Police Look at New Ways of Handling Mentally Ill

When neighbors on a quiet Thousand Oaks street saw a strange man roaming through their yards one September evening, they did the natural thing: They called the police.

But deputies couldn’t talk the man into cooperating. After a struggle in which they doused him with pepper spray, he reached into a plastic bag and pulled out a kitchen knife. That is when they fired their guns, killing him.

Only later would they learn that 29-year-old Han Huynh was a schizophrenic who had wandered away from the Camarillo home he shared with his sister and mother.

It was the third time in four months police officers used deadly force on a person with a history of mental problems. After each episode, authorities have come under heavy criticism--a barrage that has spurred them into looking at new ways of handling the mentally ill.

Family members have questioned the use of deadly force.

After William Anthony Ramos was killed as he reached for a Ventura officer’s gun during a struggle in June 1997, his sister Cindee lashed out at police.

“They killed him,” she said. “They could have stunned him or Maced him. They could have done something other than kill him.”

And activists have echoed such charges.

“I don’t want to come down hard on police officers, but I feel they are killing an awful lot of people they shouldn’t be killing,” said Lou Matthews, president of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Authorities are listening.

Last month, Sheriff Bob Brooks organized a meeting for his department, several police chiefs and mental health professionals. The big question: How can officers better respond to the mentally ill?

The officials discussed numerous ideas, including the creation of a crisis team. Departments would hire full-time psychologists and team them with officers. It’s an arrangement already used by the Los Angeles police and sheriff’s departments, said Dr. Mace Beckson, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who attended the meeting.

Currently, Ventura County’s police agencies contract with county psychiatric teams who are on call for emergencies. But that system is cumbersome, police say, because the teams can take too long to respond, or may be dealing with one of their own patients.

In the case of Nick Nelson, a severely depressed Ventura man, the psychiatric team did not arrive in time. One night in September, Nelson shot out the television in his home before pointing his gun at officers. They fired, killing him on the front walkway of his condominium.

Such a team would also be responsible for checking mentally ill people into the Ventura County Behavioral Health Center--a process that can eat up an an hour or two of an officer’s time. By contrast, booking a prisoner into the county jail takes about 15 minutes--a convenience that may be a reason so many of the mentally ill wind up there, some advocates speculate.

Authorities also called for more training for officers. In most cases, new deputies are given about 10 hours of instruction concerning mental illness. Experts say that training needs to be ongoing, a periodic lesson for deputies on the street.

In that vein, authorities began earlier this month playing a series of tapes for officers during briefings. Produced by the Ventura County Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the tapes define conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

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The Sheriff’s Department, which runs the county’s main jail facilities, also hopes to take advantage of $27 million in new grants available to counties through the state Department of Corrections.

As many as 12% of jail inmates are considered mentally ill, said Robert Benedetto, manager of forensic services for Ventura County Mental Health. As beds in mental health facilities become scarce because of hospital closures and funding cuts, jail has become the choice of last resort, authorities said.

“There has been a progressive downsizing of state psychiatric beds since the ‘50s,” said Beckson, the psychiatrist who advises Los Angeles law enforcement agencies about mental health issues. “And there has been a resulting shift of the mentally ill from hospitals to jails and prisons.”

The Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction Grant will fund programs assisting disturbed inmates funneling through the jails, and help them adjust on the outside.

“A big question for us has become what do we do at 2 a.m. when it’s time to release them,” Brooks said. “We can’t legally hold them. They have the right to be released. But if they don’t call anyone or have anywhere to go, there’s nothing we can do.”

Brooks recalled one developmentally disabled man who, after his release, “wandered around for days” before he finally found his way home.

“We need someone who could take care of that person, make sure they make it home,” Brooks said.

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The problems are unlike those Brooks and other authorities faced as beat cops some 20 years ago. Then, 51-50 calls (police code for a mentally disturbed person) were rare.

“When I was a patrol officer in the ‘70s,” Brooks said, “the only time I would run into a mentally ill person was when they walked away from a state hospital.”

Today, it’s different.

Port Hueneme Police Chief Stephen Campbell said his small department of 21 officers interacts with mentally ill subjects nearly every day. His officers drive one of them to the behavioral health unit of Ventura County Medical Center about three times a month.

Limited mental health resources put street cops in the difficult position of handling the overflow, where officers trained in the use of pepper spray and guns try to reason with the unreasonable.

And even if an officer recognizes a suspect as mentally ill, it doesn’t matter once a gun or knife is drawn, authorities said. In those situations, officers are trained to shoot.

But Nick Nelson’s brother-in-law, Joe Hernandez, spoke for many others affected by what they view as police overreaction: “They can tranquilize elephants, but they couldn’t do that to Nick?”

Brooks has a standard response to such criticism:

“We’re not ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ ” he said. “We can’t kick guns out of hands or duck knives. We’d have a lot of dead officers if we did that.”

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And, while most departments have guns that shoot bean bags or rubber bullets, Sgt. Mike De Los Santos--a use-of-force expert for the Sheriff’s Department--said they can’t be carried on an officer’s belt, making them inaccessible in an emergency. Tranquilizers won’t immediately stop a charging suspect, and some suspects, especially those on drugs or mentally unstable, are unaffected by pepper spray.

To mental health advocates, the only long-term solution is more hospitals and more housing with 24-hour medical supervision. And authorities say there is a desperate need in the county for a lock-down facility, where officials can hold the mentally ill who commit crimes, instead of dumping them into traditional jails.

In the meantime, meetings like the one authorities held last month are a step in the right direction, mental health experts and law enforcement representatives agree. More meetings are to be scheduled next year.

“We’re not social workers, we’re not behavioral specialists,” Brooks said. “But if we can get those people together, we can work with them to find a better solution in the long run.”

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Times correspondent Holly J. Wolcott contributed to this story.