Patrick Kenny before he was fatally shot by CIT trained officers in Springfield, Oregon. Disgraceful.
(10-23-20) Two recent news stories about law enforcement and mental illnesses are worth reading.
I’ve always supported Crisis Intervention Team training. Years ago, Patti and I donated $500 each year to our local police department to honor a CIT officer of the year. I know of numerous incidents where CIT officers have prevented suicides and helped individuals in crisis get help rather than hauling them to jail.
Sadly, some officers who have undergone CIT training don’t get it. One of the worst instances involves four Springfield, Oregon police officers who underwent CIT training but killed a young man in crisis. I posted a first person blog written by Kimberly Kenny about her brother’s death in July and The Washington Post used that tragic killing this week to illustrated a story with the headline: Fatal police shootings of mentally ill people are 39 percent more likely to take place in small and midsized areas.
The second news story comes from NPR and is entitled: Removing Cops From Behavioral Crisis Calls: ‘We Need To Change The Model. San Francisco, California is preparing to deploy teams of professionals from the fire and health departments, rather than the police, to respond to most calls for people in a psychiatric, behavioral or substance abuse crisis. The action “will be among the largest and boldest urban police reform experiment in decades.”
When someone becomes violent, there’s often little choice but to have the police respond. But I would argue that they shouldn’t be the first called and, in a majority of cases, don’t need to be involved. In June, I posted a blog about how Albuquerque, Mexico officials were studying ways to free law enforcement from mental health crisis calls.
What’s happening in San Francisco and Albuquerque is a much needed shift that should be endorsed by law enforcement as well as those of us with a family member who has a serious mental illness. My son, Kevin, was shot twice with a taser when the police were called. That didn’t need to happen.
But Kenny, 33, who legally had changed her gender but still appeared to be a man, was anchored to the car by a locked seat belt. Her life ends, as does the 911 call, when she tries to flee by driving away with one of the officers still inside the car. There’s a burst of gunfire, then an officer says: “We are all okay. Bad guy down.”
The 2019 death in Springfield, Ore., was one of 1,324 fatal shootings by police over the past six years that involved someone police said was in the throes of a mental health crisis — about a quarter of all fatal police shootings during that period, according to a Washington Post database.
About the author:
