Police, mentally ill can make lethal combination

By ROMA KHANNA and STEVE McVICKER

Five years after the Houston Police Department began training to better deal with people in mental crisis, such interactions continue to end violently, with an officer shooting someone with mental problems.

HPD officers have shot at least nine people with known mental illness in the past five years, seven of them fatally, according to a Houston Chronicle review. In at least six other shootings, the victim's behavior suggests a possible mental episode. Four of those shootings were fatal.

The number of shooting deaths is comparable to the findings of a similar review undertaken after the Jan. 20, 1999, shooting death of Sheryl Ann Seymour, a schizophrenic woman who was shot by an HPD officer after brandishing a kitchen knife.
 
Seymour's death propelled the issue into public view, and HPD months later began to assemble a cadre of officers trained to intervene with people in mental crisis.

That training has led to significant, measurable improvements. Almost 25 percent of HPD officers are on the Crisis Intervention Team, about the recommended average, and officers have taken a steadily increasing number of people to the hospital for psychiatric help instead of jail.

"We have improved our ability to deal with people in crisis," acting Police Chief Joe Breshears said. "We are better prepared to recognize these individuals and deal with those situations."

Yet these efforts are diminished by key shortcomings, such as the failure to deploy crisis-trained officers when they are most needed.

HPD records show that on average, the Crisis Intervention Team responded to less than 27 percent of the calls for a CIT member received in the last six months of 2003.
 
Emergency 911 dispatchers often fail to identify calls about people experiencing mental problems, assigning untrained officers to handle the crucial first interactions with them, according to both advocates and critics of the training program, including Breshears.
 
Furthermore, officers complain that the department has not provided adequate access to nonlethal weapons.

The Chronicle reviewed the initial reports from 167 shootings by Harris County law enforcement officers from 1999 to the present. In the nine HPD shootings involving known mentally ill people, only one of the officers who fired his gun had received crisis intervention training, according to department records, and CIT officers attempted to intercede before only one other shooting.

In September 1999, the Chronicle identified six people known to be mentally ill who were killed by an HPD officer in the five years before the CIT was developed. The relatively constant number of fatal shootings, even as the total number of police shootings declined, suggests that the department's strides in crisis intervention have had little impact on the most serious encounters.

"No one can make a case to say that things have improved when the numbers haven't changed," said Arlene Kelly, whose daughter, Colleen, suffered from chronic depression. Police, responding to reports that she was suicidal, shot and killed her when she did not drop a bag they feared contained a gun. It did not.

Quantifying the number of police interactions with the mentally ill is, at best, complicated. Unlike age, race and home address, police can rarely report a person's mental status. Even if it were recorded, experts say, a population of people who have never been diagnosed and have little access to mental health care would remain uncounted. Texas ranks 47th among states in per capita spending on mental health.

For example, among those shot over the past five years is a man who charged at a police officer with a screwdriver as the officer investigated reports of a suicide in progress. In another case, family members told police that a man shot to death after a five-hour standoff with a SWAT team had been depressed.
 
No conclusions were reached immediately about these people's mental health. But even without the borderline cases, some say, HPD's record of shooting people with mental illness exposes an enduring problem.
 
"This is a cultural issue," said Kelly, who helped found Civilians Down, a support group that monitors police shootings, after her daughter's death.

Kelly has found that most officers still are unprepared to provide the type of help needed by people who are suicidal, paranoid or delusional.

"It is cop culture to intimidate you and use force," she said. "They are taught to look at all situations through the same lens."

Others argue that violence sometimes is inevitable when the lives of police -- trained to use force when in danger -- and the mentally ill -- whose sickness may make them appear dangerous -- intersect.

"You have to understand that it is very difficult for police officers to assess whether they are dealing with a mentally ill person instantaneously, because there are doctors who take hours to come up with a diagnosis," said David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor and expert on police shootings. "The sorts of behaviors that could be indicative of mental impairment could also be signs of a lot of things that could make a person dangerous."

Calling such shootings unfortunate, Breshears said the safety of both the officers and others present must be a priority.

"We try to teach them to combine CIT training and safety training," he said, "but when an officer is put in a dangerous situation, they have to take what action is necessary."

One of the most publicized fatal encounters was the shooting death of Seymour, who was killed after she called paramedics to take her to a psychiatric hospital. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Seymour knew she was having an episode. When the paramedics arrived, accompanied by police, she was fully psychotic. A slight woman who stood barely 5 feet tall, Seymour advanced with a kitchen knife and police shot her.

