Cops and the Mentally Ill

Local jails have become the de facto warehouses of the severely mentally ill, and those who deal with the mentally ill in crisis are too often men and women who wear guns and badges.

Of course, it was not supposed to turn out this way. Those released from hospitals, and those who would once have been confined to such places, were to have been treated in community-based mental health clinics. These clinics were never built. Now, the cycle too often runs from the streets to arrest to jail and back to the streets.

The jails and the police cry foul: This is not the kind of work that should have been dumped in their laps. Agreed. But this situation won’t change in the foreseeable future. The police must become equipped to deal appropriately with the mentally ill, through better training and awareness. Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks presides over a department whose officers have, since 1994, shot 37 people who were exhibiting irrational behavior or symptoms of mental illness. Twenty-five of those were killed.

Times writers Josh Meyer and Steve Berry report that a dozen killings of mentally ill or unstable people over the past six years came in confrontations involving questionable police tactics and use of deadly force. The example we all know is the tiny homeless woman, Margaret Laverne Mitchell, killed last May by an officer who said he feared she would harm him with a screwdriver. Just as hard to understand is the death of the unarmed J. Pantera in Venice, who challenged officers after he threw a grapefruit at their car.

That’s disturbing enough, but allegations have also surfaced about falsified police information that exaggerated the threat in some of these cases. However, in contrast with the complex Rampart police corruption scandal, needlessly violent confrontations between police officers and the mentally ill can be clearly addressed through better training. Police officers can’t be prepared to deal with the mentally ill through just a few hours of training or by a single video. The emphasis should be on negotiation and defusing a potentially dangerous situation so that guns are unnecessary.

The Memphis, Tenn., Police Department trains about one in 10 of its officers in how to handle dangerous situations with mentally ill suspects. It’s a cost-effective approach that uses training by mental health professionals at no cost to the city of Memphis. It’s also a nationally recognized program that has spread to police departments in Portland, Albuquerque, Seattle and San Jose.

Chief Parks, as well as city, county and mental health officials, should consider adapting such a program to the needs of Los Angeles. Better training will protect police as well as the mentally ill by teaching officers how to avoid development of dangerous situations. In so doing we might save the life of a future Margaret Mitchell.

When a wild animal is loose in Los Angeles, much thought usually is given to how to safely return it to the wild. The animal is shot only as a last resort, an occurrence that almost always generates public outrage. It’s a shame that a mentally ill person here can’t get at least as much consideration as a mountain lion.