Police responses to the mentally ill dangerously wrong

A tragic and fatal scenario last month in Philadelphia has been repeated around this country for many years. An acutely mentally ill individual has a knife, officers tell him to drop it, he doesn’t, and he is shot and killed. It happens far more frequently than any other police fatal-shooting situation.

Setting aside the question of mental health treatment in the community, most of the shooting deaths of mentally ill individuals are unnecessary and should have been prevented. I said “most” rather than “all” purposely. If, instead of holding a knife, a person raises a gun toward the police or runs toward the officers holding a butcher knife overhead, the shooting is justified and may have been unavoidable. These situations, however, are the exceptions.

The Philadelphia scenario, which led to the death of 27-year- old Walter Wallace Jr., is far more common. Why do police so often resort to lethal force in such situations, and why are they so seldom held accountable? A major reason is terrible police training on this issue.

Here is the Big Lie: “At a distance of 25 feet, a person with an edged weapon (knife or similar) can charge you and, even though you are able to hit him with one or two fatal shots, he will still be able to reach you and perhaps kill you. You must consider any person within 25 feet of you with an edged weapon as constituting an imminent threat of loss of life justifying the use of lethal force.”

That sort of message has commonly been taught to new police officers and then reinforced by in-service training. That scenario is conceivable but is not realistic.

Let’s look at reality. In the 11 years prior to 2019, FBI statistics indicate a total of 1,671 law enforcement on- duty deaths. Stabbing deaths involving mentally ill individuals? Zero. To be clear, in those 11 years, there were no police deaths from edged weapons in standoffs with mentally ill individuals.

These data suggest that most police tactics and interactions with armed individuals who are mentally ill make no sense.

Any police department can dramatically reduce the chances of fatalities in encounters with mentally ill individuals. First, all police should receive serious and thoughtful training on this topic. Policy should require deescalation techniques and other crisis intervention procedures, time and circumstances allowing, and hold officers accountable when those methods could have been used and were not.

Second, departments should require officers to use intermediate force options rather than lethal force where possible. The larger dispensers of pepper spray are often effective up to 25 feet. Tasers are controversial but, if the alternative is firearms, a Taser is clearly preferable. The pepper-ball system, which shoots plastic projectiles the size of a small marble, is a third alternative. Other possibilities are a “launcher,” which fires projectiles containing small bean bags that can knock someone down, or hard rubber or wood pellets fired into the ground and ricocheting, taking a person down.

Washington Post data from 2015-19 show 1,216 mentally ill people shot and killed by police, or a current average of four to five such fatalities per week.

Generally, intermediate force options have not been used.

The most obvious alternative to sending police to respond to a call about a mentally ill person is to send trained civilians, perhaps some combination of social workers, psychologists, medics or other crisis workers, or a police-civilian combination. Some of these alternatives have demonstrated dramatic reductions in injuries and deaths of the mentally ill, without any associated injury rate for the responders.

Individuals cannot choose to stop being mentally ill, but we can choose to stop killing them.

Bay Area psychologist Jeffrey A. Schwartz has worked with police and correctional agencies across the United States and Canada for more than 40 years, specializing in crisisintervention training and use-of-force issues.