The story out of El Cajon, Calif., a San Diego suburb, had an eerie familiarity: The police respond to a person exhibiting some kind of disturbing behavior, but the subject — perhaps lost in his own, altered world — does not comply with the usual commands, does not heed the standard warnings, acts in a way that seems to invite danger, and ends up dead.

An officer in El Cajon fatally shot a man identified as Alfred Olango on Tuesday, after Mr. Olango’s sister called 911 for help because he was acting erratically. The police released a still frame from a bystander’s video showing Mr. Olango mirroring the shooting stance of the officer facing him — feet apart, hands clasped and pointed at the officer. But one man had a gun, and the other, it turned out, did not.

“I called for help; I didn’t call you guys to kill him,” the sister wailed on a Facebook video recorded by a bystander.

Far too little is known about what happened in El Cajon to judge the officer’s conduct, law enforcement experts and advocates for mentally ill people say. But the police use of force — sometimes lethal — against those with diminished mental capacity is distressingly common. The experts and advocates say that while training and practices have improved in the last generation, officers in many agencies still receive little or no education in how to recognize and deal with people who may not behave rationally.

Like other police uses of force, confrontations involving people with diminished mental capacity have increasingly been caught on video and turned into national news. In July, officers in Sacramento shot and killed a man who was walking and running in the street, gesticulating wildly, and who refused to obey orders to drop the knife he was holding or to lie down.

Days later, after an autistic man sat in a street in North Miami, Fla., playing with a toy truck the police may have mistaken for a weapon, an officer tried to shoot him — and instead accidentally shot and wounded the man’s therapist, who had sat down next to him to try to coax him away.

“There are hundreds of thousands of times when officers are helpful, but far too often, people in crisis end up being Tasered, beaten, arrested and even shot, and a lot of families are very scared to call the police, knowing something like that can happen,” said Laura Usher, criminal justice and advocacy manager at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“The underlying problem is there aren’t enough crisis services so people turn instead to 911, but there also needs to be a lot more police training.”

The Justice Department has looked into several police departments in recent years for their use of force. The investigators have reported finding that excessive force was routinely used with people whose ability to understand or follow commands was impaired — whether by mental illness, developmental disabilities or intoxication — in Baltimore, Seattle, Albuquerque and other cities.

“Officers, especially the majority who are not specially trained on this issue, do not use appropriate techniques or de-escalate encounters with individuals with mental illness or impaired faculties to prevent the use of force and, when force is used, officers do not adjust the application of force to account for the person’s mental illness,” the department wrote in its 2014 report on the Cleveland Police Department.

Law enforcement training teaches officers to be forceful, to take charge of a situation and to physically control anyone who might be a danger. In the last two decades, there has been a growing trend to teach officers to de-escalate tensions, particularly with troubled people, but experts say there is a long way to go before the techniques reach every department and every officer, and really sink into the law enforcement mind-set.

The tactics can involve the officer keeping a distance, coaxing rather than commanding, and maintaining a quiet, conversational tone of voice.

“Yelling commands at someone who’s agitated and maybe delusional is not going to help,” said Jim Bueermann, the president of the Police Foundation, a policy research group, and a former police chief in Redlands, Calif.

Some cities have gone further, establishing crisis intervention teams, with a large number of patrol officers receiving more intensive education, and getting to know mental health professionals, local advocacy and social service groups, and families of people with mental illness.

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“That way, when you have a group of two, three, four officers on the scene, one of them is going to be a C.I.T. officer, and that officer is going to be the leader,” said Sam Cochran, the former chief of the crisis intervention team in Memphis, which pioneered the approach in the 1980s. “It’s not just about the subject’s safety; it’s about the officer’s safety.”

More than 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies have created similar teams of varying strengths, out of about 18,000 forces nationwide, said Mr. Cochran, a consultant to agencies around the country. “We still have a tremendous amount that is lacking,” he said.

It is a lot to demand from officers that they know how and when to alternate between aggressiveness and a gentler approach, but it is necessary, said Hassan Aden, a former police chief in Greenville, N.C., and the senior adviser on policing at the Vera Institute of Justice, a research and advocacy group.

“We see these situations where a family member calls the police, and the situation, once the police arrive, turns into a deadly force situation,” he said. “De-escalation training is something that every officer — every officer — should get.”

Advocates and law enforcement agencies commonly cite an estimate that at least one in 10 calls to the police involves a person experiencing some sort of mental health crisis or diminished capacity.

A 2013 study by the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group that supports expanded access to treatment, estimated that half of all the people shot and killed by the police in the United States were mentally ill. An analysis last year by The Washington Post put the figure at about one in four. In addition, researchers say that emotionally disturbed people account for a high proportion of attacks on officers, and that those who are killed by the police are often suicidal.

Even when a department provides advanced training, advocates say, there are many places where the system can break down. Callers to 911 do not always make it clear that a person’s behavior might indicate mental illness; emergency dispatchers do not always communicate the information to the officers headed to the scene; and those officers do not always call for a crisis intervention officer, even when one is available.

“Calling in the C.I.T. should always be the first choice,” Ms. Usher said, but merely having the team is not enough. “The key is that every officer has enough awareness to recognize when there might be a mental health issue involved, and to call for specialized backup.”
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Source: NYTimes.com

Date Posted: Friday, September 30th, 2016 , Total Page Views: 1896