US government database hopes to tell ‘whole story’ of police killings after year of Guardian count

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/13/justice-department-database-police-killings-counted-statistics?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+CB+thumb&utm_term=143467&subid=13529055&CMP=ema_565b

A burglary suspect fleeing police dogs and a helicopter in Florida wades into a dark lake and disappears. Three weeks later his remains are found inside an alligator.

Was he killed by police?

It is an extreme example of the difficulty faced with increasing frequency by data scientists working on a new US government count of deaths in interactions with police – a count that appears likely to soar beyond all previous attempts, now that the issue has reached the highest levels of both protest and power.

As esoteric as the task may seem, the objective is deadly serious: to measure the true dimensions of an epidemic of lethal violence committed by police across the country on often unarmed civilians. A majority of the victims, such as Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald, die in police gunfire. Others, such as the New York father Eric Garner, may die in a banned chokehold or, like the Baltimore 25-year-old Freddie Gray whose death is currently being prosecuted, from injuries in a police vehicle.
Analysis FBI effort to track police killings is key step toward leaving no case uncounted
The government’s system for recording people killed by police will remain voluntary, but new changes mark a milestone in debate over a flawed approach
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At the start of 2015, the Guardian launched The Counted, a public-service project tallying and shedding light on such cases, which has reached a tally of 1,068 so far. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed plans for a similar counting effort, after grossly misrepresenting the problem in eight previous years with annual figures averaging 423.

Quietly watching both efforts has been a team of statisticians and criminologists working in a complex of low buildings in an office park housing IBM outside Raleigh, North Carolina. They are employees of RTI International, a research company with significant federal contracts from the Department of Education and the Pentagon.

The number crunchers’ latest contract is one in high demand – and a long time coming: a major deal with the Department of Justice to design a single official count that so far has eluded the government, despite swelling national demand, of people who die in interactions with police.
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The DoJ’s new effort is the result of pressure from the top of the Obama administration, from the president to attorney general Loretta Lynch, who called in October for “national, consistent” data on people killed by law enforcement.

Pressure has also mounted from public embarrassment inside the FBI and elsewhere in the Justice Department that counts by the media this year have surpassed any accounting the government has to offer for itself. At a recent summit, FBI director James Comey called it “unacceptable” that a Guardian US investigative unit had a better tally than his agency’s near 35,000 employees.

There is abundant doubt among top criminologists, however, about the ability of the FBI to do the job, despite Comey’s personal focus on the issue, because the bureau relies on the voluntary compliance of the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies to report to the government when someone dies in connection with police action. And the number crunchers say police overwhelmingly will not volunteer that information.

“I’m not sure what the participation rate’s going to be, if the FBI’s using – simply by encouragement,” said Janet Lauritsen, a criminologist at the University of Missouri who is chairperson of a National Academy of Sciences panel on modernizing crime statistics. “I think they’re really going to need some incentives here, and pressure – as well as pressure from the public.”

With that shadow of doubt overhanging the FBI’s effort, a much smaller and more specialized agency within the Justice Department, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), has stepped up to propose its own way forward – and in effect take over from media efforts following the call from Obama’s cabinet.
Last summer, to little public attention, the team at RTI, working on a contract with BJS, launched a pilot program to count what criminologists refer to as arrest-related deaths. It would entail a team of about two dozen analysts working part-time to identify potential cases and then verify them with law enforcement agencies and medical examiner’s offices.

The crux of the pilot program are two computer servers dedicated to combing the internet 24 hours a day for reports of anything that looks like someone dying in an interaction with a police officer.

The humming hardware is a gamble in the sense that government statisticians had never before fully committed to using open-source techniques in their efforts to quantify fatal police use of force.A previous BJS effort to count arrest-related deaths had experimented with open-source counting.

But in a year in which the Guardian’s use of open sources – and, increasingly, reader tips – has produced a portrait of a problem orders of magnitude larger than previously acknowledged, and with pressure also growing from Congress, the Justice Department statisticians decided to jump with both feet into online sourcing.

