Orange County Incidents : Police Learning to Deal With Abnormal Behavior

The fourth time John Hall robbed an Orange County bank, his mother wasn’t nearby to explain to police that her 23-year-old son is a victim of Down’s syndrome, that he has the mentality of a 4-year-old and likes to ask for money at banks, but doesn’t really mean to rob them.

Two years ago, John was waiting to make a bus connection to complete his daily trip from a Newport Beach group home to a sheltered workshop when he walked into a savings and loan near South Coast Plaza and said “money.”

The teller, believing the young man was armed, gave him $431 and called police. John was spotted near the savings and loan but ran when a policeman approached. He “looked like he had been hit by a truck” when his mother, Ann Hall, found him in the Orange County Jail.

Hall and her daughter, Peggy McKeon, who was working as a volunteer in the state office of the Assn. for Retarded Citizens (ARC) in Sacramento, decided to do something, and by the time they were finished, a new instructional unit on recognizing the developmentally disabled was in use by the 33 accredited law enforcement training academies in California, which had joined Florida and Georgia in mandating such instruction on a statewide basis.

Modern police work often involves making split-second decisions based on information in hand, the conduct of a suspect and the instincts of the officer. With increased “de-institutionalization” of the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled, combined with pervasive use of psychoactive drugs like PCP (phencyclidine), it is becoming harder for officers confronting what they believe to be abnormal behavior to make the decisions to preserve lives--sometimes their own--in crisis situations, law enforcement officials say.

Two incidents in Orange County since mid-April illustrate the problem:

- In Irvine, a patrol officer pursued a fleeing 18-year-old, who was screaming incoherently in the middle of the street, into a garage. Believing the youth was under the influence of PCP, the officer pulled the young man out of the garage and onto the front lawn, where, after a struggle, the suspect was subdued, handcuffed and arrested.

The youth, Guido Rodriguez Jr., is autistic and unable to communicate, and the lawn on which he was thrown was his own front yard. Released at the scene, the youth lost a kidney several days later, which his parents charge in a $10-million claim was a result of the altercation.

- In Santa Ana, two officers arrived at the Amtrak train station to investigate a report of a young man approaching a cab driver in what was interpreted as a sexual fashion, while the man was sitting in his vehicle. The suspect, by then seated on a bench nearby, was not responsive to the officers’ questions, and when they attempted a pat-down search of the 20-year-old man, he resisted. After a struggle, the young man was subdued and handcuffed.

The suspect, Kim Byrnes, is aphasic, unable to communicate, and had taken the train from his home in San Juan Capistrano, as he did every day. However, the regular bus he was waiting for to take him to a special school was late, apparently causing him to approach the cab driver. No charges were lodged, but the young man’s parents filed a complaint about the way their son was treated.

Time for Quick Decision

“Does it really matter if a suspect is drunk, under the influence of drugs, mentally ill or aphasic?” asked Philip Sugar, a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles who has handled many of the city’s civil liability cases over the past decade. “The officer who comes to the situation asks: ‘What do I need to do to protect myself and the public?’ ”

“If someone is simply acting strange, bizarre, talking to themselves, looking destructive, banging on things--you can’t tell just by looking at someone what the cause is,” said Sanford Weimer, director of Mental Health and Drug Abuse Services program operations for the Orange County Health Care Agency.

James Fyfe, associate professor of justice at American University in Washington, D.C., said that while he has often been critical of excessive use of force by police officers, he feels it is asking too much to expect police to be able to tell why someone on the street is acting abnormally.

“You really can’t expect that a cop will be able to diagnose with any precision the causes of a person’s weird behavior,” Fyfe said.

“The question of diagnosis and the explanation of a person’s behavior is really secondary to an officer’s responsibilities. It’s his job to respond to emergencies and crises. He’s not in a setting where he can diagnose people. . . . He has to deal with people on their own turf. He has to deal with them on the street, and he has to make his judgments very quickly.

“The cop’s job is to get the guy in handcuffs and get him out of there, to minimize losses and try not to hurt the suspect.”

Many Released From Hospitals

In the past decade, as a result of court decisions, legislation and budget cuts, thousands of people in California suffering from some form of mental retardation or mental illness have been “de-institutionalized,” released from state facilities, and are now on the streets.

According to Dean Owen of the state Department of Mental Health, the county-based Community Mental Health system this year expects to serve 500,000 clients, many of whom have been institutionalized or would have been institutionalized in previous years.

The state Department of Developmental Services has the names of 75,000 clients, representing just 10% of the developmentally disabled in California. Only 1% of the total, 7,500, are in state institutions, and even that percentage is expected to decline by 1990.

Some of these people experience difficulties in the outside world, and these difficulties sometimes bring them into conflict with the law enforcement officers.

During this same period, use of PCP, called “angel dust,” has skyrocketed. Under the influence of PCP, people exhibit bizarre behavior, ranging from zombie-like catatonia to extreme violence. In the latter case, they can go into a psychotic-like state resembling schizophrenia, a condition in which the sense of pain is dulled, and they may seem to have superhuman strength.

