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We Need to Talk About Mental Health Crisis Response in The Police
The response we see can kill.
While browsing my daily twitter feed during this year’s Suicide Prevention month, I came across a horrible news story that as someone who is also on the autism spectrum, shook me to my emotional core.
A distraught mother called a police crisis intervention team in Glendale, Utah to intervene in a meltdown that her 13-year-old son was having, because he doesn’t know how to regulate his emotions, and he just needed help. Unfortunately, they reacted in a completely opposite way than she expected and the poor boy was shot multiple times because he was scared of the officers and tried to run.
In the following video, here, you can see that his mother breaks down into tears describing that she thought her son was dead. The police didn’t tell her he wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t even allowed to see him at the hospital for a long while.
This isn’t an uncommon story, either. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center’s Office of Research and Affairs, 1 in 4 of all fatal police encounters, are those with a mental illness. As well as 1 in 5 jail or prison inmates. I’m not trying to make the assumption that these are undue sentences, but while police interactions shouldn’t end in death anyway, those with mental illness are…
