A System at Fault

Once again, an investigation into the fatal shooting by police of a mentally ill man in Ventura County has come up with the right answer to the wrong question.

Was Ventura police officer Jim Brittle justified in firing the single round that killed Jonathan Wesley Baker, 48, in the emergency room of Community Memorial Hospital last Sept. 30?

Yes, concludes a report issued last week by the Ventura County district attorney’s office. Baker, who had a history of depression and paranoia and was supposed to be taking psychiatric drugs, had already stabbed three people with a small pocketknife that night and reportedly lunged at police after attempts to subdue him with beanbag rounds and rubber projectiles failed.

We don’t dispute that Officer Brittle acted appropriately in that moment. But the questions that need to be asked--in this case and in all too many similar ones over the past few years--are why do these confrontations happen so often?

Isn’t there a better way to protect the public from people as profoundly ill as Baker was that evening?

Can’t we come up with better safeguards to ensure that such troubled individuals get--and take--the medication that will prevent violent episodes?

The public, the police and the mental patients themselves deserve better answers.

“We have to find a system to take care of these real sick people and we don’t have it,” Supervisor John Flynn told his colleagues the day after the report on Baker’s death was released. “Continuing to put police and the public in these positions is immoral.”

Flynn challenged the board to make better support for and supervision of the mentally ill a top priority in the county budget, in legislative lobbying and in administrative policy.

Other recent cases in which mental patients died violently include:

* On Feb. 7 two roommates who were former residents of state mental hospitals and were living under a conditional release program got into a fight that left both of them battered and bleeding outside their Ventura apartment. One of them later died.

* On Jan. 10 an Oxnard police marksman shot and killed Richard Lopez, a mentally ill 17-year-old, as he held a gun to a female student’s head during the lunch hour at Hueneme High School.

* In September 1998 Ventura County sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Han Huynh, 29, when he pulled a kitchen knife out of a plastic bag during a confrontation on a quiet street in Thousand Oaks. That was the third time in four months police officers had used deadly force on a person with a history of mental problems.

Some steps have been taken to prevent or better handle such encounters. The Sheriff’s Department and several municipal police agencies in the county are experimenting with different types of nonlethal weapon. Crisis teams have been assembled and trained to cope with violent mental patients, although in the Baker case the team did not arrive in time to help.

The county is finally acting to provide more supervised housing for mentally ill people, building 125 housing units on Lewis Road for the less seriously impaired and planning a new lock-down facility for the severely ill and a psychiatric residency program.

Such efforts deserve the unanimous support of our community. No police officer deserves to be put in the position of Officer Brittle. No member of the public should have to worry about being caught in the middle of such a tragic scene. And the mentally ill need and deserve help.

“I don’t blame the officers; I blame the mental health system,” Lou Matthews, a member of the Ventura chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, told The Times. “The system isn’t working, and that’s the bottom line. Mental illness left untreated can be deadly.”