Police stations in some 2800 American communities can’t all be wrong in singing the praises of crisis intervention training programs tailor made for the unusual nature of mental disturbance calls.

So why is New York City having to be dragged through federal court to get with it?

My guess is that NYC operates under the false post-Sept. 11 assumption that maximum, SWAT team-style aggression always lowers the body count.

The flip side to this illusion of security is a more willful blindness to the subtler forms of communication developed in the so-called Memphis model pioneered by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) 25 years ago down in Bluff City.

There a 27 year old Memphis man was threatening family, neighbors, and himself with a very large knife. Police arrived on the scene and, after a brief exchange, shot him dead multiple times.

Since then–and precisely because no one should be complacent about a mental disturbance call–some 2800 communities in 45 states have embraced the 40 to 80 hour NAMI training program.

Practical Tips for Real Life Encounters

While every situation is different, by focusing on some of the more mystifying responses from an individual in the throes of psychosis, classroom role-playing exercises are especially helpful in prepping police for the field.

Any officer of the law could be forgiven for failing to appreciate that the normal rules do not apply, that a man whose behavior is governed by voices beyond his control may be unable to act of his own volition, and that no neighborhood is spared.

In these voices, a man may even be hearing a running commentary that, in a sense, constitutes a competing set of instructions unbeknownst to the police. This puts the police at a relative disadvantage. If the cops are out-voiced, if never out-gunned, they’re just bringing a knife to a gun fight ironically.

They should be smarter than that. Otherwise, as a spate of killings this year shows, a 911 medical assistance call to the wrong force quickly becomes a death sentence.

SWAT Teams as Social Workers?

The source of the problem lies in critical shortages in community health care systems that result from cuts in social spending. As a consequence, police officers have replaced social workers as first responders in a psychiatric crisis.

NAMI legal director Ron Honberg says the organization has only dented the problem. “These are sadly not uncommon patterns,” he told the press. “The standard way law enforcement officers respond to people that they perceive to be behaving erratically is by aggression.

“They are trained to shout at the person and intimidate them into surrendering,” he explained. “If large individuals in uniform show up and start yelling it can feed into paranoia, like gasoline on a fire.”

Indeed, any search of local databases shows that Miriam Carey and Bobby Bennett are not the exceptions. (One footnote on the shocking Bennett family story: Today comes news that the Dallas police officer caught on tape shooting Bobby Bennett point blank has been dismissed.)

Big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have followed early adopters Memphis and Albuquerque along with rural areas like New River Valley, Virginia, and Cambria County, Pennsylvania.

In these places, tangible results are seen in crime statistics. Police stations also report less tangible benefits in improved community relations.

But in certain proud pockets, like Dallas and New York, resistance persists.

In New Rochelle, NY, Elsa Cruz is suing the city for the police shooting her husband Samuel in the chest last May, leaving him to bleed out in their home.

Cruz had dialed 911 after her Puerto Rican husband, an artist suffering from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, went off his meds. She told the police he was behaving strangely, that he didn’t recognize her as his wife.

While she hid out in her neighbor’s basement flat, she heard police force open the door upstairs and fire on her husband. New Rochelle police say he went at them with a knife before they used lethal force.

Either way, last Tuesday Elsa and her daughter Frances with Samuel filed a federal civil right suit accusing New Rochelle police of failing to train police adequately to respond to mental disturbance calls.

The suit also seeks an injunction that would force the city to implement proper crisis intervention training.

NYC Suit Cites String of Shootings

Randolph McLaughlin, the attorney for the Cruz family, is also representing plaintiffs in the New York City suit brought by the family of Mohammed Bah, a college student killed Sept. 25 by NYPD officers up in Harlem.

Again, officers were responding to a 911 call for medical assistance. After they arrived, the 28 year-old man’s mother pleaded with the police to let her talk to her son first to try to calm him down. The police refused and Bah was shot dead instead.

The Bah suit cites a string of fatal NYPD shootings going back to the landmark case of Eleanor Bumpurs, a mentally ill woman who was killed in 1987 by police trying to evict her from public housing.

The widely publicized case led to new NYPD procedures for dealing with the mentally ill, but these did not specifically require crisis intervention training led by mental health professionals with first-hand experience.

Taking time to size up a situation is nothing new under the sun. While SWAT teams are always rearing to go, there’s no excuse for the shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach.

It’s wrong, it’s tragic, it’s literally overkill, and it’s just plain stupid.