Mental health calls, some deadly, a growing challenge for Austin cops
Austin American-StatesmanJul 06, 2018
But as he approached her that morning of
"It turns out she was fixated on her reflection in the car windows," Hunt said. "She had schizophrenia."
Hunt said that in his opinion, she was a victim waiting to happen, either of a rape, or some of type of crime.
"She was having very strong delusions and hallucinations," Hunt said.
Hunt got on the phone to find mental health care providers that could take her in, but he also needed another officer to place her in handcuffs.
As the woman was cuffed, she screamed and cried, shouting "I refuse" over and over again, and saying she was sorry.
Several passers-by stopped as the woman wailed, drivers rolled down their windows and gawked. Though jarring, Hunt said the detention was necessary to protect the woman.
Hunt's response during the mental health call comes from specialized training, which is more the exception than the rule. Police, community leaders and mental health advocates agree that most patrol officers aren't always the best suited to treat the nation's mentally ill, despite often being the first ones responding to those in crisis.
The department's partnership with Integral Care is supposed to bring mental health professionals into these cases as fast as possible, and get the subjects into treatment instead of tossing them into jail. But it's not happening often enough, or fast enough, and some are calling for more funding that would make mental health professionals the first responders in these cases more often.
Even more troubling is that while police academy training and continuing education has included crisis response and de-escalation, encounters between officers and citizens with mental health issues still turn deadly.
In
Among the eight people who died, seven were armed, two of whom were later found to be holding BB guns, and one took his own life after being shot by an officer.
Though complete numbers were not available for the past two years, police have fatally shot people with mental health conditions in that time.
In March, 46-year-old
"Any situation like this, where a person may possibly be armed with a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, you name it, these situations are incredibly quickly evolving and very dynamic, so things happen in the blink of an eye," said Lt.
"But even with eight shot and killed by APD, I think that's way too many," Moore said.
Both Moore and coalition member
Climbing numbers of crisis calls
The Statesman found that 90,109 mental health calls were logged from 2010 through
"If you look at our stats over the last five to 10 years, the number of calls that we respond to that are mental health-related grow each and every year," he said.
Out of nearly 8,000 mental health calls in 2010, about 26 percent -- or 2,073 calls -- were emergency detentions in which police took a person who posed a threat to themselves or others to either jail or a mental health facility, according to
That number steadily climbed over the next six years, reaching a peak of 5,564 calls -- or 45 percent of all calls -- in 2016, then dropping slightly to 5,356 (43 percent) in 2017.
As deadly as armed encounters between police and potentially mentally ill civilians can be, the data show they are rare.
For instance, only 201 firearms were seized in fewer than 1 percent of the 26,898 emergency detentions since 2013.
Shifting focus of response
Mitchell of
She pointed to a new program in
"The police presence is not the lead presence. They are not the ones actually doing the first response," she said.
Snook said
In
Integral Care also runs a 24/7 Crisis Helpline independent of the police department, and can dispatch their own response teams throughout the community without tapping law enforcement.
"When someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, the best action, the vast majority of the time, is to be seen by a mental health expert," Wilson-Slocum said.
Police also have integrated Integral Care's response team into their own dispatch system, so experts can get to the scene of a mental health call quickly.
When that happens, Wilson-Slocum said experts try to relieve law enforcement within 10 to 15 minutes of arriving and take control of the situation, freeing up police and EMS personnel to focus on criminal and public safety calls.
Health advocates like Snook say calls involving people suffering from mental health issues are among the most worrisome for police.
Often, officers know the person they are dealing with is not a criminal, but too often have to use force to defend themselves or others. All too often, he said, people who find themselves in these situations are very sick, and out in the community without access to the care they need.
Snook said the priority should be enhancing and strengthening the mental health service infrastructure that is supposed to prevent people from experiencing a crisis requiring police in the first place.
"Law enforcement is so frequently called into situations to which we may not be the best trained or the best equipped to handle. We're just simply the only ones available at that time," Manley said.
Cadets get 40 hours of mental health training in the academy. Some officers, though, can get more training to become certified mental health officers, but police dispatch the nearest officer available during most violent incidents. So having a mental health officer immediately on hand when a crisis develops is not guaranteed.
Hope for more health services
Snook said the research conducted by his center found that people with a mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed in an encounter with law enforcement than the general public.
"On one hand, we want to ensure that officers have every tool in the toolbox to defuse these situations," Snook said. "We always advocate for crisis intervention training, and making sure law enforcement has diversion tactics to prevent these situations."
Snook, however, said he also cautions against the knee-jerk reaction to tragic encounters of just calling for officers to be better trained.
"Too often, there is nothing the training would have done differently," he said. "You can't train your way out of this crisis."
The key, Snook said, is to keep people from getting to that level of crisis in the first place, and, to whatever extent possible, respond with health care, rather than law enforcement.
Programs like
"That one of the big pieces here," Snook said. "In addition to that, we need a more robust mental health system."
Snook said his center has partnered with
Locally, Integral Care offers a Mental Health First Aid course to members of the community at no cost. The one-day training program gives people basic tools to help identify people who are showing signs of mental illness or substance abuse, or are in a mental health crisis.
The consensus among police, mental health experts and community members is that any mental health response needs to be shifted away from police -- but how that would happen and how it would be paid for remain the biggest questions.
Manley said he thinks a system in which a civilian mental health professional could respond to calls, as long as they aren't violent and require an officer, could be a model program to address the mental health crisis.
"Because all too often we see where they just have a tragic outcome," Manley said.
Mitchell said city leaders need look no further than the
"We don't buy into the idea that there's no money. We do understand that nobody wants their money taken away," she said. "I believe that we are at a moment right now where the city needs to decide to say no to some money that police officers have asked for in order to start that conversation."
Officer Hunt said the woman he encountered on
"Normal feelings (I might have) would be exasperated and frustrated that there's not more that we can do, there's not more that can be done," he said. "And I'm not talking about just police, the system itself."
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