Metro police departments typically have a 311 number that citizens can call for non-emergencies. This is the number that people call when a family member is in serious mental distress from such diseases as depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Usually, the family wants a medical intervention to commit the person to a mental health institution long enough to stabilize their condition with medications and therapies.

In the last few years, the number of times a 311 call resulted in the death of a person having a mental health crisis would shock you. A father or mother calls 311 to report a situation in which a child (of any age) is off their medicine, creating a dangerous disturbance, and threatening others. Since many municipalities have not funded trained personnel to respond to 311 calls, the calls are forwarded directly to the police. The police show up and within minutes, sometimes seconds, the person who is mentally ill has been shot dead.

In Kansas City, Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Raleigh, and the Bronx the same story has been repeated. In Detroit, when a father called 311 to request a mental health check for a son having a mental health crisis and holding a knife, the police arrived and shot the young man 38 times in 3 seconds. One study showed that nearly 40% of North Carolina civilians shot by police were people experiencing a mental health crisis (abc11.com/10534981). The more militarized our police forces become, the less human the targets of their “assistance” become.

When the police arrive at a mental health situation in riot gear, bullet-proof helmets and vests, with assault rifles, billy clubs, guns and bullets of assorted sizes and shapes studding their belts, you have to wonder who is more mentally disturbed. Clothing yourself in armaments is the behavior of someone in extreme distress from an extreme situation such as war. A mental health crisis does not call for such extreme measures of self-defense. A person has to be ill-trained, frightened to the core of people outside their “norm,” and suffering from mental health abnormalities of their own to choose to go through hours of practice in using these weapons instead of hours of practice diffusing complex human situations. It is not normal to enter any situation with tools of destruction rather than with the confidence of someone who generally likes and understands people.

This is why 311 services are so important. They are intended to be a compassionate response to citizens who need help. It is the middle, humanitarian ground between creating community mental health services that have to be molded to regulations and standards and end up looking and feeling like places many mentally ill people are not capable of choosing on their own as well as places they would not want to be, and the other extreme of policing mental health crises as if we are at war with the mentally ill. Take away the intended purpose of the 311 line, and you remove the compassion from the process of helping a mentally ill person in crisis.

Without 311 services, we have police squads with their own obvious mental distortions and imbalances – to the point of needing to respond to a family request with an arsenal of lethal force instruments –  policing human beings who need mental health intervention. The police are making the crisis about their own safety when the real crisis is happening to the individual who needs help. Not only are the police not trained to handle the situation, they are not intellectually, mentally, or emotionally equipped to be the grown up in the room.