https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/the-desperate-and-the-dead/series/police-confrontations/
In the midst of impassioned national debate about race and policing, prompted by a spate of shootings of unarmed black men, shootings of people with mental health disorders have inspired less outrage. No national law enforcement database tracks police shootings of mentally ill people. Recent efforts by journalists to count them, notably at The Guardian and The Washington Post, found that mental health was a likely factor in at least one-quarter of all fatal police shootings in the U.S. last year…
In Massachusetts, where the suicide rate has long been lower than in most other states, the total number of suicides per year grew an alarming 47 percent from 2003 to 2012, from 424 to 624…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dylan-noble-fresno-police-shooting_us_577efcdce4b01edea78d494d
Cell phone video footage emerged this week showing police officers shooting a teenager to death at a gas station in Fresno, California.
The Fresno Police Department said the officers believed 19-year-old Dylan Noble possessed a firearm at the time of the shooting on June 25, but it emerged later that he was unarmed…
“When he gets within about 12 feet of the officers, he makes the statement ‘I hate my effing life,’” Dyer told local news station KFSN…
https://painkills2.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/suicide-by-cop/
Having read the book Crazy in America, I remain horrified by how mental illness is addressed by our nation, within and outside of policing. Nevertheless, I am not comfortable with one misleading sentence from this article:
No national law enforcement database tracks police shootings of mentally ill people.
Especially in conjunction with the prior sentence, it sounds like killings of people with mental illness are specifically not tracked because unimportant. The truth is that NO ONE GROUP’s statistics are aggregated or made available to the public by the government; it has not been a government priority to date (and why would it? Who wants to highlight their weaknesses?), ergo why independent agencies have taken up this monitoring.
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bloody good point!
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