Of All U.S. Police Shootings, One-Quarter Reportedly Involve The Mentally Ill

Transcript

ERIC WESTERVELT, HOST:

At least 125 people with signs of mental illness have died in police encounters in the U.S. so far this year. That's the latest accounting from The Washington Post. This week, The Post debuted their database with information on every fatal shooting by a police officer in the line of duty in the U.S. And they took the extra step of identifying, when they could, details about the mental health of the deceased. Kimberly Kindy is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and she joins me now. Welcome to the program.

KIMBERLY KINDY: Thanks for having me.

WESTERVELT: So how does The Post evaluate the role mental or emotional crisis played in a police fatality?

KINDY: Right, well, we know that we undercounted it because it's very difficult to make that determination. So unless the families identified the deceased as somebody who was mentally ill or the police department identified them as mentally ill, we did not, even if it may, on the surface of things, appeared as if they might be. Now the police departments generally didn't unless the families had disclosed information or had - they had documentation that the person had, perhaps, just come out of a mental health facility. So it's a conservative number. But even with it being conservative, it was a quarter of all the killings.

WESTERVELT: How does that quarter differ from the whole?

KINDY: Well, radically different. What we're really talking about is a population where the traditional tactics that a police officer is trained to use - it's the very opposite of what they should be doing. It doesn't work very well with somebody who's a mental health crisis or who has a serious mental illness for you to get in their face, yell for them to throw down a weapon. Much of the time, as one of the national experts that I spoke to said, there's a lot of white noise in their head. So they need to not move in and take control of the situation, like you would with a criminal. They need to give a lot of space, slow things down, speak calmly and not try to immediately control the situation. That tends to escalate things and create a volatile situation instead of de-escalating things so you can safely bring a mentally ill person into custody or, you know, take them to the hospital, which is, many times, family or friends are calling and asking for that kind of assistance - transportation to a mental health facility.

WESTERVELT: That's right, you write that police officers were often called by relatives, neighbors or bystanders worried that this was a mentally fragile person behaving erratically. We've just heard Stephanie O'Neill's story on the LAPD's efforts to diffuse these types of situations. What's your sense of why that's not being done more broadly in police departments across the U.S.?

KINDY: Much of the resistance is that they're being asked to do something that's completely counterintuitive. You know, backing off a situation, not taking control of it - it really requires a complete shift in culture, in the way they - that they view policing and so it's a learning curve. And what tends to happen is that police departments start to do this kind of training, like you're seeing in the LAPD, when they've had a number of high profile cases that have gone wildly wrong and there's been some community protests. But what we found was just about half of the police departments in the nation actually have this kind of training.

WESTERVELT: Kimberly, of all the personal stories you've examined for this piece, any of the stories stick out for you in particular?

KINDY: There are so many of them. One, in particular, though, is Lavall Hall, a schizophrenic young man. His mother called for help because he went outside in the really chilly, cold air and he was, you know, out there in his underwear, swinging a broomstick. The police show up and within minutes, he's gunned down. And the mother said, I wish I would've never called them. And it's just heartbreaking because, case after case, you're talking about family members and friends who call for help, and the person ends up dead.

WESTERVELT: It is heartbreaking, and you realize there are hundreds of these kinds of stories.

KINDY: You know, what's also heartbreaking is I think the police officers - their lives are changed forever when they take the life of somebody like this. They deserve a chance at knowing how to handle these situations, and many of them are not given that chance by being given the proper training

WESTERVELT: Kimberly Kindy is a national investigative reporter for The Washington Post. Thanks a lot.

KINDY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.