The death prompted questions about HPD's protocol and why officers had not used a nonlethal weapon to subdue Seymour.

Shortly afterward, then-Police Chief C.O. Bradford expanded the deployment of weapons such as Tasers, hand-held devices that deliver electric shock, that previously were given only to sergeants. He also initiated a review of police shootings.
 
Later in 1999, HPD implemented a program that would come to be known as the Crisis Intervention Team and that had been in development for years. Sixty officers received intense training on dealing with the mentally ill. The next year, Bradford insisted that every officer receive at least eight hours of training.

In the past five years, the all-volunteer CIT has grown to about 650 officers.

Officer Frank Webb coordinates CIT training, which comprises a 40-hour initial course and an annual eight-hour refresher course. The training includes classes on improving an officer's communication skills and role-playing in simulated mental health-related situations. Perhaps the most important part of the course, Webb said, is the interaction officers have with a mentally ill person.

"It really does work," Webb said. "And it's almost paradoxical. (Police officers) are used to using force to get people under control. But in these situations, by taking a less authoritative approach you end up having more control over the person."

The strides HPD has made in its approach to the mentally ill seem insignificant to Belinda Stomski, whose suicidal daughter died after a confrontation with police.
 
Rachel Michelle Taylor, 28, had just recovered from years of debilitating back problems and gotten a job when her life ended. Suffering from severe depression, Taylor woke up angry on Nov. 23, 2002. Stomski said she left the house in a rage and attempted to kill herself by crashing her truck into a tree.
 
"She came back to the house and just kept saying, `I can't do this myself; I can't do this myself,' " Stomski said. "And then she picked up the phone and pretended to be me and told the 911 dispatcher that she was having problems with her daughter."

When the police arrived, Stomski met them in the driveway.

"She is not in her right mind," she told them.

The officers, according to Stomski, began to discuss how to get Taylor out of the house. She came out of the house on her own, with a gun.
 
Stomski struggled with her daughter and tried to persuade her not to shoot. The officers pulled Stomski away out of concern for her safety and shot Taylor.

"I know my Rachel's case is different because she had a gun and that they call this sort of thing suicide by cop," Stomski said. "But I just wish there had been someone there who might have known how to talk to her, who might have known what to do."

Police supervisors and mental health advocates both say 911 dispatchers must improve their methods for identifying when to call a CIT officer and for deploying trained officers promptly. Even Breshears refers to dispatch as a "continuing problem."
 
Maj. Sam Cochran, who leads the Memphis, Tenn., police department CIT, considered among the best in the nation, said the situation is not always so clear when the calls come into the emergency center.

Memphis dispatchers receive regular refresher training, including a 16-hour course they recently completed, he said.

When the Houston program began, all dispatchers and call-takers received a two-hour block of instruction on how to identify scenes where a CIT-trained officer should be the primary unit, said Webb, who thinks it is time for more instruction.

"I'd like to see the numbers (where CIT is the first responding unit) a little higher than they are," Webb said. "It's been about three years since we did the original (dispatch) training. And we're trying to get back in now and retrain them."

Breshears said the problem has been addressed with training, but, with turnover and other factors, it returns over time.

Sgt. Johnnie McFarland, who supervises HPD dispatchers, takes exception to singling out them and call-takers.

"If they feel more training is needed, that's all fine and good," McFarland said. "I agree with a refresher course. But the problem I have with it is, are there enough CIT units on the streets? And do they have enough (nonlethal) tools like Tasers and bean bags if it comes to that?"

Two incidents in February 2000 demonstrate the utility of nonlethal weapons.
 
In the first, a man was standing in the street striking passing vehicles with a baseball bat. He began to swing at responding officers, who used a beanbag shotgun to subdue the man and take him to the hospital without further problem. That same week, a mentally ill man accosting pedestrians on a downtown sidewalk became combative. Officers subdued him with a Taser and took him to the hospital. They obtained a mental health warrant so that he could be evaluated and treated.

Yet, Hans Marticiuc, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, said officers do not have enough access to nonlethal weapons; though HPD has expanded its stock of alternative weapons, officers are still limited to one per patrol district.
 
"There is no doubt that we have improved, but if this is a priority the department needs to make a commitment to things like making more nonlethal weapons available," he said.

Breshears said he was unaware of such complaints but is willing to look into them.

As Marticiuc sees it, the fate of progress on these issues lies in the hands of the new mayor and a police chief, who has yet to be named.

"When you looked at it, this issue came to the forefront and changes were made under Chief Bradford," he said. "Where we go from here and what type of commitment we get from the department is to be determined."

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