Lack of Training Blamed in Slayings of Mentally Ill

Twenty-five fatal police shootings in six years raises questions about how well the Los Angeles Police Department prepares its officers for one of the most sensitive and potentially dangerous situations they encounter--confrontations with the mentally ill.

In many of those shootings since 1994, the actions of the police contributed to the situation turning deadly, a Times review of police and court records, and interviews with witnesses, found.

Those actions included aggressively confronting mentally ill people, shouting confusing orders and moving in too close to armed suspects.

The need for more careful handling of such confrontations is growing, as the number of non-institutionalized mentally ill increases. Surveys by mental health advocates and law enforcement research organizations indicate that as many as one of every 10 police calls in the country--and one in 10 arrests--now involves a person afflicted with a mental disorder.

The LAPD gives recruits less than four hours of training on how to deal with the mentally ill that includes lectures and simulations.

That training meets state standards and is typical of the preparation that officers receive nationwide.

Police Chief Bernard C. Parks says that his officers are well trained to deal with the mentally ill and he contends that police use of force against them is rare. But “no amount of training, not 100 hours, not 150 hours” can prepare officers for those situations in which a mentally ill person suddenly erupts violently--especially if the person is armed, Parks says.

The more important issue, Parks says, is that the police should not have to handle so many mentally ill people on the streets.

Until that problem is resolved, officers will continue to encounter the mentally ill. And that raises questions about the tactics police use to deal with people who act irrationally or are easily disoriented.

Tactics that might effectively subdue most rational suspects can backfire with people who are suffering delusions, paranoia and other mental disorders that can make them oblivious to commands, frightened and distrustful of authority figures.

Police who mistake that lack of cooperation as defiance or a threat may take steps based on their regular training and that could escalate the conflict, experts say.

“The police ability [across the country] to handle the mentally ill is almost in a prehistoric stage,” says D.P. Van Blaricom, a law enforcement consultant and former chief of police who reviewed dozens of LAPD shootings as a consultant in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles police.

“They just don’t get it,” Van Blaricom said about police nationwide. “The training is so poor [that] they confront, and then they escalate and then they react with deadly force.”

“When you are dealing with an irrational person,” Van Blaricom says, “different rules come into play.”

The less than four hours of training LAPD recruits receive is one-fourth the minimum amount suggested by the Police Executive Research Forum, other law enforcement organizations and mental health advocates.

Those experts say four hours of education can’t even scratch the surface of understanding mental illness, much less instruct someone on how to deal with a mentally ill person.

The Washington, D.C.-based research forum--made up of police administrators, including Parks--recommends at least 16 to 20 hours of training. Particularly important, the forum and other experts say, is instructing officers on how to modify the traditional “command presence” authoritarian style of policing with a more flexible approach.

Above all, officers should do everything they can to de-escalate confrontations with the mentally ill rather than exacerbate them, using verbal skills rather than physical force, Van Blaricom said.

The LAPD’s program focuses almost entirely on detailing the symptoms of such mental disorders as schizophrenia and paranoia, and explains briefly how people afflicted with them may be inflexible, impulsive and unable to understand an officer’s questions or instructions.

But it tells recruits virtually nothing about how to communicate with such people once they encounter them.

State training guidelines lump mental disorders with physical and developmental disabilities under the general heading “persons with disabilities.” It tells recruits to “approach a disabled suspect in the same manner they would approach any suspect.”

Capt. Richard Wemmer, commanding officer of the LAPD training division, said the department follows a curriculum set by the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training and used by police agencies around California.

That basic course offers an average of 17 minutes of education describing mental disorders, 19 minutes on recognizing symptoms, 22 minutes on handling mental crises and 15 minutes on suicidal patients, according to a survey of the LAPD and other California police agencies using the plan.

Another 24 minutes is spent on where to take mentally ill suspects who do not require involuntary commitment.

“Such brief exposure to these topics probably explains why [officers] voiced frustration concerning their role,” says a 1995 report based on the survey in the Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law. “This is hardly sufficient training for a career that brings the officers into repeated contact with mental health emergencies.”

