The American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief arguing that hundreds of disabled Americans are killed in police encounters every year. It was filed in support of a mentally ill woman suing police for shooting her five times.
In the case of San Francisco v. Sheehan, Teresa Sheehan argued
that police shot her five times even though she was experiencing
a “psychiatric emergency.” The US Supreme Court will
hear oral arguments in the case on Monday.
Sheehan argued that when police came to her room in a group home
in 2008 to take her to a hospital, they violated her Fourth
Amendment rights and her rights under the American Disabilities
Act (ADA). Sheehan’s home aide called police to take her to a
hospital for an evaluation after he noticed she had stopped
taking her medication, stopped eating and hadn’t changed her
clothes in a few days.
During the police encounter, Sheehan threatened officers with a
knife. The interaction escalated and police ended up shooting her
five times. She survived and consequently sued the city. At issue
for the nation’s highest court is whether and how the ADA applies
to interactions between police and people with disabilities.
#TeresaSheehan.
A Survivor http://t.co/6HQCYNQPFK
— USuncutMN (@USuncutMN) January
20, 2015
The case comes amid an increasing number of news stories about
police officer-involved shootings of people with mental illness,
many of whom are people of color. Body camera footage just
released showed Jason Harrison, a mentally ill black man in
Dallas, Texas, was shot by police after his family called for
help and Harrison threatened officers with a screwdriver.
Earlier this month, Los Angeles police killed a homeless black
man, Africa, who had told a friend that he had spent ten years in
a psychiatric facility. And on January 5, police killed a North
Carolina teenager, Keith Vidal, whose family had called for help
as he was in a “psychiatric emergency.” He also
threatened police with a screwdriver.
READ MORE:
Video reveals Dallas cops shooting schizophrenic man holding
screwdriver
The ACLU says hundreds of Americans with
disabilities die every year in police encounters and many more
are seriously injured. But the figures of actual deaths are hard
to acquire, as The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000 was
allowed to expire in 2006 and the Bureau of Justice Statistics
collects data on a voluntary basis.
In a review of 51 officer-involved shootings in San Francisco
from 2005-2013, however, the news outlet KQED found that 58
percent of the people killed by police – 11 out of 19 cases – had
a mental illness. The ACLU argued in its brief that the last
Bureau of Statistics report showed half of the 375-500 people
killed by police each year in the US have mental health problems,
and 700,000 – or a third of the 2.1 million people in jail and
prison – are mentally ill.
READ MORE: Naked,
unarmed black man shot dead by white metro Atlanta cop
The ACLU argues that “many of these deaths and injuries are
needless, the tragic result of police failing to use
well-established and effective law enforcement practices that
take disability into account.”
The group said that shootings of the mentally ill tend to follow
a pattern. Someone calls the police about a person in crisis, the
police arrive but the person in crisis fails to immediately
respond to police commands because they are in a crisis related
to their mental disability. When they don’t comply with police
commands, an officer starts shouting and draws their weapon. They
may surround the person or spray them with mace, escalating the
confrontation. In panic, the mentally ill person grabs a nearby
object, like a knife, screwdriver, pen or mop. The officer
generally fires and the disabled person dies or is injured.
READ MORE: Mentally
ill Cleveland woman’s death by police ruled homicide
In a 2012 article in the Portland Press Herald about the trend of
mentally ill people being shot in police encounters, it was noted
that the cuts in funding for mental illness on a state and
federal level is creating a national crisis.
“The mental health care system has been shifting
responsibility to law enforcement for some time now,”
Kristina Ragosta, lawyer at the Treatment Advocacy Center
told the Press Herald. “Police
departments are become default first-responders to people in
mental health crisis.”
The San Francisco officers who reported to the group home knew
Teresa Sheehan was mentally ill and in… http://t.co/TI5QzCaQ3a
— WeRalldoingtime (@WeRalldoingtime)
February 17, 2015
Police departments across the country know this but there is a
lack of data on police shootings and officers don’t have adequate
policies for handling their new responsibilities.
“I think the biggest problem we have in this country is that
we have 18,000 police departments with 18,000 sets of policies
and 18,000 ways of doing business,” Art Acevedo, Austin’s
Police Chief, told the Press Herald. “We should come together
and develop model policies. It’s about holding people accountable
for their actions and having some consensus on model
policies.”
Acevedo said a national model on police interaction with the
mentally ill should be developed by leading law enforcement,
mental health and civil rights advocacy groups. Acevedo said the
federal government should also require police agencies to adopt
the policy, as it has with drunk-driving laws.