Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police.

Mental illness while Black.

The Intercept has a piece up about the unnecessary shooting of a young black man suffering from some type of psychotic break. Elwood White was 22, and while visiting a family friend began putting rocks in his pockets and acting out violently while yelling "Help me!" and "It wasn't me!" He punched his friend, then ran towards a busy intersection where he ransacked a shop and then threw a cinder block through the window of a truck. 

The descriptions of that day, from bystanders and police officers involved, paint a pretty clear picture of someone in crisis, who would most likely still be alive if they had been a white woman. 

In the absence of good data, we’re left with what research tells us about policing and race and policing and mental illness. Experts say no research exists that examines the overlay of race and mental illness in confrontations with law enforcement.

A lot of the stories I'm hearing about someone suffering from a mental illness being shot by police show how little training cops are getting. They rarely walk into the situation as a crisis situation. A defensive/hostile position is the default approach. Of the stories I've seen, all those who died were either Black or Native. 

As described by the article:

This means that a 22-year-old black male who’s throwing rocks at cars, ransacking a minimart and wielding a broken broom handle will likely be perceived as more dangerous than a 45-year-old white woman engaging in the same behavior, said Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor and former police officer who studies law enforcement training and tactics, “not because of conscious racism, but because of the implicit biases that shape [police] perceptions of that call or that encounter. At an unconscious level, that officer’s brain may be telling his mind, It’s unusual for a 45-year-old white woman to be engaging in this behavior, so unusual that this is probably a symptom of mental illness. At the same time, the officer’s brain may be telling his mind, at an unconscious level,This seems like violent crime that young black adults have committed in the past that I, as an officer, am familiar with, so it’s probably that.”

So why isn't there more training regarding mental illness? 

What goes along with the training for 5150's?

Surely, interaction with the mentally ill is a part of the daily life of police officers, there is a disproportionate amount of mentally ill folk living on the streets. 

Research shows that the less experience an officer has in dealing with someone who’s mentally ill, the more likely the officer is to view that person as a threat. Training in this area tends to be minimal, with most officers getting no more than eight hours of academy training, according to a recent survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum.

Elwood White was only 22.  According to his family he made a comment to his father about hearing voices only weeks earlier. It's possible he was in the midst of some type of schizophrenic break. As soon as officers approached him, and heard him (literally) cry for help, alarm bells should have rung. 

The court case that followed White's death clarified the wrong-doing of the officers involved. But policies have not changed. 

It's just another example of a system with little to no understanding of those suffering from a mental illness, coupled with a systems clear prejudice towards black males. 

The trauma of racism.

Our lives, our circumstances, our environment and the people around us play a huge role in our mental health, the way we access support (if we can even access support) and how we are able to live our lives while suffering. Gender, sexuality, race, culture, ability, our bodies, these things dictate the way we're perceived and interpolated.

Racism is alive and well all over the world. Lately though, the spotlight has been focused on America, where there has been daily reporting on police violence against black Americans. There has been increasing access to footage of people being murdered by police. Openly. Body cams. Passers by. "Black Lives Matter" is a hash-tag because it's something that needs to be repeated over and over. It is very clear in the way these deaths and murders are being represented in the media that the lives of black men are not valued the same way as the lives of their white counterparts. When you watch footage of kids at a pool party being tackled, and hear the aggressive, hostile language of cops towards black children it is painful and infuriating to any empathetic fucking human.

According to recent changes in the DSM, Racism Can Cause PTSD Similar To That Of Soldiers After War, the change to the DSM includes language that is more open to interpretation of what constitutes the traumas of racism. 

According to the change racism was recognized... 

... as a trauma that could potentially cause PTSD, but only in relation to a specific event. There had to be an incident of intense fear, helplessness, or horror for such consideration. For instance, if someone was assaulted in a racially-motivated event, then racism qualified as a sufficient trauma to be categorized as a cause of PTSD. 

But now, under the new definition, the requirements for fear, helplessness, and horror have been removed, making room for the more lasting effects of subtle racism to be considered in the discussion of race-based traumas.

This is a huge shift. It actually takes into account how microagression and negative stimuli can create and sustain a hostile environment. Of course feeling afraid for your life on a daily basis would alter your emotional health. It's tantamount to living in a war zone. That's where the term "racial battle fatigue" comes from:

...exposure to racial discrimination is analogous to the constant pressure soldiers face on the battlefield.

