Justified?

When Andrew Hanlon was shot to death while undergoing a psychological crisis in Silverton, Oregon it was but another case of deadly interaction between a person in crisis and police officers charged with maintaining public safety. It is too easy to dismiss the incident as a rampaging person out of control that had to be stopped. But that is precisely what happened as a grand jury found that the shooting was "justified."

"Justified" is, unfortunately, a relative term and is applied in this case with a great deal of assistance from a society that wishes to wash it hands of problems and overlook the real problems that lead to the circumstances that "justify" the actions taken. Taken at the precise moment of the incident, where a person out of control is threatening another persons safety and there is the possibility of the loss of a life, the rules of engagement for police officers allow for "justifiable force" to control the situation. Even so, there is a great deal of discrepancy among police departments over what actions can be taken in crises and the training of officers that are trained to handle such situations. I have yet to see where a police officer has been found to be at fault when firing their weapon and killing a person who has behaved irrationally and threatening. In several of these cases, the shots have been fired multiple times into the back of the assailant. In the Fall of 2007 a young man in Washington County, Oregon was shot in the back as he was running into a building. It might have been that he was running for shelter from being shot with rubber bullets, but a decision was made that he was a danger to the person in the building and was fatally wounded.

While it is hard to live with the process of assigning blame to an officer who is acting under crisis and with split-second decisions being made, there is so much more to all of the stories I have encountered.

On Friday July, 25, 2008 the Portland Oregonian published a letter to the editor from a desperate mother of a young man that reflects the depths of the problem and why we keep reading about young people like Andrew Hanlon that are "justifiably" killed in the name of public safety. For the past two years the mother of the young man in question has contacted numerous agencies and desperately tried to gain access to treatment that would prove effective in relieving the symptoms that her son suffers from. The lack of community resources and access to a system of care is appalling. She has been thwarted at every attempt to gain access to care for her son, even though the laws for mental health care supposedly provide for parity for those seeking treatment for mental illness.

I called her and spoke with her about her efforts. In spite of contacting numerous agencies and social service providers, she has been unable to bring the situation regarding her son under a controllable environment. Her pleas to a child welfare hotline resulted in the following advice. He "might be able to get help if he was arrested, adjudicated, and there was a court order for treatment."

This is the plight that citizens are faced with. There is really no entry point into the service system. The problem is even more difficult for a young man like Mr. Hanlon who happened to overstay his VISA and is technically a citizen of another country. We are playing in a system that has no entry point for services until a crisis is encountered and by the time that happens we have 'justified" ending their life. Hospitals supposedly cannot turn those who cannot pay for health care away from their facility. They can, however, turn away from those who have yet to behave in a dangerous enough manner and leave them at risk for early termination of their life based upon a mental crisis. Over and over, we read story after story of those who have put the public in danger and have been killed because of their creation of imminent danger to others. The real danger is to themselves as they struggle for lack of entry to a system of care that could save everyone from the tragedy that inevitably follows.

When will we recognize the real danger from the lack of access to treatment services?