Police Plan Intervention Program for Mentally Ill

Police plan to put mental health experts in Los Angeles Police Department stations and expand the department’s mental evaluation unit in an effort to help mentally ill people before they commit violent crimes.

The program is being established in response to several deaths involving mentally ill offenders, including a February, 1984, sniper attack in which Tyrone Mitchell fired hundreds of bullets into the 49th Street School playground, killing a child and a passer-by and wounding 12 others.

“The hope of everybody involved is that by having the mental health people intervene at an early stage, we can prevent these things from occurring, preventing them from getting out of hand to the point where police have to take a life or the mentally ill person takes a life,” Officer Kurt Miles said.

Cmdr. James Jones, Miles’ boss and head of the new program, said police are unlikely to prevent all such incidents, “but if we prevent one . . . it will be a major accomplishment.”

Multi-Agency Committee

The overall program is being developed by a multi-agency committee that includes officials from the Police and Fire departments, the city and district attorney’s offices and the county mental health and health services departments.

An interagency agreement to start the program is expected to be signed April 1, Miles said. Soon after, the first of four county mental health experts will be assigned to a police division station in an area with a high rate of incidents involving the mentally ill.

Officers who encounter a mentally ill person who has caused a problem but committed no crime will be able to contact one of the experts, who would get help for individual, he explained.

“We’re hoping that with a referral from the Police Department, people we feel are potentially dangerous would get some sort of follow-up from the (county) Department of Mental Health,” Miles said.

He said police officials also have been given a 1985-86 supplemental budget request of $250,000 to expand the department’s mental evaluation unit from its current staff of one detective to a staff of 10--allowing 24-hour operation--and to computerize the unit’s antiquated card files of mentally ill people.

Computerizing the files would speed the unit’s ability to learn a person’s background so he or she can be detained for a 72-hour mental evaluation if warranted, he said.

Unit workers also “would have radio contact with officers in the field for advice in a mental emergency, and they’d have a vehicle at their disposal for responding” and for taking the person to mental health counselors, Miles said.

Another feature of the program involves an agreement by the city and district attorney’s offices and the Fire Department to operate 24-hour telephone lines to advise officers dealing with the mentally ill.

Miles said certain aspects of the program already have started, including a Police Academy program to train officers “how to better handle a mental crisis, trying to eliminate police-involved shootings, which so often occur when you’re dealing with the mentally ill.”