Justice Dept. focuses on police treatment of mentally ill

WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Department lawyers investigating police agencies for claims of racial discrimination and excessive force are increasingly turning up a different problem: officers’ interactions with the mentally ill.

The latest example came in Baltimore, where a critical report on that department’s policies found that officers end up in unnecessarily violent confrontations with mentally disabled people who in many instances haven’t even committed crimes. The report cited instances of officers using a stun gun to subdue an agitated man who refused to leave a vacant building and of spraying mace to force a troubled person — said by his father to be unarmed and off his medications — out of an apartment.

Though past federal investigations have addressed the problem, the Baltimore report went a step further: It was the first time the Justice Department has explicitly found that a police department’s policies violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The finding is intended to chart a path to what federal officials hope will be far-reaching improvements, including better training for dispatchers and officers, diversion of more people to treatment rather than jail and stronger relationships with mental health specialists.

“Through the course of our work in the last several years on this bucket of issues, we’ve seen how important it is to get at the mental health issues as early in the system as possible,” Vanita Gupta, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, said in an interview.

Civil rights officials say the Baltimore report builds on work they’ve done in investigating the treatment of the mentally ill in various settings. In Mississippi, the Hinds County jail recently agreed to better screening for mental illness and to create a committee to monitor inmates with serious disabilities. And Oregon last September settled a lawsuit that accused the state of segregating thousands of disabled residents in large facilities known as sheltered workshops.

But it’s the work with police departments that often attracts the most attention. Even as police forces improve training and develop intervention teams to respond to individuals in the throes of a crisis, concerns remain that officers aren’t adequately equipped for the situations and are being forced to fill the void of a resource-starved mental health infrastructure. More than 14 percent of male jail inmates and 31 percent of female inmates are affected by serious mental illness, according to a July speech by Justice Department official Eve Hill, who said society has for too long relied on arrests and jail rather than treatment for the mentally ill.

“From the standpoint of police, they are somewhat frustrated because many of the people who are walking the streets and who are in need of help are not getting it,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “They have been out on the streets, they can’t afford medication, and so the police wind up being the only one they come in contact with.”

The issue has attracted the attention of the courts. The Supreme Court last year held that police were immune from a lawsuit arising from the arrest and shooting of a mentally ill woman in San Francisco. But the justices left undecided the question of whether police must take special precautions when arresting armed and violent people with mental illness.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has incorporated treatment of the mentally ill into several of its wide-ranging civil rights investigations of troubled police departments.

“I think some police departments have really made it a priority and are doing quite a bit. I don’t know that that’s consistent across all the departments,” said Amy Watson, a mental health policy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.