Freddie Gray, – would he have been excluded from the count? If it had just been shootings, then obviously, yes.
Duren Banks, RTI statistician

The statisticians’ new effort is not limited to fatal shootings, but aims to capture the entire corpus of cases of people who die in police violence.

“Limiting it to certain types of death doesn’t tell the whole story, and so we wanted to know more about all individuals who died in police custody,” said Duren Banks, the RTI statistician and criminologist who is running the project. “With Freddie Gray, for example, would he have been excluded from the count? If it had just been shootings, then obviously, yes.”

For the pilot program, which expects to deliver an initial report to the Justice Department early next year, RTI set out to capture any death that happened while the decedent’s “ability to leave” was restricted by a law enforcement officer (excluding federal officers) – but before the decedent was officially booked into jail.
That would include, significantly, anyone shot dead by police. But it would also include a case like that of Gray or Garner. It would include a person who committed suicide in a standoff with police, or a drunk driver killed in a single-car accident after pursuit by police. Ultimately, the burglar killed by the alligator would make the list, too, as someone whose freedom to leave was restricted by police at the time he was killed.

After a potential case is identified, the government-funded liaisons contact law enforcement agencies to ask them to fill out a 19-point questionnaire about each incident. The analysts also review the channels the information had taken to surface for their appraisal.

“For each case that we identify, we have recorded how we identified those cases,” said Michael Planty, the BJS official overseeing the project. “Whether it’s through, say, the Guardian, but also through open sources. So we might go to your website and find a case, but also through Google alerts we get the same information. Just understanding that is part of our assessment.”
How the BJS pilot program to count arrest-related deaths works:

Computer programs identify potential arrest-related deaths and add them to a queue for analysts.
Analysts move through the queue item by item, labeling cases “yes”, “no” or “unknown”.
For all “unknown” or “yes” cases, analysts collect information including the decedent’s name, age, date of death and the law enforcement agency involved.
Each month, analysts aggregate cases into a “unique decedent list”, eliminating duplicates.
Analysts check these lists against The Counted and other databases of people killed by police. Cases move to liaisons.
Liaisons contact the relevant law enforcement agency and/or medical examiner’s office and ask officials to fill out a 19-point questionnaire about the incident.
Liaisons contact an additional “stratified random sample” of law enforcement agencies of various sizes that were not associated with any report of an arrest-related death, to see whether any of them have in fact had such an incident.
RTI is preparing a first report to submit to BJS this spring.

The open-source mining is particularly muscular, explained RTI data scientist Paul Ruddle, thanks to the use of multiple commercial media monitoring services to get a depth of view not available through free search engines such as Google.
When the project was under design, Ruddle led a team that put together a list of dozens of keywords that would catch even obscure cases for review in deep web searches.

“We couldn’t have done this 30 years ago,” Ruddle said. “Now, because we have all this information available online in a machine-readable context, we are able to narrow down the universe of articles or posts initially without having a person read the universe of articles.”

The resulting volume of potential cases, Banks said, is substantial but manageable by a handful of rotating reviewers working to decide whether to promote potential cases to likely cases warranting follow-up.

How many people die each year in interactions with police? RTI is not disclosing its initial results, not having completed its first round of interviews with law enforcement agencies. But Banks said the number of cases it had tentatively identified so far was roughly in line with the Guardian’s tally, which she praised as exemplary “compared to the other ones that are out there beside BJS’s”.

The RTI pilot program was designed by “taking stock of what’s there and not moving ahead too quickly”, she said.

“Also looking into the field – looking at what you all were doing, looking at what some law enforcement agencies were doing to capture this information, and just trying to harness again what’s best about working within each of those approaches.

“I think that there’s certainly a thinking and an expectation, and I share this, that we should be able to do this,” Banks said. “That we should be able to know how many people die in law enforcement custody.

“It’s really important to BJS that they get 100%.”

