(Oct. 28, 2013) “A police dispatcher had sent Officer LaRosa to what seemed like a routine accident call. When he arrived, [Billy] Lane, 25 years old, was outside his wrecked SUV, bloodied, holding a butcher's knife and threatening passersby. Mr. Lane advanced relentlessly on the police officer, who shot him four times. Mr. Lane died on the spot (“Lives of Mentally Ill, Police Collide,” the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22).”
“You go through the academy expecting Joe Bad Guy to bail out of a car and start shooting at us," Officer LaRosa told Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields. "They don't train us for Billy."
Encountering “Billy” and other people in the throes of psychosis is often what leads to deadly encounters between law enforcement and people with severe mental illness. Our report “Justifiable Homicides: What is the Role of Mental Illness?” found that untreated severe mental illness is an increasing factor in officer-involved homicides.
When the responsibility for seriously mentally ill persons is shifted away from the mental health system to law enforcement, many people get hurt. "No police officer does well with shooting someone, let alone someone with mental illness," Michael Biasotti, Treatment Advocacy Center board member, told the Journal. “That destroys a bunch of people at once.”
We couldn’t agree more. Until states improve and use their assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) laws to support at-risk individuals and communities use crisis intervention team (CIT) policing to train law enforcement to handle encounters with people in psychiatric crisis, officer-involved shootings will continue to increase.
Read this powerful piece in the Wall Street Journal about collisions between people with severe mental illness and law enforcement.
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