The title of this blog post is probably not a surprise to anybody, but it's still a horrifying fact of American policing: The vast, vast majority of American police officers have zero or extremely minimal training in how to deal with a citizen having a mental health crisis.
This is particularly bad and scary because cops get constantly called to such situations, and thus they go there with no idea how to handle it. And, thus, they usually just handle it like they have been taught to handle dangerous people who are a potential or actual danger to the cops: In other words, with violence and sometimes lethal force.
I don't know what the numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised that, given the size and population of the country, cops are being called to people having a mental health crisis probably several times every day. Given how prevalent this situation is, one would think that they would have extensive special training for it. But no. They don't. Or, at least, extremely few of them do.
In this video (the second case showcased in it), cops have been called into such a situation, and the man having the crisis ends up walking back and forth the street with a knife in his hand.
Big kudos to the first three cops who arrive at the scene: They actually try to talk him out of it, to talk him into dropping the knife, rather than start immediately shooting. One of them tries to use a taser on him, but it doesn't work (perhaps because of the clothes that the man is wearing). Even then, the cops still try to talk him into dropping the knife for over five minutes, and only one of them has his gun drawn, but doesn't shoot.
Credit where credit is due, at least these three cops tried to do the right thing.
Then, after over five minutes of this, and the man finally looking like he might be calming down and perhaps going to drop the knife (in the video it can clearly be seen how his grip on the knife is loosening), everything goes south when a fourth, rookie cop arrives to the scene.
The new arrival does not assess the situation, seeing that three of his fellow officers are talking to the guy and dealing with the situation, and stand farther away ready to intervene if the others need help. Any competent responsible police officer would have seen that the other three officers were handling the situation and had clearly been talking to the man for quite a while, and thus he could have seen that it would be better not to mess up their work and stand a bit further back and observe how the situation evolves, offering backup as needed. Having a new cop suddenly enter the mix could only stir and worsen the situation.
But no, he does not do that. Instead, he just decides to insert himself into the situation with zero consideration to the his fellow officers, starts screaming at the man agitating him, the man who was clearly calming down and just about to drop the knife takes a firmer grip on it and starts walking towards this new cop, who then just proceeds to shoot him nine times.
He directly and clearly worsened the situation by not respecting his fellow officers and inserting himself into the situation ignoring what the other officers were doing, agitating the man who was having the mental health crisis, and then just shooting him even though he really didn't have to (the man was still at least four or five meters from him when he started shooting.)
Unsurprisingly, the chief of police defended the rookie's action. The city mayor, however, fired the rookie cop from his position. And, again unsurprisingly, the chief of police jumped once again to defend the actions of the rookie, calling the mayor a "coward" (oh, the irony.)
Cops always look after each other. They are a "brotherhood", after all.
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