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Should I Prescribe Another Opioid for This Patient?

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/855307

A clinician who performs minor surgical procedures is in a quandary about whether to prescribe an opioid for postprocedure pain to patients who are already taking opioids.

Carolyn Buppert, MSN, JD Healthcare attorney

A nurse practitioner asks about management of acute postoperative pain, but this dilemma is common to all clinicians who perform minor surgical procedures.

As part of my practice, I perform a minor surgical procedure. The procedure usually calls for a controlled analgesic for a few days afterwards. Sometimes, the patient having the procedure is already taking large doses of one or more powerful pain medications for chronic, noncancer pain. If that is the case, should I prescribe the usual postprocedure pain medication? In one case, a patient was already taking powerful analgesics—more powerful than I normally prescribe—so I declined to prescribe yet more pain medication. The patient complained to his insurer, who then wrote me a letter saying that I was deficient in treating pain. Must I, should I, or even can I prescribe pain medication for a patient who already is being treated for pain?

Your reluctance to pile more pain medication onto a patient already being treated with controlled drugs is wise. If I received a deficiency letter from an insurer for making the decision you made, I would probably respond, in writing, describing my reasoning for declining to provide pain medication and asking the insurer to respond with their recommendations for how to handle this decision in the future.

Predicting what is safe for each patient is a complex calculation and requires consideration of unique variables. You are an expert at your procedure but not necessarily an expert on treating pain. You can become an expert on treating pain, if you like, but otherwise you will need help in figuring out what to do with patients who are already being treated for pain. The safest course would be to contact the patient’s prescribing clinician. Decide whether your additional prescription is necessary and appropriate and whether it will compromise the primary provider’s treatment plan. Furthermore, you will need to know whether the patient’s primary prescriber and the patient have agreed that the primary prescriber will be the sole prescriber of pain medication. It is common (and standard of care) for a clinician who treats chronic, noncancer pain with opioids to require that each patient agree not to accept pain medication from any other provider. If the patient knows that and still wants a prescription from you, it may indicate that the patient is not willing to comply with his other prescriber’s requirements. That may be grounds for the primary prescriber to terminate his relationship with the patient.

Another consideration is whether this patient should be treated as being naive to opioids or whether to take tolerance into account. And you will need to consider that your procedure calls for treating acute pain, and the regimen the patient is on prior to your procedure likely is for chronic pain. So you will need to decide whether the patient’s current regimen is going to cover the acute pain.

I recommend that you do some research to see what other clinicians in your line of practice do. Perhaps controlled drugs aren’t necessary for this particular procedure. It makes sense to come up with a practice policy or, at minimum, have your own policy about how you will handle this decision in the future. You want to treat pain responsibly; but, on the other hand, you don’t want to be manipulated by patients or cause a problem for their pain management clinicians.

Here is a resource about pain management that clinicians might find useful: “Acute Pain Assessment and Opioid Prescribing Protocol.” (Editor’s Note: You may also find Medscape’s Pain Management Center useful.)

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Much loved former head of Havelock was in chronic pain when she jumped off the Humber Bridge

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Anderson officer arrested on drug charges, accused of selling drugs to undercover agent

http://fox59.com/2015/12/11/anderson-officer-arrested-on-corruption-charge-accused-of-selling-drugs-to-undercover-agent/

ANDERSON, Ind. (Dec. 11, 2015)—FBI officials confirm an Anderson Police Department officer was arrested on drug charges for allegedly selling drugs to an undercover FBI agent Thursday.

Donald Jordan, 52, was arrested at the police department Thursday afternoon following the incident.

Authorities say Jordan was caught selling drugs, including Hydrocodone and Xanax, to an undercover FBI agent.

Jordan faces two counts of dealing narcotics and possession with intent to distribute.

According to court documents, FBI officials began their investigation into Jordan’s alleged activity after receiving a tip from an informant in June.  The source told officials Jordan approached them to sell marijuana on his behalf.

