A week before Christmas, our family woke up early to go skiing. We tried to drive down our quiet, suburban street, but the road had been closed with yellow tape, and police cars were sprinkled up and down the street.
We were shaken to learn that three doors away, our neighbor had been shot and killed by police while we slept. The incident is still under investigation, but our neighbor, apparently during a mental health crisis, threatened to kill a family member. He said he was armed and made other threatening comments. When police arrived, he was trying to break down the door of the room where the family member was hiding, and police shot to protect the family member. He died at the scene.
We read about police shootings with some frequency. They have been consistently on the rise, and 2022 saw a new national record: 1,176 Americans were killed by police. Certainly, many of these are justifiable. There are times we want police to use force, even deadly force, to protect life. The Uvalde school shooting, where officers’ hesitance to use deadly force cost twenty-one lives, also occurred in 2022. But it also seems probable that at least some of these deaths were avoidable.
When we evaluate police shootings, we tend to focus only on the moments immediately preceding the shooting. It can be a valuable way to learn lessons and improve officer training. However, this myopic focus can detract from other factors that contributed to a death. Every police shooting is the culmination of a long series of events and choices—many of which happened long before police arrived on the scene.
In the case of my neighbor, the mental health episode that culminated in his death was not the first inkling that something was amiss. One has to wonder, what if he had access to additional mental health medications? What if there wasn’t such a shortage of mental health professionals? What if we had a continuum of options between seeing a therapist and being committed to the state hospital? Perhaps the crisis never would have materialized.
And once the crisis materialized, what if a mental health professional had responded with police? Given that there was reason to believe he had a gun, maybe events would have unfolded the same way. But it is haunting to think that something more could have been done. Perhaps everyone involved, including the officer who had to pull the trigger, would be more at peace knowing that every possible alternative had been tried and shooting was truly the only viable option.
Twenty-two Utahns were killed by police in 2022, or one death per 154,761 Utahns. This is far above the national rate of one deadly officer shooting per 284,212 Americans. Clearly, there is room to improve, and part of the solution is more effectively addressing mental health before and during crises. It has become starkly apparent to me that no community is immune from mental illness and the tragedy that can ensue when it is not addressed appropriately.