At the LAPD training academy, recruits participate in a brief role-playing scenario in which they try to use verbal tactics to handle a depressed and suicidal person who has a knife. And they must pass a test in which they confront “suspects” on a large interactive video screen, and make lightning-quick decisions on whether to shoot them.

Each officer is given one or two scenarios in which the officer responds to someone acting as an armed mentally ill person.

In addition, Wemmer contends that everything the academy teaches in its seven months of training--from tactical communication to use of force--helps officers deal with the mentally ill.

After LAPD officers graduate, they receive minimal on-the-job training amounting to watching videos and receiving bulletins at the start of their shifts. But the department provided The Times with only one 1992 bulletin on handling the mentally ill and one video from 12 years ago. At eight minutes, that video is half as long as the LAPD’s videos on “Illegal Gaming: Cock Fighting and Dog Fighting” and “Van Pullovers.”

Officers also get an occasional roll-call visit and lecture from one of the department’s nine Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Teams, which help patrol officers deal with mentally ill people.

But those visits are rare, and so is contact on the street with SMART units, department records show. When the units are called to a scene, they are not supposed to help officers disarm someone. In fact, since 1994, a SMART team was sent to the scene of only one of the 37 incidents in which mentally ill people were shot.

Incidents May Point to a Lack of Training

A review of the 37 shootings calls into question whether the lessons taught in the classroom are being used on the street.

Recruits are taught “tactical communications” so they can try to develop a rapport with a person in a crisis, mentally disordered or not. One officer should do the talking, try to find out what’s upsetting the person and assure the person that the police are there to help.

But in the 37 shootings such “communications” often meant little more than a group of officers simultaneously yelling at someone to “drop the knife!”

In one videotape obtained by The Times, an officer can be heard yelling “Relax!” to a man holding a knife down at his side while his fellow officers bellow other commands. Appearing dazed and confused, Jeffrey Hobson takes several steps away from the line of officers pointing guns at him. Then, he is shot and killed.

A similar exchange occurred with Darryl “Chubby” Hood, who was killed by police at the Jordan Downs housing projects two years ago.

Sgt. Ricky Johnson says that as the field supervisor that day, he couldn’t concern himself with whether Hood was mentally ill. What he saw was a man running around a football field with two knives, stabbing himself in the head.

“You have to take a law enforcement approach to a man with a knife,” Johnson said in an interview. “Then, when you get him in custody, then you deal with whether they have a mental problem.”

Before officers got Hood into custody, they’d already mortally wounded him.

Hood’s family is suing the LAPD, saying its failure to prepare its officers for encounters with the mentally ill make it just as liable for his death as the officers who shot him.

Widow Ginger Hood and the family’s lawyer, V. James DeSimone, say that properly trained police would have known Hood was desperately ill and done things differently.

Brent Houlihan, one of the officers who shot Hood, could not remember whether he received much training about the mentally ill.

“There was training, but I don’t remember if it was that specific,” Houlihan said in a deposition. “I’m not a doctor on that level.”

At the academy, the LAPD tells officers to be sensitive to those with mental disorders, to be aware of their own prejudices and to avoid using derogatory terms--such as “crazy” or “pyscho.”

But some of the training materials themselves appear insensitive. In a list of “shoot-don’t shoot” scenarios, one is called “Schizo Steals Gun” and another “Mental Man.”

Sometimes officers carry such an insensitivity into the field.

“He had an unusual walk, it was kind of bouncy, like a crazy person,” Officer Kelly Stallings said in a confidential police report when describing Larry Friedman, a 29-year-old autistic man she shot and permanently paralyzed in a confrontation in 1994.

Had LAPD officers been better sensitized to recognizing mental crises, they might have seen 33-year-old Jonathan Horst as a man in trouble rather than a criminal suspect.

Horst, appearing dazed, had driven through a series of stoplights and led police on a slow-speed chase before they surrounded him on a South Bay pier. He sat motionless and gripped the steering wheel, unresponsive to officers’ repeated commands. Soon, a sergeant and an officer tried to yank him out of his vehicle.

Horst “began to grind his teeth and groan,” a police report says. And when police kept trying to pull him out, he drove off with the sergeant’s arm stuck in the window, forcing the officer to shoot Horst three times, killing him.

In another case, officers advanced on J. Pantera in Venice after he threw a grapefruit at their car at 4 a.m.