Officials asked the informant to wear recording devices during their interactions with Jordan. In one instance on June 26, the informant reported Jordan gave them three Lortab/hydrocodone pills. After giving the pills, Officer Jordan then asked the informant to touch his genitals after exposing himself, according to court documents.

The source attempted to contact Jordan several times after that interaction, but was not successful.  Then, on Dec. 10, Officer Jordan’s official marked police vehicle was found parked outside a Ricker’s store in Anderson.  The informant and undercover agent arrived to the scene and entered the Ricker’s convenience store and engaged in conversation with Jordan.  The informant and undercover agent told Jordan they were looking for drugs for a party they would attend later that evening. The undercover agent told Jordan she did not trust police, in which Jordan reportedly replied he was a better criminal than a cop, read court documents.

After discussing a drug exchange, Jordan allegedly told the informant and undercover agent to meet him at a different location. During the meeting, Jordan, who was dressed in full uniform, gave them 15 Xanax pills, said the probable cause affidavit.

“It’s a sad day for law enforcement. It’s a sad day for the Anderson Police Department, if these allegations are true. For the citizens of Anderson, Madison County here, they have a very good police department. There are dedicated professionals who risk their lives every day in good servant-hood for this community,” said Chief Larry Crenshaw.

Jordan was held in the Marion County Jail in Indianapolis, but was released Friday and  is now on home detention with GPS monitoring.

He also made his initial appearance in federal court Friday and faces 15 years if convicted on both counts.

Chief Crenshaw is requesting that Jordan’s paid-leave go unpaid after the standard 5 day period.

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Drug cops will spend even more money on taking people’s stuff next year

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/national/drug-cops-will-spend-even-more-money-on-taking-peoples-stuff-next-year-20151211

America’s law enforcement officers have been seizing a record amount of property from citizens, often without charging them with a crime, under the practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Cops took more stuff from people than burglars did last year, according to FBI data.

But despite calls for reform from lawmakers and advocacy groups, budget numbers recently released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy suggest forfeiture efforts will ramp up next year.

For fiscal year 2016, the Department of Justice has requested $297.2 million in funding to support the asset forfeiture activities of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces. That’s a $14 million increase over the previous year, and a 164 percent increase in drug-related asset forfeiture spending since 2008.

By contrast, the overall federal drug control budget has increased by only about 25 percent over the same period.

The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment on the reason behind the jump in spending. The drug control policy office report notes that the Department of Justice uses those hundreds of millions of dollars to identify assets, prosecute cases and “manage the massive paper flow associated with forfeiture.”

“The Asset Forfeiture Program not only represents an effective law enforcement tool against criminal organizations, but it also provides financial support to other Federal law enforcement efforts, remuneration and restitution to victims, and an additional source of funding for state and local law enforcement partners,” the drug policy report states.

But investigations by The Washington Post, American Civil Liberties Union, Institute for Justice and others have found that many forfeiture actions target not “criminal organizations,” but rather regular citizens. An ACLU report earlier this year found that the median amount seized in forfeiture actions in Philadelphia amounted to $192. The Institute for Justice has found that the median forfeiture amounts in many states are just a couple hundred dollars.

Eighty-seven percent of federal forfeiture proceedings were civil cases, not criminal ones.

“My read on the requested increase in funding for the Asset Forfeiture Program is that DOJ anticipates that forfeiture activity conducted by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the next fiscal year will continue to increase exponentially,” said Grant Smith, deputy director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, via email. “Forfeiture activity across the country has exploded since 2000 in large part due to the growing reliance by law enforcement on the use of civil asset forfeiture to bring a cash windfall to police budgets.”

Many of the forfeiture cases brought in the past year have been initiated by drug enforcers. DEA agents in New Mexico took $16,000 from a man who planned to start a business because they didn’t believe he got the cash through legal means. Drug cops in Michigan ransacked a soccer mom’s house because they thought she committed a minor violation of Michigan’s medical marijuana law. Authorities seized $11,000 from a college kid at an airport because his luggage “smelled like weed.”

