California has become a killing field for people with mental illness.
• Linda Carol Clark, 39, was shot by a Placerville police officer as she fled a hospital and carjacked an ambulance on March 30, 2010. Officers had made many previous calls to her apartment in the past few months because of mental health issues.
• Giat Van Truong, 35, died Dec. 8, 2009, after being shot multiple times by a Sacramento sheriff’s deputy who had responded to a 911 call from Truong regarding a “tenant dispute.” He reportedly had several previous mental health holds and didn’t always take his medication outside the hospital. The family has filed an excessive-force suit.
• Folsom police officers shot and killed Joseph Han, 23, on Easter Sunday of 2009. Family members said he was hallucinating and hadn’t slept or eaten in days. According to a neighbor, they had called the police for help in getting their son to the hospital.
Californians suffering from mental illness are dying in violent confrontations with law enforcement at alarming rates.
Who is to blame for these too frequent killings? More training for law enforcement officers is definitely needed. Cops are ill-trained to be street corner psychiatrists. Yet in California severely mentally ill people are as likely to encounter a policeman as they are a psychiatrist.
Why? The state and county mental health system has run amok. The common thread for many tragic deaths in California is failed or no mental health treatment.
If we want to stop this madness, we need to look at the root of our public policies that require a person with mental illness to cycle down to the point of raw psychosis before we help. It’s not law enforcement’s fault. It’s structural dysfunction in the California mental health delivery system.
Mental illness is a medical condition. In our society, a person suffering from any other medical condition receives stabilizing treatment if they are unable to consent to that treatment. But our current mental health system requires that a seriously disabled mentally ill individual first want help before receiving society’s early intervention.
Were Linda Clark or Joseph Han capable of determining they needed help in the weeks and days before their violent deaths? To assume that mentally ill people should be made to wait to receive treatment for their mental illness until they are in danger or dangerous is discrimination plain and simple. We would never do that to anyone else with a life-threatening disease. Waiting for danger costs too much in both money and lives.
Beginning in 2002, California counties have had an opportunity to stop some of the senseless killings, but they have not resolved to do so.
Laura’s Law, passed by the California Legislature in 2002, allows counties to implement what is known as assisted outpatient treatment. It is court-ordered, intensive treatment in the community providing consistent supervision by the mental health system for those individuals who are deteriorating or recovering from crisis caused by mental illness and for whom other community services are not working. Eligibility is based upon the individual’s history of inability to self-comply with treatment and the severity of his or her current symptoms rather than waiting until that person is in danger or dangerous.
It’s time for California’s county governments to wake up and implement Laura’s Law now.
Assistedoutpatient treatment may have prevented the tragic deaths of the severely mentally ill like Truong and Clark.
Implementation of Laura’s Law can stop the killing of mentally ill citizens and limit the unnecessary exposure to danger for law enforcement.
Assisted-outpatient treatment saves lives and ensures that public funding for mental health services is used more effectively to treat the mentally ill before they slip into the tragic downward spiral of severe mental illness.
What is happening to Californians with mental illness is beyond crime; it’s immoral. What law enforcement is being forced to deal with is simply madness in the streets.