(Jan. 29, 2016) In another horrific encounter between someone in a psychiatric crisis and law enforcement, Michael Noel, a 32-year-old Louisiana resident, was shot and killed during a struggle when he resisted police efforts to take him into protective custody and drive him to the hospital (“Mentally ill man’s deadly shooting fits troubling pattern,” Associated Press, Jan. 25).
Noel, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia was agitated and showing familiar signs that he needed help the morning of December 21. His mother, Barbara, called 911, a call she had made many times during her son’s long struggle with severe mental illness.
This was the fourth time in less than eight months that Barbara had obtained an order to have her son involuntarily treated at a hospital. The orders say he had been suicidal, hallucinating, hearing voices and talking to imaginary people.
Michael’s mother and aunt say they witnessed the shooting in the living room of their home. Both said Michael wasn’t armed and never posed a threat before one of the deputies shot him once in the chest.
Barbara Noel remembers screaming, “They killed him! They killed him!” after her son collapsed and died on the floor without saying a word.
“They never gave him CPR,” Barbara said of the officers. “They never said they were sorry.”
It is unacceptable that people in mental health crisis get killed when they call for help. On the other hand, it’s unacceptable to put the burden on police when the mental health system should be responsible for them.
A 2015 Treatment Advocacy Center report found that people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement.
Stories like these have unfortunately become a commonplace of American life. Every day we read headlines about another person suffering with mental illness killed in a deadly encounter with police. The onus is on us as a country to consider this unacceptable and reform our broken mental health system in an effort to prevent further tragedies.
Read “Overlooked in the Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters” to learn more.
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