[NYAPRS Enews] Newsweek: Cops Need To Change Treatment Of PWPD

[Matt Canuteson]

Cops and People With Psychiatric Disabilities:

How Police Can Better Handle Emotionally Distressed Citizens

Eugene O'Donnell Newsweek July 31, 2008

Barely concealing his anger, Chaplain Thomas Nangle told an overflow
funeral mass for Chicago policeman Richard Francis that the 60-year-old
officer did not give his life in the line of duty-rather, it was "taken"
from him.

Days before, on July 2, Francis, a 27-year veteran of the force,
responded to a call steps from the police station where he was assigned.
An emotionally disturbed person-EDP in police parlance-had fought with
another passenger on a city bus. Before Francis could calm the woman,
she grabbed his gun and shot him in the head. All too predictably,
family members of the woman, Robin Johnson, told reporters that they had
tried to get the woman help as her life slipped downhill.

>From coast to coast, mentally ill people, without reliable access to the
costly on-demand care they need, are left to fend for themselves. In the
aftermath of the movement in the 1970s to close large mental asylums,
many of today's mentally ill are left to their own devices; they are
often homeless and without full-time advocates. With government unable
or unwilling to properly serve this population, the criminal-justice
system is left to pick up the slack.

Contrary to what many assume, the mentally ill are most often the
victimized, not the victimizers. A 2005 study by researchers at the
Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University suggested that
persons with serious mental illnesses are 11 times more likely than the
general population to be victims of violent crime, with perhaps as many
as 1 million crimes committed against those with serious mental-health
issues each year.

But relying on the police to address the problem has too often resulted
in tragedy, not only on the mean streets of big cities but in quieter
places as well. In Silverton, Ore. (population, 7,500), a 20-year-old
Irish immigrant, Andrew Hanlon, described by friends and family as
suffering from paranoia and delusions, was shot and killed by a police
officer investigating a report that Hanlon was trying to break into a
residence on June 30. The officer who shot Hanlon told a grand
jury-which voted not to indict him-that he thought Hanlon had wielded a
broken bottle. At a candlelight vigil attended by 100 people, friends of
the deceased man questioned the use of deadly force, saying that the
police should have known the man was more of a local character than an
actual threat and that he was banging on doors, not trying to break into
anyone's home. The killing drew international attention. The same cannot
be said about the shooting death, nine days later, of a homeless,
emotionally disturbed 40-year-old Newark, N.J., man, Francisco Martes,
who was shot by police after allegedly waving a knife at an officer.
This more "typical" EDP incident garnered little press coverage beyond
the usual police-blotter report.

Experts on treatment say the police for the most part do a good job
handling the millions of interactions they have each year with the
mentally ill. But is it irresponsible to ask them to undertake duties
that perplex even trained, savvy professionals? "The police are not
meant to be street-corner psychologists," says Dr. Linda A. Teplin of
Northwestern University, one of the authors of the 2005 report about
mentally ill crime victims. She notes the chronic shortage of beds for
the mentally ill in treatment facilities, something that results in
fewer stays, shorter stays and the reality that "you have to be
extremely mentally ill" to get one of them. There is also a pressing
need for more housing for this population. For law enforcement, experts
say more training and more nonlethal weapons such as the controversial
Taser could be beneficial.

Following the deaths of two people in Rhode Island this year in separate
encounters with police, Rep. Patrick Kennedy secured a grant of $200,000
to enhance police training for responding to the mentally disturbed.
After a third person, a man in police custody, died, Kennedy called for
the creation of a statewide crisis-intervention team that would be
available to handle cases of emotionally disturbed individuals.

Pressured by media coverage about mentally ill people committing serious
crimes, New York city and state officials recently acknowledged major
failings in mental-health care and oversight and in the exchange of
information between mental-health providers and law enforcement. A task
force recommended training New York Police Department dispatchers, who
handle roughly 90,000 calls annually regarding the emotionally
disturbed, to ask better questions so that the officers responding have
more information.

The task force also called for the creation of a location database with
call histories involving the mentally ill so that specially trained
emergency-service officers can be dispatched more expeditiously. Another
proposal: to establish Mental Health Care Monitoring Teams in New York
City, which would help coordinate and track the care of high-need
clients. According to the New York Daily News, $13 million will be spent
to create a sophisticated tracking system that will improve the
continuity of mental-health care, identify when individuals requiring
care cease treatment and speed up interventions for high-risk people
when, for example, they stop taking anti-psychotic medications.

And New York plans to expand its use of mental-health courts and to
share information from the tracking system with criminal-justice
agencies to improve treatment of mentally ill individuals who are
arrested. Civil-liberties groups are watching warily to make sure that
the information collected by the database does not end up being used
against mentally ill defendants.

The New York report cited the "struggle" that facilities are faced with
in treating tens of thousands of mentally ill persons under correctional
supervision. Thomas Faust, the former executive director of the National
Sheriffs' Association, has said that the large growth in many
correctional facilities is due to a lack of mental-health resources. The
three largest de facto mental-health facilities in the country, he wrote
in 2003, are actually jails: "Riker's Island (in New York City), Los
Angeles County and Cook County [in Chicago]." An estimated one in five
prisoners in these facilities receive or require daily mental-health
attention-treatment they would likely be denied in the outside world.

According to a 2000 report by the federal government's National
Institute of Justice, once a mentally ill person is arrested for
disorderliness, that person is labeled a "criminal" and will likely
continue to be arrested when acting out in the future, rather than
receive treatment.

In a presidential-election year featuring a Republican candidate who
prides himself on straight talk and a Democrat who suggests the nation
adopt a new can-do ethos, perhaps there is a glimmer of promise that the
dialogue on criminal justice this fall can extend past the archetypical
embrace of blame and "toughness" and examine the 50-state crisis in
mental-health care. On the streets, there is hard work to be done.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/149630

 

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