The call to 911 came in at 12:25 p.m. March 4. A distraught mother needed help with her 17-year-old son. The first police officers sent to the home were told the boy was “emotionally disturbed,” owned an airsoft gun and “has threatened suicide by cops in the past.” An hour later, the boy was dead — fatally shot after police said he pointed a gun, which indeed was just an airgun.
Less than a week after that tragedy unfolded in Syracuse, N.Y., police in Rochester, N.Y., responded to a call about a man with a knife. “Just shoot me,” the man told police, who had ordered him to drop the knife. “I’m dangerous.” Seconds later, he too was dead — shot by an officer who fired five times.
Both cases appear to be textbook examples of suicide by cop — in which someone intentionally behaves in a threatening manner so as to provoke police to shoot — which underscores again the need for police departments to change the hidebound ways they train officers to deal with these fraught situations. “Heartbreaking and it keeps happening,” Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum said. “And with training it is preventable.”
Several years ago, Wexler’s think tank developed a training guide to deal with a range of use-of-force situations. In 2019, it added a detailed protocol on suicide by cop situations. Of the nearly 1,000 fatal police shootings in the United States every year, it is estimated that about 100 fall in this category. The forum’s training guide emphasizes that police must first consider their own safety and that of others but lays out a strategy of de-escalation. Instead of barking orders that are likely to add to the mental distress of someone already in crisis, the training teaches police to create space, slow things down, ask open-ended questions and hold off reaching or pointing their weapons.
The forum’s training was initially met with skepticism — if not outright hostility — by some in the law enforcement community who feared it would end up getting officers killed. But a study of the forum’s training for the Louisville, Ky., Metro Police Department found a dramatic decrease in use-of-force incidents and injuries to both citizens and officers. Such experience and growing frustrations about police violence and nationwide calls for reform have, as The Washington Post’s Tom Jackman and Dan Morse reported, helped give the protocol growing acceptance. According to the forum, close to 100 police departments have adopted the program. Sadly, though, some only do so after a tragedy occurs.
In Syracuse, a troubled 17-year-old is dead after his mother called for help. In Syracuse and Rochester both, officers are having to live with the question asked by Rochester Democratic Mayor Lovely Warren — a question that all police departments should take to heart: “Could this have ended differently?”