Registries of disabled people debated in talks about police reform

HARTFORD — Victoria Mitchell wishes police would have had the full picture of her son’s struggles with mental illness and reacted differently before an officer shot and killed him last year in Ansonia.

Her son, Michael Gregory, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attempted suicide several times. He was in crisis when he was shot on Jan. 2, 2020, while charging officers with a knife, after telling them they were going to have to shoot him.

Mitchell, a nurse who cares for people with mental illness, supports some parts of a proposed statewide law enforcement registry of people with disabilities including mental illness. The idea is being studied by the state’s Police Transparency & Accountability Task Force as a way to alert officers about someone’s disability and avoid deadly use of force.

“Maybe had something like that had been available, they would have proceeded differently — knowing that he’s not in his right mind,” she said. “They could have called someone in to deescalate the situation.”

The Connecticut proposal would be a major expansion of voluntary registry programs already in place at a large number of police departments across the country, which are primarily aimed at helping officers find people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia who go missing and get them back home.

A smaller number of departments have added people with autism and bipolar disorder in efforts to improve their interactions with people with developmental and mental health disabilities, in response to public outcries about shootings by police.

Since 2015, nearly a quarter of the nearly 6,000 fatal shootings by police in the U.S. have involved mentally ill people, according to a Washington Post database of police shootings.

Advocates for disabled people, however, said there are significant problems with the registries including further stigmatizing people with disabilities and privacy concerns.

Registries are a “terrible idea,” partly

because of a flawed assumption that they will result in better outcomes in police encounters, said Kathleen Flaherty, executive director of Connecticut Legal Rights Project, which provides legal services to low-income people with psychiatric disabilities.

“I think it could just as easily be that knowing they are dealing with somebody with X,Y,Z diagnosis, because of the bias and stigmatized views that people have of people with certain diagnoses, you may just be setting things up for failure, unintended but that could be what happens,” she said.

Advocates for the disabled also have concerns about the government collecting information about people’s disabilities and how long the information would be stored.

After the registry was brought up by Connecticut’s police accountability task force, similar concerns emerged and the panel recently decided to study the issue more before deciding whether to formally recommend it to state lawmakers.

“It’s a difficult balancing act,” said Jonathan Slifka, chairperson of the task force’s subcommittee on improving police interactions with the disability community. “There is an inherent hesitation on behalf of people within the disability community to self-identify because of the potential for stigma, bias, anything else.”

Slifka and Flaherty are members of the disability community.