Page 8A
NATION
East Oregonian
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Justice Dept. focuses on police treatment of mentally ill
By ERIC TUCKER
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
—
Justice Department lawyers
investigating police agencies
for claims of racial discrim-
ination and excessive force
are increasingly turning up a
different problem: oficers’
interactions with the mentally
ill.
The latest example came
in Baltimore, where a critical
report on that department’s
policies found that oficers
end up in unnecessarily
violent confrontations with
mentally disabled people who
in many instances haven’t
even committed crimes.
The report cited instances
of oficers using a stun gun
to subdue an agitated man
who refused to leave a vacant
building and of spraying
mace to force a troubled
person — said by his father
to be unarmed and off his
medications — out of an
apartment.
Though past federal
investigations have addressed
the problem, the Baltimore
report went a step further: It
was the irst time the Justice
Department has explicitly
found that a police depart-
ment’s policies violated the
Americans with Disabilities
Act. The inding is intended
to chart a path to what
federal oficials hope will be
far-reaching improvements,
including better training for
dispatchers and oficers,
diversion of more people to
treatment rather than jail and
stronger relationships with
mental health specialists.
“Through the course of
our work in the last several
years on this bucket of issues,
we’ve seen how important it
is to get at the mental health
issues as early in the system
as possible,” Vanita Gupta,
head of the department’s
Civil Rights Division, said in
an interview.
Civil rights oficials say
the Baltimore report builds
on work they’ve done in
investigating the treatment
of the mentally ill in various
settings. In Mississippi, the
Hinds County jail in June
agreed to better screening
for mental illness as part of
a settlement, and the Justice
Department sued the state as
a whole this month, saying it
was illegally making mentally
ill people go into state-run
psychiatric hospitals.
But it’s the work with
police departments that often
attracts the most attention.
Even as police forces
improve training and develop
intervention teams to respond
to individuals in the throes
of a crisis, concerns remain
that oficers aren’t adequately
equipped for the situations
and are being forced to ill
the void of a resource-starved
mental health infrastructure.
More than 14 percent
of male jail inmates and 31
percent of female inmates are
affected by serious mental
illness, according to a July
Clinton proposes
plan to address
mental health
treatment
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y.
(AP) — Hillary Clinton rolled
out a comprehensive plan to
address millions of Americans
coping with mental illness,
pointing to the need to fully
integrate mental health services
into the nation’s health care
system.
Clinton’s
campaign
released a multi-pronged
approach to mental health care
on Monday, aimed at ensuring
that Americans would no
longer separate mental health
from physical health in terms
of access, care and quality of
treatment.
The
Democratic
presidential
nominee’s
agenda would focus on early
diagnosis and intervention
and create a national initiative
for suicide prevention. If
elected, Clinton would hold
a White House conference on
mental health within her irst
year in ofice.
Clinton’s proposal would
also aim to enforce mental
health parity laws and provide
training to law enforcement
oficers to deal with people
grappling with mental health
problems while prioritizing
treatment over jail for low-level
offenders.
speech by Justice Department
oficial Eve Hill, who said
society has for too long relied
on arrests and jail rather than
treatment for the mentally ill.
“From the standpoint of
police, they are somewhat
frustrated because many of
the people who are walking
the streets and who are in
need of help are not getting
it,” said Chuck Wexler, exec-
utive director of the Police
Executive Research Forum.
“They have been out on the
streets, they can’t afford
medication, and so the police
wind up being the only one
they come in contact with.”
The Justice Department
has incorporated treatment of
the mentally ill into several of
its wide-ranging civil rights
investigations of troubled
police departments.
“I think some police
departments have really
made it a priority and are
doing quite a bit. I don’t
know that that’s consistent
across all the departments,”
said Amy Watson, a mental
health policy professor at
the University of Illinois at
Chicago.
A 2011 Justice Depart-
ment report on Seattle
criticized oficers for too
quickly resorting to force
when encountering people
with mental illness or under
the inluence of drugs.
In Cleveland, oficers
were found to use stun guns
against people with limited
cognitive abilities, and in one
case used one on a suicidal
deaf man who may not have
understood their commands,
according to a 2014 report.
Albuquerque,
New
Mexico oficers responding
to a domestic violence
complaint used the same
tactic on a man who had
doused himself with gasoline,
the Justice Department said.
Those cities have since
reached
court-enforceable
consent decrees aimed at
overhauling practices.
The Portland police
department, which also
came under investigation,
agreed to new training and
accountability
measures
under a settlement. A federal
monitor in February found
the Seattle police department
was sending trained crisis
intervention oficers to “crisis
events in the great majority
of instances” and had given
some level of training to all
oficers in the last two years.
Federal oficials hope
for a similar resolution in
Baltimore, where the Justice
Department says police have
provided minimal training on
responding to mental health
crises. Under an agreement
in principle, Baltimore has
pledged to work more closely
with disability organizations
and mental health providers.
But, Gupta said, improve-
ments can occur only if there’s
a system with resources in
place to help the police.
Ray Kelly, a leader of the
No Boundaries Coalition, a
Baltimore advocacy group,
said he didn’t believe Balti-
more police have succeeded
in separating law-abiding citi-
zens from criminal suspects,
“so they deinitely don’t
take the time to separate the
mentally ill from the criminal
element or the average Joe
buying drugs on one of our
corners.”
He said he hoped the
report would foster better
collaboration between police
and mental health experts,
so that if there’s a possibility
that oficers are dealing with
someone who’s disabled, they
“would call a professional
that’s prepared to work with
this instead of using aggres-
sive manhandling tactics like
they’ve used in the past.”
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