13.

AT THE END OF FAILING SYSTEMS

The call came in at around 7 p.m. as a 10-96. That’s the universal cop code for a mentally ill person. I’d been on several such assignments in my early days as an officer with the Arlington, Virginia, police department. I remember it was a particularly humid, muggy, summer evening when my partner and I got one of those calls. It was 1986. We rushed to the corner of Glebe Road and Walter Reed Drive. The call to the station had apparently come from one of the neighboring houses. Mental health calls are always tricky. They can be unpredictable, dangerous affairs—for the victim and the cop. Other times, I’m almost ashamed to admit, they can be, sadly, humorous distractions from otherwise taxing work. This one, fortunately, was the latter.

We found our suspect standing on the sidewalk, a man in his mid-50s, salt-and-pepper hair, unkempt, unshaven, and dressed only in a robe, socks, and slippers. On top of his head was a board, slightly larger than the mortarboards graduating students wear, that was covered with what appeared to be three or four layers of aluminum foil. Some of the foil covered his head and held the board in place. We would later learn that this was his version of a solar panel that he had designed to protect himself from the sun’s deadly rays. We stopped the car and headed over.

“Good evening, sir,” I said. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Solar eclipse, solar eclipse coming,” he responded hurriedly. “Got to get ready.”

We looked at each other and then back at him.

“One came yesterday,” he said. “Were you ready?”

Maybe the man was off his medication. Maybe he was having a psychotic episode. We were police officers. We weren’t trained for this. As per procedure, we talked to him a little more and observed his behavior. He showed us his identification. He had a residence. He didn’t appear violent or suicidal. So, we thanked him and left. If he had badly injured himself, we could have taken him to a hospital. If he had committed a crime, we could have taken him to jail, but we could not take him to a psychiatric facility, even if we believed his mental illness was the reason for the crime. Since the man had done neither, we bid him good evening and got back in our cruiser. There’s no law against being mentally ill.

Since my days as a young cop, the issues of the homeless and the mentally ill have graduated from occasional oddities to harsh fixtures on the nation’s streets. In Los Angeles, the homeless population occupies 50 downtown city blocks. The homeless population in New York City is larger than the overall population in 95 percent of America’s municipalities. Our nation’s capital has more homeless people per capita than any city in America. Overall, nearly 200 of every 100,000 Americans are homeless. A vast number of them are also mentally ill.

Technically, being homeless and/or mentally ill are not crimes. But in the real world, it is law enforcement—police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and state troopers—who have become the default responders to calls for people in mental distress or in need of housing. When families call for help for a relative in the home who is having a psychotic episode or residents report homeless people in their communities, the 911 operators don’t dispatch mental health professionals or homeless assistance experts. They send men and women with guns, handcuffs, and batons.

Newport, Rhode Island, is a striking example of the nation’s use of police as surrogates for mental health professionals. In the shadow of enormous wealth, a place where tourists flock to view the outsized yachts and iconic mansions, about 40 percent of all calls to police are for people who are mentally ill or have behavioral problems. In one case, police responded to the home of a 57-year-old woman 61 times in 17 months, and, with each call, the only culprits were the demons inside the woman’s mind.

Meanwhile, hospitals dump homeless patients on the street for police to deal with because they are not adequately reimbursed for treating the uninsured homeless. In addition, these people often come with mental health issues hospital officials are not prepared to address. The accusations of so-called “patient dumping” had been around for years, but weren’t confirmed until 2007 when officials at Kaiser Permanente Hospital were caught on video dumping 63-year-old Carol Ann Reyes on the street. She was homeless, suffering from dementia and wearing only a hospital gown and a diaper. After failing to give her medication to treat her severe high blood pressure, the hospital had arranged for her to be driven nearly 20 miles from its facility in Bellflower, California. She was dumped in Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, where police were left to deal with her.

Other similar cases were reported in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. The most recent incident occurred in early 2018 when the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore dumped a mentally ill woman on the street, dressed only in a hospital gown and underwear in 37-degree temperatures. A passerby, a psychotherapist, videoed the incident and called 911 for help. Dispatchers sent the police.

Because law enforcement is designated to respond to these incidents, America’s jails have become holding tanks for large populations of the mentally ill and homeless.

Cook County Jail in Chicago is the most glaring example. It is the nation’s largest jail. Thirty percent of its inmates are certified by doctors as severely mentally ill. Consequently, Cook County Jail is the largest supplier of mental health services in the United States. No, not just for incarcerated people, but for all of America. As jail officials deliver daily rations of food and health care, they also hand out thousands of daily doses of anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, and antipsychotics. Doctors are on staff to provide consultation and treatment. If you are poor, and you need mental health services in Chicago, you need to get locked up, the police chief told me, because, like other cities and states, Chicago has closed many of its mental health facilities.

