Why Police Officers Are the Best Trained and Prepared Choice for Addressing People in Crisis

Rediscover the Expertise, Training, and Skills of Officers and Deputies in Responding to Mental Health Crises and Why Nobody is Rushing to Replace Them

May 31, 2024

woman leaning against a wall in dim hallway — Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Mental health is huge

We frequently say that mental health is huge right now. There is merit to that. However, to say that mental illness is a key driver of crime is speculation without adequate data. This is due to the presence of increasing diagnoses of ailments in perfectly sound people or of their children. I’m no doctor but I can spot a case of Munchausen Syndrome by proxy or hypochondria a mile away.

One of the challenges in relating to Generation Z is that a greater portion, than past generations and even millennials, have a knowledge and acceptance of behavioral health issues where it is observed as a human trait we all have in common. Also, in doing so, they have medicalized many activities that we have codified into law as crimes and dismissed them as the result of poor mental health.

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There are several conversations going on regarding behavioral health, mental illness, and police responses. A perennial criticism by anti-police reformers is the police are the wrong response to citizens in crisis. Recent conversations with officers and deputies from different parts of the country found they wish there was a solution that would take these cases off their call handling lists. The FOP and PBA are not picketing and rallying for more involuntary commitments.

Image of a police officer and a therapist

Community response teams

Especially after 2020, more police departments partnered with local behavioral health providers often modeled after the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon which has been in practice for about thirty years. Some programs I watched experienced positive results but either their grant ran out or they weren’t budgeted for the coming fiscal year. Others I watched were clearly told how successful their program was going to be, as in marching orders, before the ink dried on the Memorandum of Understanding. No one was concerned about fiscal impact or mission creep. The lone concern was success stories, despite having no long-term impact or plan to scale up in the future. These were scripted readymade feature stories for the local news in the ‘making a difference’ segment.

Professor Fredrick Vars writes: ‘On February 1, 2022, after a more than hourlong standoff, Los Angeles police killed a disturbed 23-year-old man who was wielding a knife. The Chief of Police explained that the mental health crisis response team was unable “to make it across the city to the scene to better communicate with the man.” Apparently, the vast city of L.A. has just one team. If a crisis response team can’t make it to a scene in over an hour, it’s useless.’

two police officers standing next to each other — Photo by Small Giant on Unsplash

Are police the appropriate responders?

It’s not uncommon to hear that an officer involved shooting was related to a mental health issue. This is the basis to claim that the person was shot due to a failing of law enforcement. Activists and reformers suggest that if unarmed counselors were present, the unstable individual would not have been provoked and the encounter would have been peaceful with someone getting the help they needed.

Police officers in Florida are vested with the statutory authority to suspend the liberty of a citizen on the basis of their altered mental state, where they may be a danger to themselves or others, or if substance abuse and addiction has progressed to permanent harm. Most other states and tribal lands have laws that mirror the ones I’m familiar with.

I’m often critical of body worn cameras (BWC) but among the many occasions of their successes, two were in Pennsylvania within weeks of each other. On September 13, 2020, Lancaster officers responded and before they even got to the door, Ricardo Munoz charges the officers wielding a knife and was shot by the officer in self-defense. The law firm representing the family has this statement on their website:

“Unfortunately, Lancaster police and many law enforcement agencies throughout the country are not trained or equipped to deal with mental health crises. Ricardo’s story highlights the desperate need to invest in social workers and other co-responders who can assist law enforcement when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis.”

In Philadelphia on October 26, 2020, Walter Wallace was shot charging officers with a knife. The law firm settled the wrongful death claim with a 2.5 million dollar award and a commitment from the city to purchase 14 million dollars in equipment and training from Taser. This would not have been the scenario to roll the dice on an electronic control device. Here is part of the statement from the law firm’s website:

“Wallace’s murder set off a powder keg of righteous anger throughout communities across the country including Philadelphia, leading to protests, riots, and violent conflicts with the police. The Philadelphia Police Officers who shot and killed Wallace were not equipped with tasers at the time of the shooting.”

Ironically, these videos serve as public service announcements explaining why police officers, rather than therapists, are sent to respond to these calls. There would have been dead therapists. In each case, cops were suddenly attacked by knife wielding charging maniacs. However, these cases inexplicably wound up as supporting columns in the police replacement movement.

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Uniformed police officers and deputies are the public’s best choice to respond to calls involving mentally ill individuals in crisis. Their daily experience with mentally ill people, and many have specialized training in Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), equips them with skills to be best able to de-escalate volatile situations. Additionally, their ability to protect the community if an unstable person becomes violent ensures that potential threats are managed effectively and swiftly. While it is fashionable to say we need an alternative response, I haven’t seen any in policing attempting to retain this duty. In the decades since Eugene started their co-responder program, it is rare to see anyone funding anything more than a token response.

a close up of a police car with its lights on — Photo by Max Fleischmann on Unsplash

A too frequent story

It's not unusual for people to say that the police shouldn’t have shot the person who threatened them with deadly or incapacitating force. A recent case was a 911 call to locate an unstable person who wound up spraying the responding officers with bear spray while holding a knife to his own throat.

Retired police captain and author William Fraass, frequently offers sound commentary on law enforcement force events. I’d promised to reach out to him on this article, but before I could, he weighed in on a police shooting of a mentally disturbed man in Holly Hill, Florida.

(The activists will say) “The Officers knew this person was mentally ill not dangerous, they should have got him treatment not shot him.” But here is a news flash for the uninformed, just because of a person is mentally ill that does not mean they are not dangerous. A mentally ill person can hurt or kill a person just as easily and quickly as person of sound mind.

William Fraass is completely correct. Neither motive nor psychological condition can be assessed in the rapidly changing dynamic of a situation evolving toward a deadly force encounter. Officers are navigating the razor’s edge between saving lives via deadly force and being sued for civil rights violations. The cops are usually in the danger zone, themselves in jeopardy of harm or death, with the situation changing every millisecond.

But we do have to recognize these three key principles:

The presence of mental illness in the attacker does not relieve peace officers of their duty to intervene to preserve life.
The manifestation of psychosis in a criminal does not imbue them with virtues of victimhood.
Law enforcement must work every day to get psychosis inducing drugs, off the streets, away from the kids and put the pushers in jail.

Police critics actually compare how many (356) mental health related police shooting fatalities exist compared to (1) officer killed in a conflict with a mentally ill person. Those books shouldn’t balance anyway. That came out of Harvard.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.