When San Jose police confront people in mental health crisis, why do they end up hurting them so often?
Huge proportions of the people officers beat, tase, shoot and kill are mentally ill or intoxicated from drugs or alcohol. In crisis, unable to control themselves, these individuals often can’t form the malevolent intent we associate with dangerous criminals.
Realizing the challenge, the San Jose Police Department has committed considerable effort to teaching its officers to handle these situations, becoming a national leader when it required all of its officers to undergo specialized crisis intervention training beginning in 2017.
Yet in the heat of the moment, many of San Jose’s officers can still find no other way to resolve such interactions but with violence.
A first-of-its-kind investigative analysis of San Jose police records between 2014 and 2021 found that:
- An overwhelming majority of those seriously injured by police in San Jose are mentally impaired. Of the 108 individuals on whom San Jose officers used batons, Tasers or guns to cause what’s legally known as “great bodily injury,” nearly three-quarters were believed to be mentally ill or intoxicated.
- The proportion of the mentally impaired among those killed by police is even higher. Eighty percent – 20 of 25 – of the victims of fatal incidents were classified as mentally ill or intoxicated.
- Extensive officer education has failed to curb the trends. In fact, since San Jose began its training effort, the percentage of serious force incidents that involved the mentally impaired has slightly increased. This is true even though police now recognize signs of mental illness or intoxication the vast majority of the time.
- A review of cases involving the mentally impaired raises questions about why force was the end result in many of them. In about a quarter of the confrontations, officers initiated contact with the subjects on their own, often over relatively minor infractions. Other times, police spotted or were called to help someone acting erratically, and the incident spiraled out of control. In well under half was the person armed.
I led a team of journalists for the Bay Area News Group and the California Reporting Project, working with students from Stanford University and UC Berkeley, to review thousands of pages of police records released under California transparency laws and the terms of a 2020 settlement of the news group’s lawsuit against the city of San Jose.
We combined data extracted from police records to data the agency reported to the state to examine how often San Jose police officers used force against people with mental illness and why.