And because America has failed to adequately provide care for the homeless and the mentally ill, every day the police find themselves on a collision course with people they are not trained to engage, often with disastrous results. Police are not health care professionals. Even with 40 hours of crisis intervention training—offered by only a few of the nation’s police departments—they cannot differentiate between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

We’re not trained to deal with patients who are in distress. Most cops don’t understand what it truly means when mentally ill people say, “Don’t touch me.” Unfortunately, the police response, in most cases, is to touch them, because in cop world, if people don’t respond to our verbal commands, we’re trained to apply limited force. But how can these people follow commands when their minds don’t allow them to even adequately process the conversations and exchanges?

In too many of these encounters, the result is death. Sometimes it is the cop who is killed or injured. In most cases, it is the citizen. Here’s a scary number that should give our nation pause: While black people are three times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police, the mentally ill are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Almost half of the people who die at the hands of police annually have a disability, from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to Down syndrome, according to a widely reported study published by the Ruderman Family Foundation, a disability advocacy organization. Officers respond to emergencies with lethal force where urgent care may be more appropriate, the report said. The result? We are unnecessarily killing mentally ill people and using cops to do it.

Fast-forward 25 years from my encounter in Arlington to a cold December evening in Baltimore. That’s when two Baltimore cops got their 10-96, even though the people who needed assistance had never asked for police. It was a Sunday night in 2011, and the family of Franklin Williams needed help. Williams was schizophrenic, and he was off his medication, as are about half of mental patients daily, experts say. The family suspected so, because Williams, 37, had begun acting the way he did when he had one of his rare psychotic episodes. He had begun to drink lots and lots of water that day. He took baths and smoked cigarettes to calm himself and quiet the voices in his head. He was strange, but not violent.

When his 65-year-old mother came home, she found that he had locked her out of the house. Williams’s mother called her niece, who was a nurse. She would know what to do, she thought. The niece dialed 911 and asked the operator to send someone to the southwest Baltimore home to take Williams to a hospital. The anxious mother was expecting medical professionals, perhaps an ambulance with people familiar with schizophrenia.

Instead, she got Sergeant Don Slimmer, a 10-year veteran, and Officer Brian Rose, who had been on the force for five years. When the officers arrived, a neighbor led them through their connected row house to the backyard, so they could have access to the back of Williams’s home. One officer climbed through a back window and let the other one through the back door. The officers cleared the downstairs and made their way up the stairs. They stopped in a small hallway with bedrooms on either side. The officers could see Williams in the bedroom on the left. He was slumped over in a chair. Their guns were drawn. One of the officers yelled, “Police.” That startled Williams, who stood up. Williams was a big man. When he stood up, it rattled the officers. He walked toward them as they commanded, and they shot him. Williams did ultimately get to a hospital, as his family requested, but it was a shock trauma unit in an Emergency Department. His attorney, Robert Joyce, told me Williams was so badly wounded he was dead on arrival. He had been shot 11 times, once in the head, but the doctors miraculously pieced him back together after several weeks of surgeries. He is permanently disabled from the incident.

The officers claimed Williams came through the doorway armed with a knife and attempted to attack them. He hadn’t. That was a cover story. The cops hadn’t noticed Williams’s 12-year-old nephew across the hall; he saw the shooting and testified in court about what he saw. He told jurors that Williams didn’t have a knife and he didn’t lunge at the officers. In fact, Williams was standing inside his room when police shot him. Joyce noted to the jury that, after being shot, Williams’s body was slumped inside the doorway and all the blood was inside the room.

The jury ruled for the family and awarded it $600,000 to care for Williams. The courts later cut the award down to $200,000. The cops were found to be at fault, but while that is true, it was the city, the state, the nation, all of us who are to blame. On average, each day, one mentally ill or disabled person is killed by a law enforcement officer because these officers are being asked to do a job that they simply cannot and should not be assigned to do. People who are mentally ill and the homeless are the most glaring examples of “criminal” cop encounters because of failed systems.

While in the St. Louis area trying to understand what happened in Ferguson before and after the death of Michael Brown, I stopped by the office of Adolphus Pruitt, the head of the St. Louis Chapter of the NAACP, to talk about his city’s issues with crime and cops, poverty and police. Pruitt is an interesting guy. He had made so much money in construction in the first half of his life, that he decided to take a stab at tackling what ails the city and African-Americans as his second career. As we talked, he slid a piece of paper to me across his desk.

“Read this and tell me what you see,” Pruitt said.

It was an annual murder report from the St. Louis Police Department’s statistics section. It broke down the homicides by the usual categories: race of the victim, race of the assailant, age of the victim, age of the assailant, which neighborhoods the murders had occurred in. However, this document added some more information: whether the victims and assailants had used drugs or alcohol before the incident; gang affiliation, if any; previous criminal record, etc. St. Louis doesn’t have nearly the number of murders as Chicago. In 2016, it reported 188, a paltry number compared to the 762 in Chicago. But when it comes to murders based on how many people live in a city, people are being murdered in St. Louis at more than twice the rate they are in Chicago. I quickly scanned the paper and shrugged. Of 188 murder victims, 159 were black. African-Americans, who made up about half the city’s population, accounted for almost 90 percent of the people who were killed.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen this before in lots of cities. That’s true in just about every major city with a large black population. African-Americans make up a disproportionate number of the murder victims.”