Easier to Second-Guess

Largely as a result of these two developments, judgment calls are becoming more complex for the police, and easier to second-guess.

In New York City last year, officers attempting to serve an eviction notice on Eleanor Bumpurs, a woman with an extensive history of mental disorders, shot and killed the woman as she came at them with a knife. The officers later were indicted for manslaughter, but the indictment was dropped on appeal.

Norm Karde is particularly frustrated by cases like this. A 15-year veteran of the Placer County Sheriff’s Department and the father of a 19-year-old retarded son, he said he has “made it my business to find out the difference” between criminal and drug-induced behavior on one hand and mental illness and developmental disability on the other.

The “strangely normal,” as Karde refers to them, “are victimized every day by law enforcement because they (the police) don’t know any better.”

PCP Called an Excuse

According to Michael Mitchell, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in federal civil rights suits involving people who have died in police custody, officers have used suspected PCP use “as an excuse for excessive use of force” in “a good 90%” of the cases he has tried.

“For the most part,” he said, “homicide officers will attribute an arrest that results in death to phencyclidine.”

Karde said that when the likelihood of PCP use is raised in connection with a suspect, all other possible explanations for erratic behavior are frequently excluded from an officer’s mind until the individual is handcuffed.

“That’s the buttons that are pushed,” Karde said, which is why he joined McKeon and others at the Assn. for Retarded Citizens in preparing the new unit on developmental disabilities.

Because of her experience with her brother, McKeon said, “I’ve always known that people are afraid of people who are handicapped or disabled, because they just didn’t understand.”

The core of the California unit they compiled over a two-week period was based on a curriculum developed for the state of Florida in 1972 and Georgia in 1974 by Dolores Norley, who served for 15 years on the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation.

Norley, an attorney and longtime activist as well as the parent of several children with developmental disabilities, recalled that after she drew up the unit she “heckled the police training board until they allowed it to be mandated” in Florida.

Once in place, the results of the training were excellent, said Norley, who lives in Deland, Fla., and travels around the United States, speaking on the subject to law enforcement officials. “I find police officers to be the best students I’ve ever had in terms of their interest and humanism,” she said. “They really want to do the right thing. If you offer them the training, they lap it up.”

Surprised at Reaction

When McKeon and Karde completed work on the project and began to talk about action, she said, “I was told it was going to be so hard, that the police would be so resistant.” But when they approached Don Mauro, then coordinator for the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST), which prepares texts for the 33 accredited law enforcement training academies in California, she was pleasantly surprised.

“Basically, what he said was, ‘Wonderful,’ ” McKeon said. In less than two weeks, a supplement to a new edition of the basic training curriculum was prepared, including exercises with typically ambiguous “case vignettes”:

- While patrolling, you find a young man staggering down the sidewalk, and he appears intoxicated. When you stop him for questioning, his speech is slurred but there is no alcohol on his breath.

- A call comes in on a reported exposure case in a park. When you arrive, you find a 15-year-old boy walking around with his pants open. He knows his name and part of his address, but can’t answer any other questions about himself.

- You respond to a call of a robbery in progress at a grocery store. When you arrive the store owner informs you he was held up by three young men. Two of them have escaped, but you find one suspect hiding behind the store. He is unarmed and obviously frightened and confused. He is unable to answer questions about himself and acts like a child of about 6.

Officially added to the Basic Course Guide on Jan. 1, 1984, the unit deals specifically with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, autism and the likelihood of violent behavior.

“Violence is not a part of retardation,” it states, “except in the same situations which produce violence in non-retarded persons: fear, self-protection or mental illness.” It also acknowledges that “as in most police details, handling aggressive developmentally disabled persons presents difficult judgment calls.”

Impact Remains to Be Seen

Mauro’s successor at POST, Bob Spurlock, said it is extremely difficult to gauge the impact of such an effort. “You’ll never really know how much of this material has sunk in,” he said, “until a situation comes up.”

Descriptions of the effects and symptoms of PCP intoxication contained in a Los Angeles Police Department training bulletin give an indication of how difficult it can be for an officer to make a quick street judgment on the causes of a person’s behavior. PCP users, according to the bulletin, are often initially uncommunicative, disoriented about time and place, confused and fearful, with behavior that is agitated, excited, combative, self-destructive or bizarre.

Several other symptoms that might help distinguish between PCP users and people with mental illness or developmental disabilities--such as increased blood pressure and pulse rates, rapid eyeball movements when the individual looks to the extreme left, right, up or down, or sluggish pupil reaction to light--cannot be readily detected until the person is in custody.

Even Norley, who said she took second place to no one “in the vociferousness of my advocacy” on behalf of the developmentally disabled, added, “My heart does ache for officers in these situations.”

