“In rural areas, they don’t have resources like in cities,” said Gordon Ramsay, sheriff of St. Louis County. “In the Ely or Babbitt areas you don’t have a social worker who can pop over in five minutes. It’s our staff who deal with it. While we have incredible staff, they’re not the best to deal with people in crisis. A uniform and a badge can create escalation just with the uniform.”
Ramsay said a person might call 911 as many as 40-50 times in an active mental health crisis. This kind of volume drowns out other calls and yet cannot be ignored.
“Law enforcement is designed to respond to a crisis, fix it, and get on to the next one,” said Duluth Police Chief Mike Ceynowa. “That’s not how it works for people with mental health issues. It’s a repetitive cycle.”
A seminal 2015 study from the Treatment Advocacy Center found that people with untreated serious mental illness were 16 times more likely to die than other individuals because of law enforcement encounters. After that report, researchers had difficulty acquiring reliable data to update this figure.
In Pocatello, Idaho, a 17-year-old autistic boy, Victor Perez, who had cerebral palsy, was shot nine times when police responded to a call to his family’s home on April 5. Perez was holding a knife when officers fatally shot him from the other side of the fence shortly after they arrived. His family intends to sue the city for wrongful death.
Here in Minnesota, a St. Paul woman was shot after pointing a gun at officers during a suicide crisis last year. Ramsey County declined to prosecute the officers, calling their decision justified by the circumstances.