What struck me about Christy E. Lopez’s op-ed in the Washington Post advising on how law enforcement agencies to “keep police responses from ending in tragedy”:
The tragic police killing of yet another person in mental health crisis — this time in Philadelphia — underscores the need to dramatically improve community mental health services — including ending our over-reliance on police officers as first responders. But the death of Walter Wallace Jr. on Monday also reminds us that the police will continue to respond to such crises on occasion, and that more must be done to ensure that when they do it is not a precursor to tragedy.
and
First, law enforcement agencies should ensure that every officer is comprehensively trained in how to de-escalate mental health crises without resorting to deadly force. A system developed by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) provides guidance for avoiding the use of deadly force in such encounters — even when the individual has a weapon. PERF recommends integrating de-escalation training with crisis intervention training. This training should be paired with active bystandership training, which teaches officers how to intervene to keep each other from over-reacting during crisis situations.
Currently, even in departments that provide crisis intervention training, most officers receive just eight hours rather than the full 40 hours of training — and some receive none. Given the proportion of police calls and deadly shootings that involve persons in mental health crisis, reforms should include investment in full training for all officers. Nor should crisis intervention training be paired with Taser training, as the Justice Department warned Philadelphia in 2015. Such coupling sends the dangerous and inaccurate message that weapons, rather than words, are the best tool to bring to the scene of mental health crises.
Secondly, cities should consider identifying and deploying — again, 24/7 — teams of individuals, either two officers or an officer paired with a mental health professional, to respond to individuals who are in mental health crisis and threatening to use a dangerous weapon. This intervention is more fraught, given the risks that a police culture of confrontation would undermine the effectiveness of such teams, or that they would be used in situations where a police response is unnecessary or even counterproductive. But as part of a larger community-based response to mental health crisis, such teams could fill a small but critical need.
is that Philadelphia, Kenosha, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and many, many other police departments all have such Crisis Intervention Teams and engage in substantial non-violent conflict resolution training. Maybe these teams aren’t being deployed when they are needed; I can’t speculate on that. But what she’s advocating has already been done.
Here in Chicago despite the hundreds of thousands of police responses in 2020, Chicago police officers have fired their sidearms about a dozen times. During that same period there have been nearly 4,000 shootings in the City of Chicago. I think that the preponderance of the evidence does not support the notion of trigger-happy police officers. Is it possible that people are over-reacting to what are actually very rare and regrettable occurrences?
Is it possible ?
Of course it is. But in today’s environment, the police need to know the skin color of the violent actor before they arrive, so they can avoid response, set up a perimeter, and wait.
“I think that the preponderance of the evidence does not support the notion of trigger-happy police officers. Is it possible that people are over-reacting to what are actually very rare and regrettable occurrences?”
Is it possible? Uh, yeah. Pardon my cynicism and my revulsion at the total bloodthirsty positioning of media and the Dem Party for purely political reasons.
‘What struck me about Christy E. Lopez’s op-ed in the Washington Post advising on how law enforcement agencies to “keep police responses from ending in tragedy‒
I strongly suspect Ms. Lopez lives in a neighborhood where there are virtually no tragic ends to police responses. Extrapolation by lived experience.
Of course the easiest and quickest way to keep police responses from ending in tragedy is to have no police responses at all. In olden days they were called police strikes. They never ended well.
So if they only kill 5 or 6 needlessly in Chicago every year everything is OK. And if it carries over to the rest of the country at similar rates we get hundreds killed, but that is OK because criminals are killing each other?
Could you explain again why there is some moral equivalency between the police wrongfully shooting someone and a criminal shooting someone?
Steve
“So if they only kill 5 or 6 needlessly in Chicago every year everything is OK. And if it carries over to the rest of the country at similar rates we get hundreds killed, but that is OK because criminals are killing each other?”
I don’t think it’s OK, but I think people need to recognize this isn’t an easy problem to solve and that there will inevitably be cases where police needlessly kill someone in a country of 330 million millions of police encounters every year.
Training for crisis situations where people under stress have to make split-second life-and-death decisions isn’t easy and such training doesn’t “take” for a lot of people as I learned in the military where there is a lot of that kind of training.
The assumption that “that every officer is comprehensively trained in how to de-escalate mental health crises without resorting to deadly force” assumes that officers can consistently and accurately distinguish a “mental health crisis” from something else when they’ve received incomplete information before they even get to the scene.
In short, there are limitations and diminishing returns to what training can do unless one is willing to spend a shit-ton of resources and time on training – money and time that municipalities have not been willing or able to spend.
Personally, I think the primary focus should be on removing bad officers from the force or putting them in jobs that don’t require interfacing with the public. I haven’t closely examined the data, but it does seem like a lot of these high-profile police killings are done by officers with extensive records of misconduct.
If the goal is to get to zero killings by police in an obviously hyper violent society then take away their guns.
Stop demanding an omniscient King Solomon level of judgement
from an armed human being in every tense, dangerous situation.
Take their guns, give them a whistle, pad and paper.
If that’s how they want it, let them vote, city by city.
Call it a voluntary compliance zone. See how it goes.
I’d really like to see it go well.
At the least, you would have no police killings. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?
Germany, France, Canada and the UK have much lower rates of people killed by police. We are right there with Mexico, Sudan and Colombia. That first group doesnt seem like a bunch of lawless hell holes. It is possible to have police and not shoot so many people. (Of note, many of the places with higher death rates have essentially no trauma systems in place. A person shot by the police in the US has a much higher chance of surviving than in most other countries. So our actual rate of shootings is probably higher.)
“Personally, I think the primary focus should be on removing bad officers from the force or putting them in jobs that don’t require interfacing with the public. I haven’t closely examined the data, but it does seem like a lot of these high-profile police killings are done by officers with extensive records of misconduct.”
Completely agree. It is nearly universally accepted that government workers often have deficiencies. But when you get to the police they are all deemed perfect, or not needing any changes, by certain political elements in the country. So Dave, like conservatives, concentrates on killings but it is a much broader issue. Police abuse, beatings and even torture keep popping up, besides the corruption and ineptitude that can be a problems with govt workers anywhere.
Steve
They also have much lower rates of violent crime. We are a more violent country. Always have been. I think we should continue to strive for less violent crime and less violence on the part of the police while acknowledging that perfection is beyond our grasp. I think that Chicago is doing pretty well under the circumstances. Police homicides are a small fraction what they were 20 years ago—single digits. But I think that more aggressive responses from the police that resulted in twice as many police killings would be acceptable if they cut the number of black homicides in half or farther and I believe that most Chicago blacks agree with me.
And why did I focus on homicides? Because the topic, raised by the op-ed in that conservative rag the Washington Post, was homicides.
I have complained frequently about police torture. I think it’s reprehensible and I think the best solution for it is making police officers who engage in actions that are contrary to official policy fully accountable for their actions. As it is we shield police officers engaged in egregiously bad behavior inconsistent with official policy while accepting lawsuits against the city for their actions. That’s the opposite of what we should be doing.
The article talked a lot about shooting the mentally ill. We have more violent crime, but that shouldn’t necessarily mean shooting more of the metal ill. They seem to manage that in the aforementioned countries. In the US it seems we are more likely to shoot the mentally ill.
Steve
We are also less likely to institutionalize them which means we have a lot more people who are seriously mentally ill just walking around.
And the mentally ill don’t wear nameplates. Once they’re coming at you with a knife…
Mental illness of the sort that has people going after you with a knife is usually a chronic illness. The neighbors and family who call for help usually know. The police could and should usually know.
Steve