(March 26, 2015) In August 2008, Theresa Sheehan, a mentally ill 56-year-old woman, was shot multiple times by San Francisco police officers in an encounter that occurred after she stopped taking her medication. Jason Harrison, a man with schizophrenia and bipolar was shot and killed in Texas last year. James Boyd, 38, a homeless man who had a history of mental illness was also shot and killed by police in New Mexico last year. Each of these cases grabbed national headlines.
But the Sheehan case has made it all the way to the Supreme Court. This Monday, justices heard oral arguments in Sheehan v. San Francisco about regulations that apply to police policies and procedures during arrests (“Reasonable accommodations,” Slate Magazine, March 26).
“Unless we want a society in which the mentally ill are automatically killed,” Justice Sotomayor said in the oral arguments, “isn’t the ADA ... intended to ensure that police officers try mitigation in these situations before they jump to violence?”
Yes, the ADA is intended to give “reasonable accommodations” to people with disabilities, including people with serious mental illness. But we need to go much further than that to stem the tide of killings associated with untreated severe mental illness.
Whatever the verdict, it is clear that people with untreated severe mental illness are increasingly coming into contact with law enforcement, often with deadly consequences. Our study, “Justifiable Homicides: What is the Role of Mental Illness?,” estimates that just about half of all people shot and killed by US police have mental illness.
These preventable tragedies will not stop occurring until we return the 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 and use assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) to reduce officer-involved tragedies and enact AOT laws in the five states where the treatment option remains unavailable.
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