Cops 16x more likely to kill people with untreated mental illness

[HereSince1628]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peggy-drexler/mental-illness-a-smoking_b_8839128.html

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A new study released last week by the Virginia-based nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center reported that people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than people without.
In fact, people with severe mental illness account for one in four of all fatal police encounters. One reason for this is that those suffering from mental disorders are more likely to come in contact with authority figures: Although less than four percent of the general population suffers from severe mental illness, they generate 10 percent of all calls for police services and they take up at least 20 percent of spots in American prisons -- where, it should be noted, they are often unable to get the care they need.

Another reason may be that police officers often lack the training to approach the mentally unstable, according to a report published earlier this year by the Washington Post. This lack of training, of course, makes little sense, given the significant size, and possible threat, of that very population -- of an estimated eight million Americans living with severe mental illness, half, according to the TAC report, are untreated.

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[Downwinder]

1. Anybody check the Cops for mental illness?

[HereSince1628]

2. May not be cop mental health, but cops' informal education

A recent international study of over 200 "territories", published in the premiere journal Nature, suggested that education levels, all over the world, greatly influence attitudes about persons with mental illness. People with less education tend to see persons with mental disorders as more dangerous than they actually are. In societies across the planet, including our own, police are mostly inadequately trained to deal with persons with mental illness.

I suspect that the mechanisms that create attitudes among police that facilitate violence against the mentally ill are quite similar to mechanisms that facilitate police violence against young black men. Those are informally learned patterns of thinking that riefy bias/misperception into apparent clear and present danger and validate excessive force in the service of self-protection.