Ten percent of our population will suffer severe mental illness at some point in their lives. Mentally ill people are 16 times more likely to be shot by police. This is a huge problem in our society that must be addressed.
The key is training. All law enforcement should have intense training by mental health experts on how to recognize psychological conditions and what to do to diffuse such situations. Mentally ill people, by definition, will often not respond logically to police commands, triggering a chain of events that can too often lead to an unnecessary death. These are tragedies that can be averted with the proper training.
Currently Mississippi’s Department of Mental Health (DMH) and the United States Department of Justice are engaged in a huge civil lawsuit over mental health policy in our state. DMH has for too long relied on mass institutionalization rather than decentralized community-based treatment plans. Effective crisis response teams are one of the key aspects of this lawsuit, with the feds pushing our state to do more.
In today’s complex and chaotic society, fragile human minds can easily snap under too much stress. It can happen to anyone. We need law enforcement to understand mental illness so people can be calmed down and properly treated, not shot and killed out of ignorance and lack of training.
One place that is doing something about it is Central Mississippi Residential Center. The staff routinely hosts Crisis Intervention Team training for law enforcement and first responders to help educate them on how to recognize certain mental conditions and how they can deescalate the situation. It also helps them learn how to develop empathy for them and can help them Those officers and responders can then go back to their departments to help train others to be prepared for those.
This training is very important and could save lives, not just the patients, but also the lives of officers when the situation becomes out of control. The skills from the training could also be applied to other situations when suspects are not compliant with normal police commands. Instead of ratcheting up the situation, the officers could choose an alternative that might prevent another tragedy from happening.
