NYAPRS Note: The two articles below illuminate the often destructive and lethal relationship of police officers to persons in emotional distress or people with disabilities, and the need for a better trained and more thorough response method for dealing with unknown persons in the community. But in the first article, it details how one of the officers who last week shot and killed a 25-year-old man in emotional distress on the sidewalk was CIT-trained. If anything, evidence indicates that training is not enough. A concerted and integrated response from the entire system of care is necessary to eliminate these occurrences. And without a system-wide commitment to de-escalation in every situation, whenever possible, police are left with few tools at their disposal to appropriately gauge someone’s risk or emotional state.
Kajieme Powell Died Because Police Have Become America’s Mental-Health Workers
Science of Us; Jesse Singal, 8/27/2014
On Tuesday, 25-year-old Kajieme Powell was shot by St. Louis police responding to a call that he had stolen two canned energy drinks and a packet of pastries from a local convenience store. As a video of the incident reveals, Powell had been stalking the sidewalk in front of the store, the cans on the ground before him, when the police arrived. A few moments later, he was dead.
The Metropolitan Police Department of St. Louis, which released the video to the public, believes the footage exculpates the responding officers of any wrongdoing. But as the New York Times reports, the video conflicts with key aspects of the initial police account: At first, the department said that Powell had raised his knife at the officers and was only a few feet away from them at the time they opened fire, and the video shows both of these things to be false (he’s close, but more than a few feet away).
Those last few seconds of Powell’s life will be parsed, and appropriately so, but this focus obscures a bigger issue: As a result of the nation’s patchy, frequently inadequate mental-health-care system, police are all too often the first responders to mental-health crises. Powell’s death is a worst-case reminder of why this is can be disastrous.
Both the video, in which Powell can be seen acting erratically and yelling at the officers to shoot him once they arrive, and accounts from neighbors relayed via Chris Hayes, support the idea that the police weren’t dealing with a regular shoplifting criminal, but with a man suffering from un- or undertreated mental illness.
This is an unfortunately common script. “These encounters go on every day, and they contribute to the mass incarceration of people with mental illness,” said Robert Bernstein, president and executive director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. The high rates of mental-health issues among jail and prison inmates (PDF) can’t be explained entirely by these encounters — imprisonment itself can lead to or exacerbate mental illness — but they are certainly part of the story. “There are, shamefully, lots of people with public mental illness who are known to public systems, out there on the streets, very much at the risk of being victimized or engaging in conduct that could get them in trouble with the police,” Bernstein said.
There are complicated reasons for this, many of them summed up by an informative Bazelon report (PDF), but what it comes down to is that all too often, Americans simply don’t have access to the mental-health resources they need. They fall through crack after crack in the system, and hitting bottom usually involves an encounter with the police.
“Police absolutely want to get out of the mental-health business,” said Bernstein. “This is something that has been thrust upon them just because of a lack of resources in mental-health care. They all believe they have better things to do, even when things go right.” In his (and his organization’s) eyes, any time a mentally-ill person is approached by police as a possible perpetrator of a crime, it’s a failure of the mental-health system.
That said, mental-health advocates and law-enforcement personnel know that this unfortunate status quo isn’t going to change anytime soon. That’s why programs like Crisis Intervention Teams have been invented. CIT training consists of about 40 hours of programming seeking to teach police officers how to deal with mental illness when they encounter it. Among other things, the curriculum offers verbal tools for dealing with individuals in crisis, and conversations with those who suffer from mental illness, as well as their families.
Part of the training prepares officers for situations in which a mentally-ill person doesn’t respond to commands the way most people do, and this includes training on when a softer, more gentle voice might help de-escalate a situation, as opposed to the louder, more imperative tone often used when interacting with suspects — particularly those seen as dangerous or noncompliant.
In an ideal situation, how would police have dealt with the call about Powell? The groundwork would have needed to have been laid before they arrived, said Major Sam Cochran, a retired law-enforcement officer and leading CIT specialist. For a dispatcher to know to send a CIT officer, an incident needs to be reported as a mental-health emergency.
