(Sept. 9, 2014) Following the shooting of 18-year-old Joseph Jennings last month, who reportedly suffered from suicidal thoughts, depression and delusions, law enforcement in Kansas has renewed its interest in crisis intervention training (CIT) for police officers (“Ottawa shooting renews focus on crisis intervention,” Kaiser Health News, Sept. 4).
“They had to have known that he was not alright,” Jennings’ aunt, Brandy Smith, said. “But . . . I want this to be about police officers getting the knowledge and training they need so that this doesn’t happen again and no other family has to go through what we’ve been through.”
The day before the shooting, Jennings attempted suicide and spent that night in the psychiatric unit at Ransom Memorial Hospital. When he returned home the following day he was still agitated, according to his aunt.
That evening he walked to the local grocery store only one block away from his aunt’s house.
When Smith heard the police appeared ready to shoot her nephew in the parking lot, she ran barefoot to the scene. “I was screaming at them (police) at the top of my lungs: ‘Don’t shoot him! He’s suicidal! That’s Joseph Jennings! Don’t shoot him!’”
But it was too late.
Sadly, tragedies like these are no longer surprising. The responsibility of law enforcement officers for seriously mentally ill persons has increased sharply in recent years and is continuing to increase.
This makes tactics like training police on how best to respond to people in a psychiatric crisis even more important.
But in Kansas, only 1 in 4 law enforcement officers have received CIT training. Our report, ““Prevalence of Mental Health Diversion Practices: A Survey of the States,” awarded the state a C- for its use of CIT programs and other diversion tactics that have been consistently found to reduce deadly encounters, arrests and incarcerations that sometimes occur when people with severe mental illness meet law enforcement.
Homicides, like Jennings’, are a symptom of our broken mental illness treatment system. Ultimately, tragedies like these would be less likely to occur if people were getting treatment when they needed it.
To comment, visit our Facebook page.
Visit our blog archive to read all our recent posts.