Mentally Ill and Locked-up Kids, State of the City, and Police Brutality

BACKGROUND ON RAHEEM HOUSSEINI’S ILLUMINATING STORY ABOUT HOW MENTALLY ILL KIDS WIND UP IN JAIL

Here in California, there has been ample discussion about how adults with mental illnesses are winding up in jails and prisons instead of receiving appropriate treatment in their communities or in mental health facilities. (And in LA County, in particular, District Attorney Jackie Lacey is working on a comprehensive mental health diversion program.)

Sacramento-based reporter Raheem Hosseini found, almost by accident, that the same thing is happening to mentally ill kids in California, and wrote in-depth about the issue last November.

This week, Hosseini published a story-behind-the-story about how he came upon this troubling set of facts and the difficulties he faced in reporting on kids with mental illness in the juvenile justice system. Here’s a clip:

Interim chief probation officer Suzanne Collins spent her limited time summarizing her department’s mandate: supervising adult offenders once they exit custody; producing in-depth assessments for the courts to consider at sentencing; and housing juvenile delinquents. While describing this last mission, Collins made the off-hand comment about juvenile hall having turned into a “commitment facility” for mentally ill children with no other place to go. The session quickly moved onto other business. In my head, however, the bell had been rung.

I had become familiar with the shifting complexion of adult prisons and jails, where a third to half of inmates experience mental health issues, depending on who — and when — you asked. But I had done little reporting on the juvenile justice system, and I was surprised to hear such an alarming assertion dropped so casually.

Because, if true, this is where the prison pipeline began for children who needed help, not institutionalization.

It wasn’t until weeks later that I was able to schedule a tour of juvenile hall. The kids I briefly met, especially in the special needs unit, stuck with me. Who were they? What brought them here? And where would they go next?

I managed to pick story subjects with multiple, co-existing privacy obstacles: Minors (1) with mental illnesses (2) in the juvenile justice system (3).

How would I find them? And can a mentally ill minor even grant consent to their story being told? That’s a question I posed to a few of the speakers present at a week-long health reporting fellowship at the University of Southern California in February 2014. I got sympathetic shrugs in return.

When I started reporting, I immediately reached out to multiple youth justice foundations, advocacy groups and researchers to see if they could put me in touch with mentally ill incarcerated juveniles, former juveniles and their families. Many requests went unanswered; some referred me to other groups or individuals; most said they couldn’t put me in touch with anyone.

Meanwhile, locating hard data on mental health trends within the juvenile justice system proved almost as tricky…

Here’s a clip from Hosseini’s original story about how kids who really need mental health care get ensnared in the juvenile justice system (where they are over-prescribed antipsychotics) and what counties are doing, or are not doing, to rectify the situation:

Ashley Drake is trying to be something other than a cautionary tale. In a north Sacramento law enforcement office, the 22-year-old waits on a probation officer, the same one she’s had since childhood. It’s time again to reach for the straight and narrow.

She’s never had much help in that department.

Afflicted with bipolar disorder, clinical depression and avoidant personality disorder symptoms, Drake’s childhood is a blur of family discord, 10 juvenile hall detentions and 13 separate group home placements. Therapy, counseling and treatment? They never happened. Instead, she began self-medicating with hard drugs as an adolescent, and has since graduated to adult jails…

According to a comprehensive analysis completed in September for the Sacramento County Criminal Justice Cabinet, nearly 43 percent of the average daily juvenile hall population received mental health services this year, a 19-percent increase over 2000. Of the 84 children who were served, 52 received psychotropic drugs. The representation of medicated juveniles at the hall rose by 16 percent in comparison to 2004, when the population was larger and the number of medicated kids smaller—around 32—an examination of state and local data shows.

“About half of our juvenile hall is a mental health facility. And we don’t have adequate services to keep up with that,” says Arthur L. Bowie, supervising assistant public defender of the county’s juvenile division. “We’re making criminals out of them, instead of what they are.”

What they are, says Bowie and others, are victims of abusive homes and failed institutions. Institutionalized at a young age and too often deprived of proper psychiatric care, they’re groomed for lives on perpetual lockdown.

“Half these kids don’t belong in detention,” says deputy probation officer Gabo Ly, who supervises the special needs unit, where juvenile hall’s most emotionally and psychologically unstable are segregated. “But this is all we have.”

It’s a crisis in quiet, sapped of any grand political campaign or national outcry.

Read the rest.

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LA MAYOR’S STATE OF THE CITY: COMMUNITY POLICING, TARGETING CRIME HOTSPOTS, FUNDING GRYD

At CSUN on Tuesday, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti delivered his second annual State of the City address. The mayor announced a new 40-officer LAPD unit that will focus on community policing, as well as other activities (like coaching sports teams) that will build better relationships between cops and the neighborhoods they serve.

The LAPD will also hire 200 new Metropolitan Division officers to target high crime areas. (KPCC’S Frank Stoltze has more on this plan and why critics say it may harm the efforts of community policing.) Each police division will also receive a new specialized domestic violence unit.

Among other noteworthy changes, an extra $5.5 million in funding will go to the Gang Reduction Youth Development program, which allows for GRYD’s Summer Night Lights program to be extended to include non-summer Friday nights in some park locations.

KPCC’s Sharon McNary has more on the State of the City address. Here’s a clip from the mayor’s speech:

“We should all be very proud: we reduced overall crime at the end of last year to its lowest level per capita since 1949.

But our city’s violent crime numbers were up.