Pantera, assuming a wrestling position, challenged the officers to a fight. When he refused to drop another grapefruit, he was kicked, pepper sprayed and hit with a baton. When Pantera reached for a fanny pack, an officer wounded him, explaining later he thought Pantera was going for a gun. There was no gun, department records show.

“The job of the police is to take as much time as possible to deal with emotionally disturbed people, to try and defuse encounters with those folks and be reassuring rather than confrontational,” says Temple University professor James Fyfe, a use-of-force expert and former officer.

“I always tell people--that [police] should deal with the mentally ill the way the LAPD dealt with O.J. Simpson” in his famous freeway flight. In that case, police elected “to wait things out. It inconvenienced all of Southern California for some time, but they got the job done and no one was hurt.”

One national expert, Lt. Sam Cochran of the Memphis, Tenn., Police Department, likens confrontations with the mentally ill to dealing with a child: Officers should be careful in reacting with force to a disordered person’s refusal to comply with commands since it will often make matters worse.

Police should realize that people with mental disorders are sick, in need of help and often not a danger--even if they have a knife--unless provoked by officers using overly aggressive tactics, Cochran said.

“Aggression begets aggression, and this is amplified many times when you are dealing with a mind that is already out of control,” the National Mental Health Assn. tells officers in its manual for law enforcement.

State May Require More Police Training

Changing from one style of policing to the other, experts say, starts with changing the training.

California officials have begun meeting with mental health advocates, saying they’re considering expanding the required curriculum for training with regard to the mentally ill.

Lupe De La Garza of the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training says that officers could use more role-playing training in encountering irrational people, especially those with knives.

Mental health advocates support more training.

“Everybody has been trying to get the police to do more training with the homeless and the mentally disabled,” says Richard Van Horn, president of the Los Angeles County Mental Health Assn. “I just think basically that law enforcement has not wanted to deal much with this group.”

Chief Parks denies that and says he works to improve the LAPD’s response to the mentally ill.

Other police departments, meanwhile, are changing, often in response to shootings of the mentally ill.

When New York City officers encounter someone they believe is mentally disordered, they’re told to contain them--and do nothing unless they have to--until a supervisor is on the scene to direct the response and deploy an array of specially developed nonlethal weapons. The NYPD also has 400 specially trained Emergency Service officers who respond to mental health calls.

Those crisis teams did not arrive in time on Aug. 30, when New York police shot and killed a 31-year-old man with a history of mental illness. The grand jury found no criminal wrongdoing on the part of the officers involved in the shooting.

In New York, moreover, if a mentally disordered person has a weapon, a captain must be on the scene before officers may approach the person, says Michael Julian, a former deputy chief of training.

The city of Memphis has gone even further.

Ten years ago, the police department started handpicking experienced, levelheaded officers to join special Crisis Intervention Teams and work almost exclusively with the mentally ill.

Currently, 165 officers receive at least 40 hours of special training and work closely with local mental health advocates to gain an understanding of what it means to be mentally disordered. That is one-fifth of the entire patrol force. They have formed a daily working relationship with mental health facilities, so they can provide the mentally ill with alternatives to jail.

The Memphis model has been emulated by police departments from Waterloo, Iowa, to Portland, Ore., to Albuquerque.

Like other intervention team officers, Doreen Shelton is trained so well that she can look at a person in distress--and at the person’s medication--and almost instantly figure out how to resolve whatever problems the person is facing, or creating.

On a recent day, Shelton responded to a crisis call involving a mentally ill man. He was delusional, dying of AIDS and threatening to jump off his high-rise apartment patio to his death.

Shelton quickly took command of the scene, as intervention team officers are trained to do, and called off the regular patrol officers who were ready to take the man into custody by force.

Instead, she went in with the man’s father and patiently coaxed the distressed man into getting psychiatric treatment.

Since the Crisis Intervention Teams were created, Memphis hasn’t had one fatal shooting of a mentally ill person, says Cochran, head of the unit. Injuries to police officers also dropped dramatically, as officers use verbal skills instead of force.

“Most cops don’t, but you have to listen to them,” Shelton says matter of factly, after the man was driven off in an ambulance. “You have to treat them like human beings.”