Police Learning to Deal With Mentally Ill

Clutching her month-old daughter like a rag doll, the distraught woman warned Ventura police that she would slam the infant on the pavement if they didn’t back off.

Officer Ramiro Capa trained his flashlight on the woman and immediately began talking, trying to win her confidence. After a few tense minutes, the baby was safe in the hands of officers and the woman was on her way to a clinic for treatment. Mission accomplished.

“You try to build a rapport with the person and find something you have in common,” Capa said in describing the delicate negotiations that took place in late January. “You get a little bit nervous because you don’t know what this lady may do. She was very unpredictable.”

Law enforcement and mental health officials credit a new training course for officers such as Capa with helping save the baby’s life. Capa and 33 other officers were the first to complete the 40-hour mental health training program at the Ventura County sheriff’s academy in Camarillo in December.

Such training has become increasingly important because police often are confronted with incidents involving the mentally ill, officials said. Last year, Oxnard police fatally shot three disturbed people.

During the past decade, county law enforcement officers have been involved in the homicides of at least 17 mentally ill people, according to a new grand jury report.

After a review, the grand jury recommended that all local police officers and dispatchers take the new academy training course, modeled after successful programs at other agencies across the country.

Such training “will decrease the number of police shootings,” the grand jury concluded, and “the lives of citizens and police will, as a consequence, be saved.”

The hope among the program’s creators is that officers will learn to exercise restraint whenever possible in dealing with an emotionally or mentally troubled person. It is important to think all the options through, to determine what kind of help a person needs before acting, said Ventura Police Sgt. Mark Stadler, who helped design the county’s Crisis Intervention Training program.

“This isn’t regular police work and we realize the danger involved,” Stadler said. At the same time, when dealing with mentally disturbed individuals, “we don’t want to corner them where they feel trapped.”

Stadler, who teaches a class on officer-involved shootings at the academy, is no novice when it comes to dealing with such cases.

In June, he was summoned to talk to a man threatening to leap from a railroad trestle above the Ventura Freeway. After three hours of negotiations, the man agreed to climb down.

Then there was an incident that occurred 14 years ago. Six weeks out of the training academy, the then-Santa Barbara police officer confronted a machete-wielding man who had wounded several people during a rampage.

When Stadler encountered the assailant, the man lunged toward him and the officer opened fire. The wounded man staggered toward Stadler and collapsed at his feet.

Had he known then what he knows now, Stadler said, he may have tried to handle the situation differently when he arrived on the scene.

“I wouldn’t have done anything different after he attacked me,” Stadler said. “But before, I would have tried to communicate with him and find out what was bothering him and find out what it was that brought him to that point ... I didn’t come to this job to take lives.”

Organizers Hope to Train 10% of Officers

Organizers of the new training program hope it will reduce the number of officer-involved shootings. At least 150 police officers and dispatchers are expected to complete the course this year.

The training includes courses taught by mental health officials that cover everything from role playing to drugs used by the mentally ill. Every local police agency sent officers to the program in December. The goal of the training coordinators is to have 10% of all officers trained eventually.

The emphasis of the program is on “increased people skills,” said Dr. Michael Ferguson, a psychiatrist who works with inmates and helped craft the course’s 100-page training manual.

In typical police training, officers are taught the importance of establishing an aggressive and commanding presence in potentially violent situations.

“Most of the time that’s appropriate,” Stadler said. But when dealing with the mentally ill, the emphasis is on “talking softly and listening.”

Having trained officers at the scene will allow more time for a member of the county’s busy mental health crisis unit to respond, said Patrick Oviedo, a member of the crisis unit. The program has already helped officers in the field diffuse situations before they spiraled out of control, he said.

The trainees “have had a profound effect on the mortality rate,” he said.

Though it is a noble effort, it will take more than just a week of training to fix the problems that led to the spate of officer-involved shootings last year, said attorney Greg Ramirez. He formerly represented the family of Robert Jones, a man with a history of mental problems who was shot by Oxnard police on Aug. 24.

Oxnard police said they had no choice but to shoot Jones because he moved toward them with a 13-inch knife. Jones’ family has sued the department for negligence.

“Training in and of itself does not change people,” Ramirez said. “The change in the mental attitude has to start at the top. The leadership sets the standard.”

Since last year’s shootings, there has been mounting community pressure for police agencies to better prepare their officers for dealing with the mentally ill.

The string of officer-involved shootings began in January 2000 when the Oxnard SWAT team shot and killed a 17-year-old boy holding a female student hostage at Hueneme High School and ended in October with the shooting of a knife-wielding man in Thousand Oaks.

The district attorney’s office has ruled that police were justified in three of the four fatal shootings involving mentally ill suspects. But investigators have yet to rule on the Jones case.

With the closing of Camarillo State Hospital in 1997 and continued budget cuts for mental health facilities and programs, the number of confrontations between police and mentally ill people will continue to rise, the grand jury report warned.

The problem boils down to the fact that there are numerous mentally ill people on the street with little oversight, said Lou Matthews, a consultant for the police training course and a member of the county chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

The new police program is “like putting your finger in the dam,” Matthews said. “It’s not solving the whole problem.”

Oxnard Police Chief Art Lopez said he is in full support of the specialized training but warned that it won’t stand in the way of police protecting themselves and the community.

“The mental health system is broken down ... the first responders are going to be the ones thrown into the situation more and more,” Lopez said.

“We want to be able to bring these situations to a peaceful conclusion where there isn’t a use of lethal force,” he said. “But the fact is that sometimes [suspects] leave us with no other choice.”