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(ThyBlackMan.com) “Mental illness should not be your ticket to death.” This was what one grieving parent told a phalanx of reporters a year ago in Virginia. Her son had serious mental health challenges. Yet he died at the hands of law enforcement. We’ve seen endless variations of this tragic pattern of death in Los Angeles almost always as in Virginia at the hands of the LAPD or the L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputies.
The tragedy happened yet again with the slaying by LAPD officers of a young woman in Panorama City. Officers claimed the woman had a knife and threatened them and family members. If true, this should raise massive red flags. A woman, a knife, threatening family members. That has all the all too familiar signs of someone that had at least for that moment a serious mental challenge. Meaning that the admonition from the Virginia mother that mental illness should not be your ticket to death had serious, grim consequences, and most important might have been avoided.
There is one simple way to ensure that. The police should not be the first responder to an individual experiencing a mental trauma and who pose a potential physical threat to others. The mandatory first response in Los Angeles should be that of a Prevent Death Crisis Response Team. It would quickly rush to the scene where an individual is experiencing a mental crisis. The team would be thoroughly trained in the vast array of counseling, therapeutic, and psychological techniques to talk down someone who poses a threat to others. The LAPD and L.A. County Sheriffs should be present but only as a last resort back up resource if all non-violent, talk down methods fail.
Countless studies on the use of prevent death crisis response teams in other cities as the first and in many cases only response has prevented the use of deadly force such as that of the Panorama City. A study conducted by the New Jersey Monitor in 2023 found that a crisis response team at the scene of threatening mental health related situations cut the use of force and arrest in over ninety five percent of the cases. Other studies of similar Prevent Death response team interventions have shown similar results.
L.A. City officials and the LAPD have talked repeatedly about the use of such teams in potential life-threatening situations as the Panorama City tragedy. And here are pilot programs currently in place. However, the brutal and tragic reality is that the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriffs, still in most mental health challenged cases, are the first responders. And as was the case in Panorama City as in other past cases like, the result has often been death.
That raise another question n about the LAPD overuse of deadly force. There have been countless reports, recommendations, rule changes, investigations, civilian checks, and balances on the LAPD on the overuse of deadly force. It’s as if none of these things ever happened or meant little to nothing. The LAPD shootings continue to remain uncomfortably high. Even when the LAPD shot fewer people the death toll from the shootings still remains high.
Now we have the Panorama City slaying. This again rams home the perennially troubling issue of what, when, and how LAPD officers should use non-lethal force. In the Panorama City slaying, the official version is that officers responded to a violent incident call at a home and confronted the woman allegedly with a knife and resisted orders to drop the weapon and didn’t respond a taser.
What makes the slaying dubious is that it and the other LAPD shootings come in the wake of the historic legislation the state legislature passed last January 1, 2020. It mandated strict training, accountability, and discipline procedures for the use of force by officers. Since the law was passed, however, the number of shootings, some questionable, has not dropped. The LAPD shootings are a prime example.
The one certainty in the latest killing is that it’s not an isolated case of deadly force used by the LAPD. So, the question again in the latest shooting is did she have to die? The stock answer is that whenever a suspect poses a direct threat to an officer, or an officer responds to a potentially life-threatening incident, he or she can use whatever force is necessary up to and including deadly force. In more cases than not this is a strictly subjective judgment call. And, in almost all cases, officers that use lethal force are shielded from prosecution in the absence of iron-clad proof of wrongdoing. No LAPD officer has been prosecuted for the use of deadly force on duty no matter how questionable in many years.
The way to avoid this unnecessary tangle of the highly questionable use of force in dealing with those with possible mental health challenges is the mandatory use of Prevent Death Crisis Response Teams in all such situations. LA officials have talked a good game about that need now it’s time to fully respond not with more talk but action. In that absence, it’s only a matter of time before the next Panorama City tragedy happens.
Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
One can find more info about Mr. Hutchinson over at the following site; TheHutchinson Report.
Also feel free to connect with him through twitter; http://twitter.com/earlhutchins