And as long as I’m your Mayor, I won’t duck bad news. I’m going to own it and I’m going to attack it.

Here’s how:

First, we’re nearly doubling the ranks of LAPD’s elite Metropolitan Division, so we can quickly saturate a neighborhood with additional officers when crime spikes.

Second, because domestic violence increased in our city last year, we’re also doubling the number of our Domestic Abuse Response Teams so there’s one in every LAPD division — and today, I am proud to announce that they will be on the streets by July first, six months ahead of schedule.

DART teams are civilians who roll out with police officers and give victims of domestic abuse the legal, medical, and emotional support they need to break the cycle of violence.

Third, we know that intervention works…when our Gang Reduction and Youth Development workers step in, guns are lowered and lives are saved.

Today, I’m pleased to share that the budget that I’m sending City Council next week will include five point five million dollars more for the GRYD program, so we can cover new territory and 50 percent more gang-related violent crime.

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TA-NEHISI COATES: BEYOND POLICE REFORM, SITUATIONS FOR WHICH LAW ENFORCEMENT MAY NOT BE THE BEST SOLUTION

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates says that instead of questioning whether a police use of force was within the law and department policy, we should question whether we should have sent the officer(s) out to deal with the situation that led to a use of force. Coates says we should ask, for instance, whether there are safer (for both officers and the public) and more peaceful ways to deal with a person who is skipping out on child support (instead of arrest), or to help someone in the throes of a mental health crisis. Here’s a clip:

There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, “Were they justified in shooting?” But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, “Were we justified in sending them?” At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems—homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one’s children, mental illness—are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can’t be every place.

When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t, or won’t, support their children at a level that we deem satisfactory. Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.”

Last week I was in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was informed of the killing of Tony Robinson by a police officer. Robinson was high on mushrooms. The police were summoned after he chased a car. The police killed him. A month earlier, I’d been thinking a lot about Anthony Hill, who was mentally ill. One day last month, Hill stripped off his clothes and started jumping off of his balcony. The police were called. They killed him.

[SNIP]

Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners.

STEVE LOPEZ: COPS GET TOO MUCH LEEWAY ON USE OF FORCE

In his column, the LA Times’ Steve Lopez says that while officers have to make extremely difficult, split-second decisions to protect their own safety and the safety of the public, deadly use of force incidents resulting from minor civilian misdeeds seem to occur too frequently. And, after questionable uses of force, officers are investigated by their own department, District Attorneys with close ties to local law enforcement agencies, and sympathetic juries. Here’s a clip:

The job is inherently dangerous, split-second decisions are hard to make under pressure, and sideline critics like me have the advantage of hindsight in second-guessing the use of deadly force.

But too often, it seems to me, we’re left trying to understand how a minor infraction or mere suspicion of criminal activity could have escalated into a deadly confrontation, and why police didn’t use better judgment.

[BIG SNIP]

It’s also time for police to refine the widespread broken-windows strategy — a full-bore crackdown on minor infractions to discourage serious crime — that can border on harassment and have deadly consequences, even if it does conveniently fill local treasuries with money from nuisance citations.

I’d like to put in a vote for the development and use of less lethal arms and ammo — such as a non-penetrating bullet now being tested in Ferguson, Mo. — that can incapacitate a suspect without killing him.

And it’s time to review deadly force policies and training.

Stephen Downing, a retired LAPD deputy chief, said he thinks a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on use of force has led to varying interpretations that give police too little guidance and too much latitude in determining when to shoot.

In training and practice, Downing said, the standard has been pushed “closer to what is justified by law as opposed to what is expected by the community. Thus, we see more and more, ‘He reached for his waistband’ rather than, ‘I opted to take cover, assess, develop a tactical alternative to use of deadly force and do all in my power to avoid taking a life.'”

And as for cops who negligently or maliciously cross the line, no more free passes. As Los Angeles attorney Walter Katz argued last week in a Harvard Law Review commentary, it’s time for independent investigations of police shootings, to help restore police accountability and public trust.

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MAN SUING LAPD FOR ALLEGED BRUTALITY SAYS COPS ARE HARRASSING HIS FAMILY

Clinton Alford Jr., a 22-year-old man who filed a lawsuit last year against the LAPD for alleged excessive use of force, says officers are retaliating against him. Alford says officers drew guns on him during a traffic stop, have driven by his house heckling Alford and his family, and flown a helicopter so low above his home that the house shook.

Last fall, a store security camera captured video of an officer allegedly kicked Alford in the head while he was being restrained on the ground. LAPD officials said Alford was not resisting arrest, and one viewer described it as “a football player kicking a field goal.”

The LA Times’ Kate Mather has the story. Here’s a clip:

Flanked by his father and his attorney, Clinton Alford Jr. told reporters that officers have repeatedly driven past his South L.A. house. And helicopters have flown so close overhead that walls and windows shook.

The 22-year-old’s attorney, Caree Harper, said officers had “heckled” Alford and his family while driving past their home. Last week, she said, officers drew their guns on her client after stopping him for a traffic violation.

Harper said she planned to amend a federal civil rights lawsuit she filed on Alford’s behalf to include the allegations of retaliation by police.

“They want to catch him doing anything,” she said. “Even if he’s not doing anything.”

Cmdr. Andrew Smith, an LAPD spokesman, declined to discuss the Oct. 16 incident, citing an ongoing internal investigation and civil litigation.

“There’s already an internal affairs investigation into this matter,” he said. “If they have any other allegations of misconduct, we’re eager to hear them and have internal affairs investigate them fully.”