Advocates want more police training for mental health issues

ATLANTA — Supervisors for the Georgia Tech police officer who fatally shot a student thought the officer showed promise, but there is no evidence that he had received the kind of training that advocates say is crucial to effectively interact with people who have mental-health issues.

Officer Tyler Beck fatally shot Scout Schultz on Sept. 16, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said. Beck and other officers responded after Schultz called 911 to report an armed suspicious person, investigators said. Police have said Schultz had a knife and refused to drop it after repeated commands.

A lawyer for Schultz’s parents, Chris Stewart, has said that Schultz appeared to have been experiencing a psychological breakdown, and that Beck overreacted by shooting when non-lethal force could have been used.

“Police are responding to medical emergencies and often they don’t have the training to recognize even that there is a medical emergency happening,” said Laura Usher, senior manager for criminal justice and advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Usher, Stewart and others say more officers need to be specially trained to respond to calls involving mental health problems.

Such training, known as Crisis Intervention Team training, began at the University of Memphis after a police shooting there in 1987, and is now available across the country, Usher said.

“A typical police response to someone holding a weapon is for a couple of officers to draw their guns to point them at the individual and say, ‘Drop the knife, drop the knife, drop the knife!’ really fast and really loud. And that works on a lot of people,” she said. “But … in a mental health crisis, that kind of loud, fast, repetitive command actually might escalate the person more than they expect.”