The article quotes Dr. Jose Soto from the psychology department of the University of California, Berkeley adding:

While the term [racial battle fatigue] is certainly not trying to say that the conditions are exactly what soldiers face on a battlefield, it borrows from the idea that stress is created in chronically unsafe or hostile environments.

All of this makes me think of an Audrey Lorde quote:

As I'm trying to stay as informed as I can bear (since this is all terribly sad). I realize that's my ability to not experience racism first-hand is privilege

I recommend checking out Why Spotlight Minority Mental Health? by Afrika Foreman.

I also follow Black Girls + Mental Health, which links to articles you might find useful.

If you know of any good resources, please link to them below.

The murders of Caroline Small and Sandra Bland.

Caroline Small was a woman living through a mental health "breakdown" of some kind. Whether afraid or overwhelmed, she slowly drove away from police who were questioning her, and what followed was a brutal, unnecessary shooting and her murder. Then of course, the cover-up, as this happened in 2010 and it's only making national news now.

Daily Kos' Shaun King has an overview of what happened. I don't watch the videos of these things any-more. I find them too upsetting. They make me sick. You're watching someone being murdered. I trust the journalists who do watch them, and I think it's important to circulate these stories, these names, and these videos.

It seems every day there's a new name, immortalized to hash-tag status. A murdered man or woman. Predominantly black.

Another name is that of Sandra Bland. She was arrested for a ridiculous traffic infraction (not using her blinker!?) and was violently arrested by an insanely aggressive police officer. Three days later she was found dead in her jail cell.

Why was she even in jail for 3 days? This makes no sense to me. What kind of traffic laws are these!?

There is an ongoing investigation into Sandra Bland's death, and so far it's being treated as a homicide.

In Caroline Small's case, they didn't even consider the possibility there was a non-violent way to approach her, totally dismissing and ignoring her mental state (and considering these same officers waved-away the EMTs after she was shot multiple times, you get a sense of their value for life). Her mental state, and her need for aid was completely overlooked.

With Sandra Bland, mental illness is being used as a red herring for her death. Police officers have said she committed suicide in that jail cell. Everyone is calling bullshit. She was never told why she was being arrested, the arresting officer was hyper-aggressive, she was violently handled - it's just a whole shit-show.

For Caroline small, her mental state was ignored. There was no consideration for her.

For Sandra Bland, quoted as being "argumentative and uncooperative" by the arresting officer (she kept asking why she was being arrested and was never told), mental illness is used to discredit her as a victim.

The real sickness in all of this is the palpable aggression of the police towards those they encounter. It seems in several cases there was a real desire to shoot and kill. I don't know what the answer is. Police reform? Community involvement? Community-based peace officers?

I hope the outrage fuels real change.

1 in 4 shot by the police are mentally ill.

Alternet has a piece out on how One Quarter of People Police Have Killed This Year Were Mentally Ill. The article cites a Washington Post article which focuses on the lack of training police have when it comes to dealing with the mentally ill.

...The dead account for a quarter of the 462 people shot to death by police in the first six months of 2015... 

The vast majority were armed, but in most cases, the police officers who shot them were not responding to reports of a crime. More often, the police officers were called by relatives, neighbors or other bystanders worried that a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically, reports show. More than 50 people were explicitly suicidal. 

More than half the killings involved police agencies that have not provided their officers with state-of-the-art training to deal with the mentally ill. And in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous.

I see this daily on the streets of down-town Montreal. It seems more and more of the homeless population is mentally ill (often visible schizophrenic, or visibly struggling) and it isn't uncommon to see police engaging them, or often corralling them away from the tourist-focused areas of the city. 

We have a similar story locally, when news reports described a man being shot after he attacked police with a hammer. Little else was said. Now, we know a little more about the man, Alain Magloire, a biologist with two-children who was homeless and mentally ill at the time of the attack. His brother, Pierre testified at the inquest (from The Gazette):

Pierre Magloire began his testimony asking for better police training in times of crisis management involving people with mental health problems. 

“We can’t treat these people the same way we treat someone who just committed a crime,” he said. 

In addition to training, he questioned the weapons being carried by officers on patrol, calling them unnecessary for crisis intervention. He was especially critical of the use of a patrol car by one officer to run into his brother. “I do not believe that using a car as a weapon of opportunity is adequate for an individual that suffers from mental illness.” 