Once CIT officers are on-scene, a key point to understand is that crisis intervention isn’t really possible until a certain level of security has been established. “The first step is always going to be for responding officers to make sure the individual doesn’t pose a threat to them or to any bystanders,” said Cochran. Then and only then can a CIT officer start trying to apply her or his skills to a given situation. “Invariably, opening up communications is a process,” he said. “You’d like to slow things down as quickly as possible.” Ideally, officers can get the individual in question in a position where conversation is possible, and can get them “to just stop and pause, and starting to talk at a safe distance,” said Cochran.
In an email to Science of Us, the Metropolitan Police’s Public Affairs Office said that one of the two officers who shot Powell was CIT-certified. But unfortunately, that probably didn’t matter. For one thing, according to 911-call and dispatch audio the department made available, the incident wasn’t reported as a potential mental-health emergency — the responding officers knew only that there had been a disturbance and robbery, and that the suspect had a knife.
And given the sequence of events once the officers arrived, the CIT officer was given little opportunity to deploy his knowledge. Michael Woody, a CIT expert and former police trainer in Akron, Ohio, watched the video and said that it didn’t appear to be a case in which CIT protocol could have come into play at all.
Many people who have watched the video — myself included — have noticed that the responding officers seemed to escalate the situation very quickly by immediately exiting their squad car with their guns drawn on Powell. But Woody, who wrote a paper about mental-health crisis de-escalation (PDF) that starts with a hypothetical story about a young woman being killed for refusing to drop a knife, said that this is normal protocol.
Given that the officers knew Powell had a knife, he said, “You absolutely have to have your gun out.” “In my opinion, I don’t think a CIT officer could have done anything else different in that case,” he said, since Powell continually moved toward them and the situation never reached the sort of stable détente in which CIT can serve a helpful role. (Cochran, who hadn’t seen the video, concurred that a guns-drawn approach did not on its own signal the officers had acted improperly.)
“It puts an exclamation point on officers needing more training on dealing with people with mental illness, because they’re the ones getting these calls,” said Woody. “They’re the new mental-health workers in America.” Cochran, for his part, said Powell’s death highlights “why we need a strong mental-health system, or layers of systems, in our community, so individuals can have access to some kind of support to be able to accommodate an effective life living with [their] illness.”
All of which is a fancy way of saying that an armed confrontation involving law enforcement isn’t the best venue in which to deal with mental illness. That doesn’t mean this situation had to end the way it did — as witnesses pointed out in the video, it isn’t clear why police couldn’t have used Tasers or other nonlethal weapons to halt Powell’s advance (a point echoed by Woody). But it does mean that the range of possible positive outcomes for Powell narrowed significantly the moment police were dispatched on Tuesday.
As Bernstein put it, “People rarely, rarely, rarely just snap. If anybody is watching, there’s an observable trajectory where everybody knows somebody’s at risk, everybody knows somebody isn’t doing well.” For whatever reasons, Kajieme Powell snapped without anyone noticing. For his story to have had a happy ending, he needed help long before he stole those energy drinks.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/08/police-kajieme-powell-and-mental-illness.html
Why do Police Keep Seeing a Person’s Disability as a Provocation?
The Washington Post; Harold Braswell, 8/25/2014
On Aug. 11, Los Angeles police killed Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old who had allegedly resisted arrest, tackled an officer and reached for his gun. And last week, police shot a 25-year-old in Saint Louis, Mo. Kajieme Powell had approached them with a knife, refusing to back down after they had asked him to drop his weapon. Ford and Powell were black, so pundits have highlighted their similarities to Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
But perhaps they have more in common with 26-year-old Ethan Saylor, a white man. Last year, Saylor reentered a movie theater in Frederick, Md., to watch a second showing of “Zero Dark Thirty.” He did not have a ticket. The theater manager asked three sheriff’s deputies to remove him. When Saylor refused, they threw him to the ground; one lay on top of him, pressing Saylor with his full weight. “Mommy, mommy. It hurts,” Saylor pleaded, moments before he stopped breathing. His larynx had been crushed.
