Mental illness isn’t a crime, so stop treating it like one
Two years ago, just months after George Floyd was murdered, body cam footage of Daniel Prude’s gruesome death came to light and furthered demands for racial justice.
He had been experiencing a mental health crisis and had gone missing in the middle of the night when his brother, Joe Prude, called 911 desperately seeking help. As a Black man, he had concerns about calling the police but didn’t know where else to turn.
“Please don’t kill my brother,” he told them. “He means no harm.”
Even though Daniel was naked, unarmed, clearly vulnerable and in distress, officers physically restrained him and put what’s known as a “spit hood“over his head, making it hard to breathe. They shoved his face into the pavement for minutes on end and can be seen openly laughing and mocking him in the video.
The next time Joe saw him, Daniel was on life support and later died of his injuries from that fateful night.
“Everything that they did, they didn’t have to do. That excessive force they used on him, the pushup stands on his neck, the knee on his back, holding his legs, that wasn’t called for,” Joe has said. “They treated my brother like he was an animal in the street.”
To this day, Joe wonders whether Daniel would still be alive if, instead of a bevy of cops, he had been met with an emergency medical technician (EMT) or social worker who could have given him the care he needed and spared him from such undignified treatment.
He’s not alone. As advocates at Fountain House, a national nonprofit working with and for those most impacted by serious mental illness to support their recovery and ability to thrive, we’ve seen firsthand how law enforcement is ill-equipped to properly support people in distress.
One of our members, Deborah Danner,
a 66-year-old woman living with schizophrenia, was killed in her own home by the very officers who had been sent to help her through her mental health crisis. The stories of Deborah, Daniel and countless others have spurred us to push for change.
Working alongside our national network of mental health clubhouse partners, we’re urging policymakers to reduce police presence on mental health crisis calls and instead send in teams of medical professionals, EMTS and trained peer specialists who can better assess and de-escalate crises.
This “care response“approach to mental health emergencies is not a new concept.
Oregon’s CAHOOTS program has been around for more than three decades and has had incredible success diverting mental health calls away from the police – ultimately saving lives while saving taxpayers millions.
Denver’s STAR pilot program has done so well that the local city council recently voted to expand the program to help more people in need.
Lawmakers we have worked with across the country have taken notice, with Michigan and California, among others, now looking to launch similar care response programs.
At the heart of our advocacy efforts are clubhouse members, people living with serious mental illness, who have built momentum around care response and must continue being the drivers of this change.
Simply adding more mental health training for officers, though well-intended and perhaps a good first step, is not enough to truly serve people in crisis. The cops who had met Daniel Prude and ultimately killed him had gone through crisis intervention training yet still failed to follow proper de-escalation protocols.
And despite the onslaught of press and protests following Daniel’s death, Rochester police have struggled to handle mental health emergencies, killing another Black man in distress, Tyshon Jones, less than a year later.
Instead, we must work to involve people with lived experience of mental illness at every level of care response work, from conception to implementation, to ensure these measures are actually helpful and will honor the dignity and autonomy of the communities most impacted by these policies.
For far too long, mental illness has been criminalized and treated as a public safety issue, not a public health one. Our prisons and jails have become the largest provider of mental health services in practically every state, and when it comes to crisis response, we’ve seen how the stigma surrounding mental illness can lead to horrific and deadly consequences.
It’s time to start meeting people in distress with help, not handcuffs. Adopting proven, commonsense and cost-effective care response measures can get us there.
Mary Crowley is interim president and CEO of the national mental health nonprofit Fountain House. Christina Sparrock, a member of Fountain House, is a mental health advocate and peer specialist trained in crisis response.
This column is part of a series by USA TODAY Opinion about police accountability and building safer communities. The project began in 2021 by examining qualified immunity and continues in 2022 by examining various ways to improve law enforcement. The project is made possible in part by a grant from Stand Together, which does not provide editorial input.