(July 1, 2015) “It was not yet 9 am and Gary Page was drunk. The disabled handyman had a long history of schizophrenia and depression and, since his wife died in February, he had been struggling to hold his life together,” writes the Washington Post in an investigative editorial on fatal shootings by police this year (“Distraught people, deadly results,” Washington Post, Jun. 30).
Page called 911 and told the dispatcher “I want to shoot the cops” and “I want them to shoot me.”
Shortly after, Indiana law enforcement arrived at Page’s home, found that he had taken a neighbor hostage, and shot him to death. It was later discovered that Page’s gun was a starter pistol, loaded only with blanks.
According to the Post, police have shot and killed 460 people so far this year; 123 – or 26% – of them showed “signs of mental illness.”
123 people who, like Page, were in the midst of a psychiatric crisis.
Moreover, in “45 cases, police were called to help someone get medical treatment, or after the person had tried and failed to get treatment on his own,” reports the Post.
“This [is] a national crisis,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an independent research organization devoted to improving policing. “We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change.”
In a 2014 report, the Treatment Advocacy Center found that at least half of those shot and killed by law enforcement each year in the U.S. have a mental illness.
The report makes three recommendations for decreasing the number of justifiable homicides associated with severe mental illness.
- Return responsibility for mental health from law enforcement and the criminal justice system to the mental illness treatment system.
- Collect more complete and reliable data to improve the study of justifiable homicide trends.
- Use assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) to reduce officer-involved tragedies and enact AOT laws in the five states where the treatment option remains unavailable (Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Tennessee).
It is a sad and forgone conclusion that until law enforcement and lawmakers across the country heed these recommendations the list of people with mental illness shot dead by police will continue to grow.
Read the Treatment Advocacy Center study “Justifiable Homicides: What is the Role of Mental Illness?” to learn more.
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