“There’s very little difference between a crazy person and someone who’s on PCP, who has made himself crazy,” said Officer Sergio Diaz, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

‘No Easy Test’

“There’s no quick and easy test to tell you which is which. It is inevitable that sometimes these mistakes are going to happen. . . . The victims sometimes are going to be mentally ill people who, through no fault of their own, are judged to be under the influence (of drugs). It’s going to be that way as long as people voluntarily make themselves crazy (by taking PCP).”

But the proper procedures for officers to follow are basically the same regardless of the causes of a suspect’s behavior, said Shirley St. Peter, psychological consultant for the Los Angeles Police Academy.

The basic point of mental illness training, St. Peter said, is that “you take time; you leave space; you consider safety, and you always talk.” These are the same procedures that should be initially employed when dealing with a suspected PCP user as well, St. Peter said. Any escalation in use of force to take someone into custody is then based on their subsequent behavior, not on the cause of that behavior, she added.

Officers are taught to leave lots of “personal space” to the suspect, to use appropriate voice tones and simple explanations, and to keep their hands off their guns, said Officer Bill Frio, who teaches crisis intervention techniques to instructors at the Los Angeles Police Academy. Such training helps prevent suspects from overreacting to the officer’s actions, Frio said.

“The officer’s first obligation is to investigate unusual or suspicious behavior,” said Lt. Sim Middleton, commander of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department Training Facility. “He’d be considered remiss in his duty if he did not.”

An officer’s attempt to investigate, however, “sometimes arouses fear or panic or hostility on the part of that other person,” Middleton said. “At first glance or first encounter, the behavior of someone who is retarded or handicapped and panicked at the sight of an officer might not be outwardly different from someone who is drunk or under the influence of a drug,” Middleton added.

Officer Must React

“The officer, in trying to pursue his duty to inquire and determine what’s happening, has to deal with that person’s reaction. If the person runs away, the officer has to pursue him. If the person attacks, the officer has to defend, and take the appropriate action.”

Both the Los Angeles Police Academy and the Orange County sheriff’s facility use POST outlines to teach recruits how to deal with the mentally ill and with PCP users when they are first encountered. In addition, since 1982 the Los Angeles academy has been using a 20-minute videotape explaining developmental disabilities.

The tape, prepared at city expense with the cooperation of the Los Angeles Bar Assn., shows street scenarios with clients of the Harbor Regional Center in Torrance, which is affiliated with the ARC.

The same year, the Orange County Human Relations Commission, in cooperation with the local affiliate of the ARC, produced a similar tape that is available to local law enforcement agencies in Orange County, including the sheriff’s facility.

When a street situation escalates to the point where a suspect must be overpowered, the two academies teach different methods.

In Los Angeles, where the carotid control holds based on cutting off the supply of blood to the brain have been banned in all non-life-threatening situations (the same standard applied to use of a gun or other deadly force), the preferred method of physically controlling an uncooperative suspect is to call in a taser gun and backup officers.

Training in Control Holds

Recruits in the three-month Orange County course receive 45 hours of training in arrest control techniques, including various holds and grips to control uncooperative individuals, Middleton said.

“The amount of force used can’t be any more than the amount required,” Middleton said. “We teach them to wait for help. One officer in a one-on-one situation will probably have to resort to a higher level of force. Usually, two is better than one, and three is better than that.

“Generally they apply a wrist lock or some arm-control hold that will take someone down to the ground, and then they can handcuff them.

“Pain is the main factor in these usual takedown holds. A person who is on PCP or other drugs, or who is mentally deranged, may not respond to pain.”

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department does not use the taser gun, Middleton said, but, as in Los Angeles, the carotid hold is available as a last resort to officers in Orange County.

“At best it’s a controversial hold, and I don’t know any department that encourages officers to use it except when other methods fail,” Middleton said. “The carotid hold is effective because it stops the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain, and it causes even the PCP user to lose consciousness.”

Last Monday, Irvine Police Chief Leo Peart announced that, as a result of the incident involving Guido Rodriguez, officers in the department will undergo additional training this June in dealing with the developmentally disabled.

Visits to Special Schools

The three-week program, using videotapes and materials from the ARC, will be augmented by visits of uniformed personnel to special schools in the area, as well as the joint drafting--with parents and teachers--of a lesson plan about the police to be taught in the schools.

The parents of John Hall, Guido Rodriguez Jr. and Kim Byrnes--all middle-class people financially able to keep their sons at home or to place them in private care, concerned enough to locate the most appropriate special schools or sheltered workshops, with ready access to doctors and lawyers in the event of trouble--spoke of their frustration in not being able to protect their children from the police. They also voiced concern for those less fortunate.

“I’m a resourceful, tenacious person,” said Ann Hall, “especially when it comes to getting John out of jail. What happens to the poor soul who doesn’t have anyone to look after him? It’s a dangerous world out there. He was lucky he didn’t get shot in Santa Ana that day. They want all those people to be ‘mainstreamed,’ but society isn’t safe for them.”