt the police. It’s because they are, at that moment, desperate and in need of help.
That help is often just de-escalation of the situation and listening.
Too often, police officers responding feel they must immediately “take control” of the situation with commands to the person that, if not immediately followed, escalate the situation. This is completely the wrong response, and is the precursor to nearly every tragedy where the officer shoots (and often kills) the person.
Patience and taking the time to listen to the person nearly always works. The problem is many officers in the U.S. simply haven’t been trained in CIT techniques and should be. It would save some lives, and also help officers sleep better at night (since they weren’t responsible for another human’s unneeded death).
Hi Vince. 8 years later!! sorry I read this as I was searching through the current racial police brutality debate, and trying to find stats from mental health brutality. I am all for Black Lives Matter, and I also agree with your statement about police needing to make a quick decision. But just to say most of the racial brutality exists also with the same statement in mind regarding mental health ( having to make a quick decision) yet here we are standing up for Black Lives Matter, and yet the same cannot be said for mental health. Kind of seems like we’ve become a ‘selective’ society or at the very least follow the current trend. Sad really.