A sly smile crossed Pruitt’s lips.

“Nope, look at it again,” he said. “You’re missing it.”

I stared down at the paper. Only 18 of the victims had been gang members and only three of the incidents were gang-related. Not it. Nearly all the shooters were the same race as the victim, a long-recognized pattern for homicides. Not it. Most of the victims were male. No news there. Forty-three of the victims and 13 of the suspects were on probation at the time of the murder. Fifteen of the murders were the results of domestic discord.

“Most of the victims have a previous criminal history,” I mumbled to myself.

“You’re missing it,” Pruitt said. “Look at the education level.”

I was stunned. Not one of the murder victims had graduated from high school. Not one. The pattern was virtually the same for the people who killed them. Of all the factors on the page, it was the number one indicator of who was getting shot and who was doing the shooting. Pruitt handed me documents for the previous year and the one before that. The numbers were virtually the same in every report. Year after year, young black men were divorced from regular society, uneducated, largely unemployable, and unable to envision a future beyond robbing, stealing, dope dealing, and killing each other, while raining havoc on the rest of the city in the process.

The relationship between education and criminality exists across America. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, only 1 out of every 35 high school graduates was in jail or prison. Conversely, 1 out of every 14 white high school dropouts was in custody and 1 out of every 4 African-American dropouts was behind bars.

To be honest, you don’t need a study to tell you that. Just ask any public school teacher. Schoolteachers can look across their classrooms, some as early as the fourth grade, and identify the students who will probably end up in prison or dead. They are the ones in impoverished families who can barely pay attention in class because they are quietly traumatized by unsettled homes and tumultuous neighborhoods, kids being bounced around foster care, the ones with a parent struggling to support too many children on too little money or those without present parents or stable guardians at all.

I’ve witnessed it as a volunteer mentor to middle school kids through my 100 Black Men chapter. Once a week, I drive from my home to Newark where I meet with six eighth-graders at Chancellor Avenue School whom school officials have identified as “at risk.” The fathers of three of the six were gunned down in the streets of Newark. The father of a fourth died four months before I met him. He barely knew his father, because the father had spent most of his adulthood in and out of jail, but when I asked the kid what he would change about the world, he said, “I wish my dad was still alive.”

The six arrive at each counseling session drowsy and tired because they live in households, they explained to me, with so much activity they rarely make it to bed before 1 a.m. One suffers with obvious signs of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Consequently, he is constantly missing out on activities and getting in trouble. They are not bad kids; they have bad conditions.

And if they drop through the cracks, like millions of similar children, they become a police problem, because that is who we turn to when our systems fail.

Arne Duncan, former secretary of the federal Department of Education and previous superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools system, has seen it time and time again while working with public school systems. I met Duncan during a presentation to Chicago business owners about how they could help reduce the city’s soaring violent crime rate by hiring and training some of those high school dropouts. Duncan had returned to Chicago to form an organization that would put black kids lost in the shuffle on a path to employment. He is working with Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger.

Duncan explained that decades of neglect and failure to buttress faltering families and children had stunted the development of the vast majority of the men and women with whom he worked.

“Many of our guys are in the family business,” Duncan said. “This is the world they grew up in. It is violent. It is dangerous. Most of them are tired of getting shot at and tired of getting shipped off to jail. There is this terrible myth that they are making all this money selling drugs. They aren’t. We discovered that the guys who are doing the shooting are making $80 a day. Most would get out of that business if we could pay them $12 or $14 an hour. Transformation isn’t easy, but we can’t arrest our way out of this.”

As I think about law enforcement, a lot has changed. No longer are our departments homogenous bastions of white males. Many are led by African-American and Latino men and women. Still, in many departments, the percentage of cops of color is not representative of the community’s populations. The numbers are a far cry from the days when black officers stood while white officers sat, when black officers were not allowed to arrest white citizens or ride in police cars, when referring to them as “niggers” or refusing to work with them because of their color was not cause for reprimand.

Yes, a lot has changed. And change is good, but it’s not necessarily progress. If black men and women continue to die disproportionately at the hands of police, as they have over the past few years, we haven’t made progress. If the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement remains as toxic as ever, we haven’t made progress. Additionally, it begs the question of whether African-American and Latino officers are just as complicit in the continuing problem of biased enforcement as their fellow officers. For me, it points to a fundamental issue.

The wrongs inside police departments are not about a handful of bad police officers. Instead, they reflect bad policing procedures and policies that many of our departments have come to accept as gospel. To fix the problem requires a realignment of our thinking about the role police play and how closely they as a group and as individuals are knitted into the fabric of society. Do they stand apart from societal norms or will they uphold their motto of “To Protect and Serve”? Are they to be looked at as the men and women who sweep up the refuse left by our refusal or inability to tackle societal problems, or are they partners in our efforts to provide a vibrant and supportive community for all? The decision is ours.