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Are cops prepared to deal with mentally ill?

San Diego Union-Tribune (CA) - 9/8/2015

Sept. 06--On a sunny day in February, Philip McMahon was naked and pounding on a neighbor's window in Mira Mesa.

The frightened residents called police, and one neighbor stood by with a bat. An officer found the 27-year-old man standing bloody amid shards of broken glass.

Police say he charged the officer and tried to take his gun as they struggled. The officer's Taser had no effect, and the officer ultimately shot McMahon in the shoulder before several more officers helped subdue him.

McMahon's parents, Ken and Cheryl Scott, are critical of law enforcement and social services systems that fail to protect someone like their son, who appeared mentally deranged that day.

"It's not so much the police officer that's at fault, it's his training," said Ken Scott, 59, a record producer widely known for his work with the Beatles.

How law officers deal with the mentally ill has been an increasing source of concern across the county, and the nation.

"It's the kind of issue that keeps police chiefs up at night," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. The Washington D.C.-base organization studies policing techniques and recommends better practices.

In a recent telephone interview, Wexler echoed Scott's view that police officers generally lack skills in deffusing someone who is acting bizarrely and possibly carrying a potential weapon, such as a rock or stick.

"If your training and culture is that you don't back down, you can't blame the police officer," Wexler said. "The training is inadequate. Our training has to change."

Although crime is at a decades-long low across San Diego County, the number of mental health-related calls to law enforcement has gone up 62.3 percent since 2008 for the San Diego'sSheriff Department and 100 percent for the San Diego Police Department.

Sheriff Bill Gore has frequently expressed frustration that his county jails collectively house more mentally disturbed men and women than any other institution in the county.

Wexler's research organization held a conference for some 300 police leaders in May dealing, in part, on the use of force on the mentally ill, disabled or chronic substance abusers. A report on their findings, issued in August, said officers should be taught to "slow the situation down" at such calls, buying time to assess the person, develop a plan of resolving the incident and get additional help to the scene.

The slow approach is the opposite of how many officers are programmed, the report said.

"Some officers, with the best intentions, think that their job is to go into a situation, take charge of it, and resolve it as quickly as you can," Wexler wrote in a report summary.

Wexler said that nationally, use-of-force training lacks emphasis on the sanctity of life, decision-making and de-escalating the situation.

Conference participants agreed on the importance of crisis teams that pair officers with mental health experts.

San Diego County has Psychiatric Emergency Response Teams, comprising pairs of licensed clinicians and law officers who are trained to assess a mental health episode and find the referrals or resources that would help the person.

PERT teams do not negotiate with anyone who is suicidal or threatening.

"The officer can assess for safety, then the clinician can step in and talk to the person, refer them to a shelter, or case management, or transport them to a hospital. The goal is to problem-solve," said PERT's Executive Director Mark Marvin, a license psychologist.

There are 23 PERT teams for the county, and another 10 teams have been funded this year.

Every city police agency in the county, and many unincorporated communities served by the Sheriff's Department, have access to at least one team, which may be shared with an adjoining jurisdiction. Marvin said there are plans to assign a team to the San Diego Unified School District police force and to a pilot program focused on the homeless in the East Village area of downtown San Diego.

In the last fiscal year ending in June, the teams went on 17,400-odd mental health calls. So far this year they have had more than 15,000 calls.

Still, the demand is greater than teams can handle working only 6 a.m. to midnight shifts. Sometimes a PERT team isn't available. Then the responsibility of dealing with a mentally ill person falls to the first officer or deputy to show up. That's where training in crisis intervention counts.

Last year, about 375 officers and deputies attended the PERT program's three-day academy, Marvin said. About 800 went through an 8-hour course, and PERT clinicians took their expertise to about 800 officers at various police agencies during shift-change briefings.

Recruits get their first crisis training at the police academy. The San Diego Regional Police Academy requires 11 hours of training in mental health techniques, said Officer Lisa Hartman, an academy instructor.

The regional academy also offers a voluntary one-day PERT training course, as well as 4-hour refresher courses, she said. Hartman said most departments don't have the money to provide continued training for every officer.

It's often hard at the onset of an incident to know it involves mental health issues, and each call is different, sheriff's Lt. Christopher May said. In the wake of their son's shooting, Scott and his wife set up an online petition calling for "all police officers to spend as much time in the crisis-intervention classroom as they currently spend on the shooting range."

The police research forum survey 280 police agencies about training, and learned that recruits received a medium of 58 hours of firearms training, 49 hours of defensive training, and eight hours each on use of force policy, de-escalation and crisis intervention.

The officer who shot McMahon had the standard academy training on mental health. According to his testimony in McMahon's preliminary hearing, he had five hours of further mental health training in 2011.

"We probably can't train these employees enough," said May. "But any and all training in crisis intervention and mental health techniques is beneficial."

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