If the drug policy office’s funding numbers are any indication, we could see even more cases like these next year.

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Is Chronic Pain a Disability?

www.nationalpainreport.com

68-year old Judie Bruno his filed a complaint under the Americans with Disability Act regarding discrimination against those who are being refused pain medication they need for their quality of life.

And she thinks other chronic pain sufferers should follow suit. (Here’s the complaint form)

Bruno, who the National Pain Report featured in October, is an Army veteran amputee who fought and won the VA over her use of medical marijuana to combat her pain. A pharmacist at the Loma Linda VA decided to stop filling Bruno’s morphine prescription (that had been unchanged in 14 years) because she uses marijuana. Bruno, who understands how to navigate the federal health care system, fought back and the VA relented.

“This is discrimination, plain and simple,” Bruno told the National Pain Report.

She made the case in an email to the National Pain Report, which she has given us the permission to share with our readers:

“They are now turning those who would abuse Narcotic Medication and can’t receive them to harder drugs like heroin and turning Veterans and others to use Medical Marijuana which is good for some illnesses and pain but you can’t function being stoned on pot all day long. We need hundreds, thousands of complaints.

Chronic Pain is a real disability. For those Americans who are suffering such a disability, Veterans and civilians alike, many are not being prescribed the pain medications they need or are having those medications refused that they have been on for years to have the best quality of life they can all because of those who would, no matter what, abuse narcotic medications. This is discrimination and is against the laws and rules under the American with Disabilities Act.

There is no doubt at all regarding my need for pain medications, in all in my medical records. No one has denied this need. I deal with three different types of pain and each needs the medications formulated to deal with each and my medical records prove that I have never abused any of the pain medications I have been prescribed over the last 40 some years, over two thirds of my life. I always have extra pills and only take them when I need and yet I and many others are all being treated as if we are “drug addicts” because we dare request the medications we need and have to beg for the care we deserve.

On Sept 16, 2015 a pharmacist at the Loma Linda, CA, VA Medical Center, made the decision to just not give me the morphine I have been prescribed for over 14 years, with no warning, no concern at all for the possible shock my body and system would go through by just stopping this medication, nothing to help with the withdrawals I would have to deal with or anything to help with the chronic pain I have every day of my life. This pharmacist didn’t know I had enough morphine to last over a month, more proof that I never abuse these medications. He clearly didn’t care what this action would do to me. I know the reason that this pharmacist took this step was because I do use medical marijuana at night, the doctor remarked about it and that is why I’m able to get by on most days with only three of the four to five pills I am prescribed. That was how I was able over all these years to keep my morphine intake as low as possible.

I went in front of a “Pain Management Board” and proved not only the need for these medications but that I have never abused any medications prescribed and even amputated my leg in 1995 to get off of the high levels the VA had me on. I also removed myself from a Fentanyl Patch because it was more than I needed. The Pain Board returned the medications to me and with that and the new drug I had requested; I had one of the best months in a very long time.

I have requested through a complaint through the Patient Advocate Office at this VA Center the name of the pharmacist who refused to send me the pain medication I need but so far I haven’t been able to learn who he is but I’m sure it’s in my medical records and have requested a copy. I wish to bring discrimination and malpractice charges against this individual for refusing to prescribe to me the pain medications I need and have been prescribed by my doctors who’s care I rely upon and the same charges against the VA Medical Center in Loma Linda, CA and the doctor and pharmacist now in control over the pain medications I need.

Even after proving my need for pain medications and the fact that I never abuse any medications two doctors at the VA are now removing me from the Xanax my GI doctor knows I need for my symptoms and he does not agree with this removal. My quality of life has been very affected by not having this medication all because I use Medical Marijuana legal in my state.

Please help all Americans who are suffering from chronic pain and can’t receive the medications needed for their quality of life. This is truly discrimination against those who suffer from chronic pain and we depend on the ADA to protect us from such treatment.