Here’s what ties these men together: They were disabled, and the cops’ failure to comprehend their disability is what got them killed.
Ford was known by community members to be psychiatrically disabled; based on his behavior, it appears that Powell was as well. Saylor had Down syndrome, and his IQ was reportedly 40. Like Powell and Ford, he committed a minor crime and resisted arrest. But also like them, his resistance was largely a product of his disability, which made it impossible for him to fully understand and comply with police requests. Police officers overreacted, with fatal results.
Such examples of use of force are part of a broader trend of police violence against persons with disabilities. David Perry and Lawrence Carter-Long have compiled a list of recent cases in which disabled individuals — people with diabetes, deafness, cerebral palsy — were wrongly arrested, and even assaulted, by police who interpreted their disabilities as provocations. But among disabled populations, those with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities face the highest risks.
The statistics are shocking. A 2012 investigation by the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram found that “about half of the estimated 375 to 500 people shot and killed by police each year in this country are mentally ill.” Similar figures were found in a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and National Sheriff’s Association. In local police departments, the ratios can be even higher: The New Mexico Public Defender Department found that, in 2010 and 2011, suspects shot by police had a mental illness almost 75 percent of the time.
Such statistics are sobering counterpoints to arguments that justify police violence in response to a suspect’s failure to comply. These arguments generally presume that the suspect is a mentally healthy individual making a conscious — and thus malicious — choice to resist. But psychiatrically or intellectually disabled suspects are not making such choices. They may be resisting because of a lack of understanding, or physical control, or both. In such cases, police violence should only be a last resort. But the high percentage of psychiatrically and intellectually disabled among police shootings indicate that the opposite is the case.
The video of Kajieme Powell’s killing makes this point. Powell was acting erratically while brandishing a knife. But, as Conor Friedersdorf points out, the alacrity with which the responding officers drew their weapons escalated the situation. Contrary to both St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson — and the official police report — Powell does not walk toward them with his knife raised; rather, his hands are by his sides. The officers opened fire while he was still several feet away, and they continued to fire after he had fallen wounded to the ground.
Powell’s life did not have to end this way. While his advance was menacing, police officers could have created distance from him to deescalate the situation. If that failed, they could have subdued him with less violent means, such as a Taser or other non-lethal device. Though lethal violence may be necessary in extreme situations, the video of Powell’s killing provides further evidence that it is grossly overused.
Improved police training is necessary to fix this problem. Perry and Carter-Long advocate increasing funding for Crisis Intervention Teams and the Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Act, both of which are designed to improve to mental health services within — and as an alternative to — the criminal justice system. In addition, a greater emphasis on community policing will familiarize cops with the members of their precincts; they shouldn’t have to guess, in the heat of the moment, whether a person is acting from psychiatric disability or malicious intent. Finally, mental health services need to be further integrated into communities, and the intellectually and psychiatrically disabled should be provided with accommodations so that they can participate in communal life. This combination of policies can minimize conflicts between police and the disabled, while giving police a more nuanced toolkit to address conflicts when they occur.
Police misunderstanding, sadly, is nothing new. Sixty years ago, my mother was arrested in New York City. A cop had confronted her when she entered the subway without paying. When she ignored him and attempted to walk away, he arrested her, assuming that she was wising off. What he did not know was that she was autistic; because of her condition she either didn’t know or — more likely — simply forgot to pay her fare. She was also deaf, which explained why she hadn’t listened to his commands.
At the end of the day, my mother was lucky. She was from a white family of means, and her father pulled some strings in the local Democratic Party to get her out of jail. But if an intellectually disabled woman could spend an afternoon locked up in the 1950s, I shudder to think what would happen to her today.