(Mar. 2, 2016) More than a third of the people shot by Los Angeles police in 2015 showed signs of mental illness, nearly triple the number from the year before, according to a report by LAPD officials made public Tuesday (“More than a third of people shot by L.A. police last year were mentally ill, LAPD report finds,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 1).
The 300-page report offers a review of how and when Los Angeles police officers used force in recent years in an effort to answer a question that has plagued the department for years: How can officers safely interact with a growing mentally ill population?
Fourteen of the thirty-eight people shot by LAPD officers in 2015 had documented signs of mental illness, according to the report. And about a quarter of the nearly 1,900 less-serious uses of force — such as an officer using a Taser or firing a bean-bag shotgun — involved someone the officer believed was mentally ill.
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said Tuesday that encounters involving officers using force are rare – accounting for fewer than 2,000 of the 1.5 million contacts officers made last year. Nonetheless, the department is eager to drive the number down, he said.
Coincidently, Tuesday also marked the one-year anniversary of the skid row shooting in which officers fatally shot Charly “Africa” Keunang after he allegedly grabbed an officer’s holstered gun. Keunang was homeless, suffered from severe mental illness, and had previously spent years in a prison mental hospital.
That shooting and others have prompted furious criticism of the Los Angeles Police Department and calls for better training for officers who intersect with the mentally ill population.
But better training will only go so far. Police still need someplace to take people suffering from acute psychiatric crises.
“There simply aren’t enough hospital beds available for those who need care,” Treatment Advocacy Center Executive Director John Snook said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Daily News.
Reform cannot come soon enough. A 2015 Treatment Advocacy Center report on the role of mental illness in fatal police encounters found that people suffering 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.
It’s a good thing the LAPD is investigating its use of force, but it shouldn’t take high-profile tragedies and national outrage for this to happen. We must use this information as motivation to restore the mental health system so that individuals with severe mental illness are not left to deteriorate until their actions provoke a police response.
To comment, visit our Facebook page.
Visit our blog archive to read all our recent posts.