Letter From Houston
Cop Drama
Cutbacks in state psychiatric services have put more and more mentally ill Texans on the streets and forced police officers into a complicated new role—with sometimes deadly consequences.
Jodi says: Unfortunately this issue is even worse for teens with mental illness. My 15-year-old daughter is severely bipolar. Can’t get help for her at all--I can’t afford to commit her anywhere (even her meager health insurance won’t help), the state hospitals keep her until she is "safe," and she has been put in juvenile detention in Hays County five times. This is a complete shame. Thanks for highlighting the issue. (August 18th, 2010 at 4:43pm)
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One sunny day in April I rode around in a patrol car with Patrick Plourde, a sergeant who supervises the department’s crisis intervention response teams. Mounted on the dashboard was a computer screen flashing various addresses where people’s lives were falling apart. Watching the screen, I began to think that all the normal activities—commuters headed to work or lunch with friends, shopping centers abuzz with traffic—were no more than a thin veneer over a cauldron of roiling craziness.
A call came in, and we raced down toll roads and residential streets to the home of a schizophrenic woman. She was big, angry, and delusional. Her words came in loud, spittle-laced bursts that were punctuated by violent, thrashing gestures. Occasionally, she would interrupt her narrative to curse someone in the room. She recounted improbable tales of sexual torture by unseen assailants. Her eyes bugged with fury; her hair shot out from her head at cartoonish angles. Her sister, who had called a crisis hotline looking for help, stood somber vigil by the front door, while an elderly woman using an oxygen tank sat in the corner, shaking her head in grief.
What happened next was a perfect example of how changes in policy can affect lives on the ground. When Plourde and I arrived, an officer named Joe Osborne, following the HPD’s new crisis intervention response protocol, was talking in soothing tones to the woman. “Now, that sounds pretty serious,” Osborne murmured softly when the woman briefly paused her tirade. “Can you come with me to the doctor so we can tell him about it? Kisha and I will stay with you the whole time to make sure nobody hurts you.” Meanwhile, therapist Kisha Lorio was interviewing family members about the woman’s drug regimen. After that she went and grabbed the woman a change of clothes. Their goal: to persuade her to walk of her free will to the back of their patrol car, so they could escort her to Harris County’s NeuroPsychiatric Center; there she’d be held for a mental evaluation and possible hospitalization. It worked, though she hesitated at the car.
With the patience of Job, Osborne stood about four feet away from the woman and repeated his promises of help.“Just go ahead and slide on in the backseat, and I’ll get the air conditioner going for you,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna lay hands on you.”
Family members looked as if they would cry with relief when Osborne clicked a seat belt over the woman and shut the patrol car door. Later, Plourde told me that Osborne’s tactic of letting the woman feel as if she were choosing to come with him was strategic: “There’s no way we’d leave her there when there’s an elderly woman who would be at risk. But if he had gone in yelling, ‘Hey, you’re coming with me!’ how do you think that would have gone down? You’d most likely have a fight on your hands.”
As incidents like this one have become more and more common, training for police officers has come to include more and more mental health education. “The police are being asked to fill a very difficult and unfamiliar role—as skilled clinicians,” Harris County sheriff Adrian Garcia said. Since 1999, the Houston Police Academy has offered cadets crisis intervention classes, in which they’re taught basic information about mental illness and various “de-escalation techniques.” (The first responders in the Guillory case, however, had not received this training.) Shortly after my ride-along with Plourde, I visited one of these sessions, led by an officer named Frank Webb. A wiry man who exudes energy, Webb bluntly told a class of about twenty veteran officers that when dealing with a mentally ill person, their attitudes would have to be “180 degrees different” from what they would normally bring to a crisis. “You come up in a uniform,” he said, “and it can be a powder keg of a situation.”
Psychotic people, he told them, “are hearing voices, and those voices are as real to them as my voice is to you right now. And those voices are very negative and saying some very weird stuff.” In psychosis, the brain’s frontal lobe, which controls judgment, shuts down, Webb warned his class. He counseled his students not to be surprised if a mentally ill person ignored them. “It may not be because he’s a butt but because he’s hearing three or four voices in his head and he doesn’t know who is talking to him. Or he could be having hallucinations. His voices could be telling him he’s gonna have to kill you.”
Though this sort of training has been set in motion by the increasing number of mentally ill people who go untreated, it could have helped generations of cops. It was not available when Garcia joined the HPD as a rookie, in 1980. Not long after he became a patrol officer, he encountered a guy named Jerome, an intimidating mountain of a man who was always rambling on about “all the dead people around him.” The first time he arrested Jerome, for drunk and disorderly conduct, Garcia confesses, “he scared the bejesus out of me.” After Jerome was handcuffed and sitting in the back of his squad car, Garcia offered to take him home. Jerome made a deal: “He said he would give me an address, so long as I would let him play with the siren.” Garcia had several more encounters on the street with Jerome before he transferred to an investigations unit. Sometime later he heard news that haunts him to this day: Jerome, violent and wielding a hammer, had been fatally shot by police.
Various crises, not only those involving the mentally ill, have caused the department to reform over the years. McClelland began his career a few years before Garcia, in 1977. That same year, five Houston patrol officers beat a Hispanic man named Jose Campos Torres so badly that when they went to book him into the city jail on charges of being drunk and disorderly, they were ordered to take him to Ben Taub Hospital for medical attention. Instead, they left him in Buffalo Bayou, where he drowned. The case sparked race riots; to this day, the name Jose Campos Torres conjures a dark history of brutality by the HPD.
“We’ve had a few officers who did some atrocious things that alienated this community,” McClelland told me as we sat at a long conference table in his downtown Houston office, one month after his appointment to chief. “Actually, those times during the seventies probably gave rise to the biggest reform era in HPD history. HPD didn’t change because we thought it was a good idea and decided to change. The community forced us to change.”
The same could be said of the HPD’s new response to the mentally ill: Each new step has been prompted by the outrage and introspection that follows a shooting. But should some of the community outrage be channeled toward policy makers in Austin? Sure, in each tragedy a cop fired the deadly weapon. But could it be that our lawmakers have created this nightmare for law enforcement? And the worst part is that it may end up costing us more money in the end. It is significantly cheaper for the Harris County MHMRA to provide treatment for an adult (around $705 a month) than it is for the Harris County jail to house an inmate in its mental health unit (up to $265 a day). Wouldn’t the fiscally prudent—and humane—option be to support treatment programs that keep as many mentally ill Texans as possible from ending up in the county jail in the first place?
“It’s a simple proposition—fund our programs for the mentally ill appropriately,” says Coleman. If the state’s budget deficit leads to a replay of the 2003 cuts, he cautions, “It will be an absolute disaster.”
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