The Washington Post recently published a long and poignant feature about the emotional impact of police shootings on the officers involved. The story did a good job of correcting the distorted “cops shooting bad guys” stereotypes of the big and little screens but failed to recognize the role of treatable mental illness in setting the stage for these fateful encounters ("Officers haunted by fatal shootings in the line of duty, Feb. 9).

The Post can't really be faulted for the omission though. There's not a government agency that recognizes the role either.

We all know law enforcement officers have become the default mental health providers for people in acute psychiatric crisis. Officers roll when a family member with mental illness becomes unmanageable or dangerous. Officers interact with mentally disordered people living on the streets. Officers transport people in acute crisis to hospitals for psychiatric evaluation and then stay in ERs to keep patients and staff safe.

That these encounters sometimes have lethal consequences is beyond question. More than 60% of the senior law enforcement police and sheriff officials who participated in Chief of Police Michael Biasotti’s 2011 survey, “The Impact of Mental Illness on Law Enforcement Resources,” said that officer casualties result from service calls involving mental illness.

At the same time, in Portland, Oregon, the Police Bureau is under investigation by the US Department of Justice for civil rights violations because of a “significant increase in officer involved shootings,” the majority of which “involved persons with mental health issues.” Murder charges are pending against two suburban California police officers accused of beating a homeless man with schizophrenia to death at a bus station. Less sensational news reports of police-involved killings hit our radar screen every single day.

But it's impossible to identify precisely how many of the 387 Americans killed by police in 2010 were severely mentally ill or how many of the 153 American officers killed in the line of duty were responding to calls involving mental illness. That's because the government doesn’t count them. Officially, the incidents are invisible, which means mental illness is rendered invisible, and the means of preventing these tragedies remains invisible.

This needs to be corrected. Invisible problems are ignorable problems, and the role of mental illness in police shootings is ignored at great human cost. Our Preventable Tragedies Database has recorded 525 homicides since 2000 in which a law enforcement officer killed a mentally ill individual involved in a service call and 73 incidents in which law enforcement officers were killed by people with unmedicated mental illness – and the database contains only selected episodes reported in the media.

Severe mental illnesses are treatable. In Washington, D.C., and 44 states, assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) makes it possible to treat people too ill to seek care for themselves before they become a danger to themselves or others, including law enforcement.

Some number of police-involved shootings is inevitable, as are the human loss, anguished officers and families, and devastated careers they produce. If we wish to minimize the occurrence of these tragedies, the government needs to monitor the role that untreated mental illness plays in them, and communities need to use the treatment otpion available to keep those most at risk from becoming involved. 

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