“No Veteran, no American should suffer one more day in pain that is necessary and this is “NOT” necessary.”

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More liquid meth discovered near Austin as DEA warns its only getting worse

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/More-liquid-meth-discovered-near-Austin-6688967.php

Austin police recently discovered a large load of liquid methamphetamine concealed inside a pickup truck just south of the state capital.

The discovery was made Dec. 7 during a routine traffic stop.

A gray 2001 Dodge Ram pickup with Iowa plates was pulled over and after a brief investigation written consent to search the vehicle was obtained.

RELATED: $4 million in meth found in gas tank in Texas

 

Richard Martinez, age 44, was arrested on a DEA detainer, after authorities reportedly found $4 million worth of liquid methamphetamine inside a truck he was driving in Austin. (Austin Police Department)

A canine officer conducted a sniff test, indicating that narcotics were onboard.

 

Officials later found 50 kilos of liquid meth inside the gas tank. This setup was somewhat the same as the one seen in a recent meth bust in nearby Fayette County.

RELATED: New form of meth found in Texas City middle school

The driver Richard Martinez, 44, was soon arrested.

Police said the estimated street value of the liquid meth was nearly $4 million.

Drug officials and criminal courts are not going easy on meth smugglers, liquid or otherwise. It would appear that its become a hot commodity just like marijuana.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, liquid meth is now the number one drug entering the United States at the southwestern border. It’s also not easy to detect considering the lengths that some smugglers and cartels will go.

RELATED: Drug report: Meth becoming choice of smugglers

In early November a Guatemalan man was sentenced to federal prison for more than 24 years for trying to smuggle more than 350 kilograms of liquid meth inside a tractor trailer across the Texas-Mexico border.

That conviction was handed down the same day that DEA officials released a report saying that the amount of meth being seized by authorities is increasing in recent years, climbing 90 percent in the Rio Grande Valley and 245 percent in El Paso.

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DEA Partners With Pharmacists To Combat National Heroin Epidemic

http://wesa.fm/post/dea-partners-pharmacists-combat-national-heroin-epidemic

They continue to use the 120 deaths a day… ADMIT half are from opiates.. but don’t admit that the other HALF is from OTC meds … like Tylenol !! They also state that 80% become addicted to prescription opiates… but.. don’t say if they were legally prescribed, stolen, purchased on the street.

As drug and law enforcement agencies find a growing link between prescription pain killers and heroin use, they’re trying to attack the problem of abuse and overdose from multiple sides.

Among their allies are those doling out prescription medication: pharmacists. A little more than 200 southwestern Pennsylvania pharmacists are in Pittsburgh through Friday for a conference hosted by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Eight out of 10 new heroin users in this country say they’ve used heroin after becoming addicted to prescription opioids,” said Gary Tuggle, special agent in charge with the DEA Philadelphia division. “These opioids are highly addictive. About 120 a day are dying from overdoses. Half of those, more than half of those, are dying from the misuse and abuse of prescription opioids.”

Opioid addiction is leading to an uptick in heroin users and has spread the addiction to people in all socio-economic, age and ethnic groups. That’s because heroin is less expensive than prescription opioids, he said. For someone who is addicted and can’t get a prescription, a 30-mg tablet of Oxycontin would run about $30 on the street, according to Tuggle. A bag of heroin runs between $5 and $10, which consists of one-tenth of a gram.

So where do pharmacists come in?

“They are oftentimes the first line of defense with it comes to identifying folks who are doctor shopping or practitioners who are running pill mills,” said Tuggle.

“Doctor shopping,” meaning addicts and people who want to sell medications illegally visit more than one physician looking for multiple prescriptions. Another issue is theft of pharmaceuticals.

Conference speakers have emphasized pharmacists’ responsibility to ensure secure inventory and vigilance when verifying prescriptions are legitimate, as there has been an increase in forged prescriptions nationwide, according to Tuggle.

