MENTAL HEALTH CALLS POLICE OFFICERS SHOULD NOT RESPOND TO PSYCHIATRIC CRISES
Calls for police reform have intensified in recent years in response to fatal shootings of unarmed individuals, especially Black men. One reform focus has been on whether it makes sense to have officers respond to calls on mental health emergencies. Below, an activist, two graduate students and a San Diego County official weigh in on the topic.
The U.S. has convulsed as protests continue to be fueled by the deaths of Black and Brown people, some with mental illness. Efforts to fundamentally change how police departments respond to someone experiencing a mental health emergency should be a top priority. In fact, many people are calling for a complete removal of the involvement of police officers in response to mental health crises. As a mental health clinician and advocate, I have witnessed the trauma experienced when police respond to mental health crises with force due to ignorance and lack of education on mental health issues.
In the U.S., about 23 percent of the people killed by police since 2015 have previously experienced mental illness.
Dennis Carolino was shot and killed in 2019 by San Diego police while experiencing a mental health crisis. Carolino’s aunt called 911, stating her nephew was experiencing a psychotic episode. There was no accountability for the officers involved in this tragic death of a person of color. Police officers do not have the proper training, skills or education to deal with mental health crises. In California, officers’ basic training covers 42 different law enforcement topics.
Mental illness education is included in only one, titled “People with Disabilities,” which includes basic information on developmental and physical disability laws, and mental illness. It does not begin to address the diagnostic complexities of mental illness, cultural considerations and nuances of mental health, or the impacts systemic racism and oppression can have on a person’s emotional well-being.
The training police officers receive is inept and inadequate at preparing them to identify and de-escalate situations involving people experiencing mental health crises. This often leads to the harming of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).
Furthermore, this creates traumatic consequences for people with mental illness, causing them to fear law enforcement; often leading to internalized stigmatization also referred to as self-stigma, characterized by a subjective perception of devaluation, marginalization, secrecy, shame and withdrawal from society due to mental illness. This can exacerbate symptoms of mental illness, cause psychotic breaks, and even result in death by suicide or external factors such as police violence.
As a therapist, I have worked with many low-income monolingual immigrants and refugees in San Diego over the past few years. There are times I’ve had to contact PERT (Psychiatric Emergency Response Team) due to someone feeling suicidal and needing to be assessed for a psychiatric hold. When the officers arrived on scene, I witnessed them exuding aggressive behaviors and offensive demeanors and showing no inclination to empathically assess and de-escalate the situation, often creating further anxiety and fear in my patients.
Many police departments across the country continue to handle mental health and substance abuse crisis calls via a program called Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs), a program proven to be ineffective. The funding used to implement CITs could instead be used to address mental illness on a systemic level. If this funding is not used to specifically address the overall systemic issue of mental illness and mental health treatment, and is only used to respond to crises, it is not tackling the issue proactively. If we wait until a person has a mental health crisis in order to address it with use of force, we have failed as a society. The “defund the police” movement is a proactive effort to decrease the use of inept, untrained police officers in mental health crises and to funnel financial resources into effectively creating community-based mobile crisis response teams with trained mental health clinicians, social workers, medical professionals and peer support specialists who have experienced mental health or drug and alcohol challenges.
They can help connect the person to services, not jail.
It is time to invest in empathic person-centered destigmatizing approaches and expand communitybased models of mental health crisis intervention that do not involve police officers. Ultimately, people with mental illness should not be criminalized or locked in jail cells. It is estimated that 40 percent of adults with serious mental illness will enter the criminal justice system in the course of their lifetimes. Each year, 2 million are jailed; most are charged with misdemeanors and low-level felonies directly tied to their psychiatric illness.
It is inhumane to continue to criminalize those with mental illness and subject them to torment by locking them away, discarding them rather than supporting them with effective treatment. We need to eradicate the shaming and degradation of people with mental illness because no one should feel that their mental illness is a death sentence.
I have seen responding officers exuding aggressive behaviors and offensive demeanors.
Abdallah-Elnakib is a Muslim American civil rights activist and mental health clinician studying for a doctoral degree in clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology. He lives in East County.