Magloire’s brother, who works as a teacher, said he knows from experience that a crisis can be managed without force. 

“A person in a crisis needs to be given time to wind down,” he told the coroner’s inquiry. “We need to give them the space to have the time to manage their crisis.” 

Months before he died, Pierre Magloire said his brother sought help, but was let down by a system that works in “silos.”

Boy does this echo with me. I've mentioned countless times how difficult it is to access services, and I'm someone who is relatively functional when in the grip of my depression and anxiety. One bad day, and one trigger happy cop - that's all it takes.

Magloire mentions groups working in "silos" - which I had to google. Apparently this is a business terms that refers to departments that refuse to work together or share information. In the mental health care system, I don't know that the intent is to be terribly organized, but that's definitely the working reality of the health care system.

It seems so little information is centralized. So much of my time and energy has been recounting my mental health history to practitioner after practitioner.

Again, let me take a moment to highlight the innate irony and flaw of asking someone who is mentally ill to be the sole keeper of their story. 

There needs to be a centralized information system for this information. For the medication. For the breaks. For the crisis points. There needs to be follow-up and follow-through.

The Washington Post also has a breakdown of the people shot by police, mainly men, and though the breakdown seems quite mixed, it would be interesting to further break this down my race and class. No doubt these men didn't have access to proper care.

Alain Magloire sought care, and was "let down by a system that works in silos." No doubt every one of the 466 people referenced in the Post article also have a story about how they were let down by the system. Hopefully more and more people will share their stories, so the way in which we're approached by police can be drastically changed.

Baltimore.

What's happening in Baltimore, the protesting and rioting, is necessary. The absolute devastation of black experience is unarguably historically rooted and needs to be actively addressed and corrected.

I don't feel discussing racism is my place, since there are fantastic writers out there covering what's going on. You can go on Twitter and follow, in real time what's going on. You can watch guerilla journalism happening, and see what is and what isn't being represented by the media. 

I post on Pushing Hoops with Sticks' Tumblr just tore at me. 

i don’t think people will ever understand how tolling this shit is on black people. during the bulk of the ferguson/eric garner protests during november i fell into the deepest depression. i couldn’t fall asleep until 6 or 7 in the morning, my jaw was permanently clenched, no appetite. i had ridiculous migraines and i’m someone who rarely has headaches, i would cry out of nowhere, i felt paralyzed/paranoid in public around any white people even my own mother/friends. no one will ever understand how draining this is for us.

This is brutal. I feel so deeply for this. I don't know what it is to be black. But I've known discrimination, and I know pain. Not like this though. 

I might not be super effective at discussing everything that's going on, but I want words of support and kindness to come from me, and to be expressed outwardly towards all those marching, all those protesting, all those doing what they can while they can to fight the systems of oppression and corruption. 

Montreal has a big, thick history of protesting. We're big on unions, we're big on student strikes. There's a lot of racism here as well, the Montreal police department is part of that, as is the long history of the indigenous people of Canada. The Oka Crisis wasn't that long ago. There are ongoing reparation problems. There was a cultural genocide of natives here, and people consistently choose to ignore that. Hérouxville is still fresh. Our hands in Canada are just as dirty as the white majority of the U.S. There's a lot of work to be done. 

MLK said that riots are the voice of the unheard. We're seeing that now in Baltimore, and all across the United States. We're also seeing that locally here in Montreal, and globally as a show of support. 

I've read a few articles on how to show support and solidarity for people of colour, as a white person who lives with a certain type of privilege, and it seems the consensus is using your whiteness to confront the racism in white spaces. 

11 things white people can do to be real anti-racist allies

Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now

There's just a lot out there. I'm trying to stay abreast of the situation. It's just such a brutal time. It seems every-time I log into Twitter, there's a new name, another black man immortalized by a hash-tag. 

#Freddie Gray
#Michael Brown
#Trayvon Martin

I cannot imagine the way this demoralizes a community. I listened to Part 1 of This American Life's pod-cast on how Cops See it Differently, this disconnect between how police see what's going on, and how "regular people" see what's going on. 

All I hear in the pod-cast is the pain in the voices of those being interviewed. It's just so personal and raw. 

I just don't want to be silent and complicit in this. 

Baltimore riots: How the Western media would cover the unrest if it happened elsewhere

It's just so fucked.