Oh boy....I hate to see stories like this...

[jeffk]

Originally Posted by ITD

Mental illness is usually a lifelong thing. Stay on your meds per doctor's orders if you have an issue. This person was young and may not have been diagnosed yet, this is sad.

It says there is badge cam video, so at least we will see what happened, mostly.


I grew up in Worcester MA, there was a lot of incidents with the mentally ill in crisis with the police. A mentally ill person in crisis having an episode can be dangerous, but more often than not they are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else.

What happened in Worcester during late 70s into the 80s is that police, who were dealing with these calls, got special training in how to cope with these people. The result of the training was that injury incidents to police and subjects were drastically reduced when the police had a better understanding of what was going on and used the strategies to deal with people in crisis.

I don't know if NH or these towns have programs like this, but it might be worthwhile for police departments to have this type of training to help prevent these tragedies. With over 60% of the people shot by police having had mental illness histories, it may be time to investigate or update these training programs.

I agree with you completely. This is tragic.

However, there are a couple of things I would point out.

It is one thing to discuss how to manage such a situation in a training scenario. It is completely different in an emergency situation. I would suggest even the professionals who teach such classes could mess things up in an uncontrolled and unknown situation.

In addition, while training is good and does help, it is not a certain solution. Some people in a mental health crisis simply cannot be "managed". The police walk in with very limited knowledge of the person or the situation. They have to, VERY quickly, determine what is going on and try to get control of the situation. They have to decide if the person will respond to management techniques or not and how dangerous he is. This combination of factors is a disaster waiting to happen and decisions sometimes need to be made in seconds.

The police are in a lose-lose situation.