The newest survival tip to young non-white male persons who encounter law enforcement (since even in these circumstances, they're disproportionately male and disproportionately Black or Latino) is to avoid carrying your hairbrush with you, especially if you are not 100% sane.
This appears to be the early lesson we're learning from the death of yet another non-white teenager, 18-year old Khiel Coppin, last night in my old neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. The early reports are that New York's finest believed he had a gatt when in fact he was carrying a Goody.
The news of young Mr. Coppin's death is still pretty hot off the presses less than 24 hours after the event. So, of course, as is always the case when a completely unarmed person gets shot and killed by the police, the stories about what happened are still all over the map. You have those witnesses who claim that that Mr. Coppin asserted that he had a gun, or that his mother said to police he had a gun, in person or on the phone -- take your pick. You have witnesses who say it was clear this teenager was unarmed, that the police knew it because he put up his hands, and even that one of the officers even confronted his colleague about why he shot Mr. Coppin. Right now there's not even agreement about whether he was killed by 13 shots or all 20 hit him (not that this detail really means all that much, except to reinforce that the NYPD still hasn't figured out despite Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell that Black men don't need to have multiple weapons emptied into them just to kill them; they die just as quick as white men do with one or two well-placed shots -- which to me begs the question of why multiple cops are wedded to the habit of emptying their weapons routinely when Black suspects are involved, rather than shoot to disable.)
But the one thing everyone appears to agree on is that earlier yesterday, his mother tried to obtain psychiatric help for him, but failed.
No psychiatrist can help him, now.
Our cultural narrative -- and certainly, the police narrative -- whenever these things happen is that the mentally ill pose a "significant danger" to law enforcement, so while it's "tragic" that mentally ill people get deadded so often at the end of a police weapon, it's both "understandable" and "justified." Indeed, we've come up with a new diagnosis just to explain these encounters away: "Suicide by Cop." Unfortunately, the data simply doesn't support our cultural narrative. Quite the contrary -- as a matter of honest statistics, law enforcement is far more dangerous to those who they encounter when they are mentally ill than the other way around:
Police interactions with people with mental illness can be dangerous, but usually are not. In the United States, 982 of 58,066 police officers assaulted in 2002, and 15 of 636 police officers feloniously killed from 1993 to 2002, had "mentally deranged" assailants. These represent one out of every 59 assaults on officers and one out of every 42 officers feloniously killed-relatively small portions of all officers assaulted and killed.
Encounters with police are more likely to be dangerous for people with mental illness than for the police. An early study found that an average of nine New York City police shootings per year between 1971 and 1975 involved emotionally disturbed people. Between 1994 and 1999, Los Angeles officers shot 37 people during encounters with people with mental illness, killing 25. A review of shootings by the police from 1998 to 2001 in the United Kingdom indicated that almost half (11 out of 24) involved someone with a known history of mental health problems. It is estimated that people with severe mental illness are four times more likely to be killed by police.
Review of some of the most recent cases confirms that most don't occur in "suicide by cop" circumstances either -- unless you consider the rantings of a person having a psychiatric episode the equivalent of the conscious decision to die that (used to) underlie the entire idea of "suicide." In fact, many of the events are prompted by well meaning family who are simply trying to get the victim some HELP, in a world where it is virtually impossible to find treatment or placement for the mentally ill, psychological and psychiatric treatment programs being seen as extremely low priority where municipal and county budgets are concerned.
And you just gotta love it when advocates for greater mental health resources find themselves encouraging the cultural and media myth of violent mentally ill people roaming the world in the hopes that a "public safety narrative" will obtain the absent yet critically necessary financial and other resources to help the mentally ill -- most of whom pose no threat to anyone, not even themselves -- where simple appeal to humanity has failed to do so.
Such as was the case yesterday in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
In a normal, just world, of course, all law enforcement personnel who carry guns would get some meaningful training in mental illness just to avoid what at least one person who testifies in these cases has noted are screw-ups of judgment in the first 90 seconds of an encounter with the mentally ill.
But, alas, most do not have more than the de minimis training. Cities - including some with the worst habits in the "Suicide by Cop" arena, like Houston Texas -- instead have gone with a handful of officers labeled Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT). This sounds great until you read the PR, in which the CIT's make clear that the families of folks having an episode need to make it clear when they dial 9-11 NOT to send the regular police when they call, but to ask for CIT instead.
I'll repeat that: It's the family's job to make sure their loved one in distress is not at risk of death at the hands of a poorly-trained law enforcement officer. Not law enforcement's to find out whether a mentally ill person is involved and, if so, to dispatch the specially-trained CIT officers in response.
This assumes, of course, that a family in an emergency with a loved one that has psychiatric issues has even heard of the CIT unit of the police department. I know where I'd put my money on that question.......
What are we left with as lessons learned, in light of these things? Because if one thing is clear from these events and the official law enforcement response (which is that the killings are always justified), police are not required to actually see a gun or weapon, or even think to try negotiation and crisis defusion before they shoot (empty their guns, it seems in the case of non-white suspects).
Well, we already know not to fly if you're not 100% mentally healthy - the late Rigoberto Alpizar could attest to that, if the US Marshals hadn't killed him (with only 3-9 shots, depending on who you believe, which is why I continue to demand an answer to the question of why police seem compelled to empty their weapons whenever a Black suspect is involved, as they did yet again yesterday in Bed-Stuy; 20 shots indeed - did they think the man was protected by Kryptonite or was some sort of super-human beast that couldn't be stopped otherwise?) in Miami.
We also know you're probably better off not standing on your rights to refuse to be interrogated by police -- as Randy Baker would confirm if he wasn't also deceased -- or trying to walk away from a cop who doesn't want you to walk away. For his trouble, Baker first got beat and then, when he fought back (his mental illness no doubt clouding the fact that he was hitting a cop) shot three times in the head even though he was totally unarmed.
Just to be safe, unless you passed your latest Rorschach with flying colors it's probably a good idea to avoid Houston and Harris County in Texas, altogether. As Omar Esparza, Steven Guillory, and Reginald Sumbler could all confirm - if they weren't dead.
And remember, whatever you do, for all that is holy, don't ever EVER carry your wallet, whether you're sane or not. Amadou Diallo demonstrated the utter foolhardiness of that with absolute clarity, even for those of us who don't carry our hair brushes.
So, whatever you do, please don't ever be in need of psychiatric help. And if you are, whatever you do, don't call the cops (and tell your family not to do it either, or they may be crying over your grave for their trouble no matter how many times they tell the cops before hand that you need help, not jail). Or if you simply must, remember to leave your hairbrush at home. Better a few naps than a body bag at the hands of trigger-happy police.