The conference is part of the DEA’s 360 Strategy, an effort to stop the cycle of prescription opioid and heroin abuse by going after drug trafficking organizations and partnering with social service organizations and health care professionals. In November, the agency announced that Pittsburgh would be the first pilot city to implement the plan.

“It is an epidemic, and we’re losing 120 a day,” Tuggle said. “If we were in a war zone, those (numbers) would be considered mass casualties.”

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Risk of being killed by police is 16 times greater for those with mental illness

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/10/risk-of-being-killed-by-police-16-times-greater-mental-illness?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+CB+thumb&utm_term=142893&subid=13529055&CMP=ema_565b

Jamiles Lartey in New York

@JamilesLartey

The risk of being killed during a police incident is 16 times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than other civilians, according to a new report by the Treatment Advocacy Center (Tac). The report suggests that a variety of institutional and policy failures have often left law enforcement as the only available resource to deal with people in mental health crisis, sometimes with fatal results.

“If you have these situations in communities where, when someone is really sick, the only call the family can make is to law enforcement; of course you’re going to see these sort of tragedies happen,” said John Snook, executive director of the Virginia-based nonprofit, which works to eliminate barriers to the treatment of severe mental illness.

“People don’t stop getting sick just because you don’t have hospital beds for them, they have to go somewhere, so they go to the places that can’t say no,” Snook said. Often, those places turn out to be either emergency rooms or local jails. Twenty percent of America’s prison and jail beds are occupied by people with severe mental illness, the report said.

According to Tac, an estimated 7.9 million Americans live with a severe mental illness, and about half of this population does not receive the necessary care on any given day. It is this untreated population that is disproportionately likely to be harmed in an engagement with law enforcement.

Matthew Ajibade, who died after an altercation in a Georgia jail in January might be considered an example of this type of vulnerability. Ajibade, who had bipolar disorder, was arrested after a domestic disturbance involving his girlfriend, and was beaten and struck with a Taser several times at the facility. He died of blunt force trauma, and nine of the officers involved were eventually fired.

The study comes just as the FBI and Department of Justice have announced plans to expand and relaunch each of their individual efforts to collect data on fatal interactions between civilians and police. According to Tac, one of the primary roadblocks to addressing the issue is a lack of reliable government data.

“To some degree, the failure to track the role of mental illness in fatal police encounters is symptomatic of the failure to systematically track fatal police encounters, period,” the report reads.

The Guardian, the Washington Post and a former FBI investigator’s “True Crime” blog have all independently found that about 25% of fatal police incidents involve a mentally ill victim, the report notes. Currently there is no comprehensive government source for this information. The new DoJ program is expected to track mental health information. A spokesperson for the FBI did not immediately return requests for comment.

The startling statistic noting 16 times greater risk of a fatal encounter with law enforcement for people with mental illness was calculated using the 25% number reported by the Guardian and other publications, which Snook said made the estimate “very conservative”. The Guardian’s Counted investigation monitors whether mental health issues are identified by family members, friends or police.

The Tac report cites psychiatric deinstitutionalization, the process of emptying and closing psychiatric hospitals in favor of pharmaceutical and other less extreme treatment strategies, as a major driver of these disproportionate police contacts. From 1950 to date, the number of psychiatric beds plummeted by about 90% according to a Tac study. As this happened, according to the report, the community health centers meant to replace the institutions were neglected.

This process picked up speed roughly around the same time that the idea of “community policing” began to put more officers onto the streets and encouraged them to engage in more frequent contact with civilians. “In this environment, studies consistently find that 10-20% of law enforcement calls involve a mental health issue.”

The report recommends shifting the responsibility for dealing with mentally ill individuals to professionals in that field, and away from police, as well as an overhaul in the way the police killing data is collected, to ensure mental health issues are captured. It also suggests that lawmakers consider the “taxpayer savings that result from providing treatment that reduces criminal justice involvement”, along with treatment cost when making funding decisions.”

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AG: Drug dealers should face murder charges

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20151209/NEWS03/151209175

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