Tough calls

Two years ago, when my brother in Michigan stopped taking his meds and relapsed, I had to decide if I was going to call the police and request a wellness check from two states away. I hadn’t heard from him in almost a day, and while the break from the frightening verbal abuse that accompanies his particular breakdowns was welcome, I was also increasingly worried. He’d attempted suicide during relapses before, he owned over a dozen guns, and he was alone.

In the end, I didn’t call: I was terrified of the cops showing up and shooting him. I was terrified of him shooting someone else. He needed someone who could reach the bowels of paranoia and hallucination he’d gone to, and de-escalate what could be a dangerous situation, but this “someone” didn’t exist.

From 2019-2021, police responded to calls requesting wellness checks, reporting suicide threats, or generally asking for help for someone in a mental health by shooting and killing at least 178 of the “very people they were called on to assist,” according to a June 2022 report from the Washington Post. A recent investigation by the Invisible Institute’s Kelsey Turner on police use of force and involuntary commitment in mental health cases noted, “people with serious mental illness experience police use of force at 11.6 times the rate of those without mental illness.”

That January night two years ago, gripping my phone in my sweating palm, it wasn’t the statistics on death and arrest that haunted me—it was the stories. A sister in Pennsylvania called the police after her brother, who was schizophrenic and bipolar, punched a car and tried to break into her home. “He needs help,” she said, and requested that they take her brother to a hospital. Instead, officers shot Ricardo Muñoz four times.

In Colorado, a man received delusional texts from his depressed, combat veteran brother 800 miles away in Texas. He didn’t trust the police to check on him without violence, so instead, he called the Red Cross. But the Red Cross called the police, who shot Damian Daniels twice in the chest.

One Sunday morning in Detroit, a man made a 5 AM phone call. His brother, who had a long history of mental illness, was in crisis: “He’s frantic and he has a knife. I’m concerned for people,” he said. Shortly after their arrival, five officers fired 38 rounds in three seconds, killing Porter Burke.

“If anyone out there has a family member or a loved one (in crisis), help them yourself,” Burke’s aunt, Michele Wilson, told reporters. “Don’t call 911; they might not make it.”

Just like those who do not have mental illness, some people with mental illness occasionally behave violently; most do not. To flatten and diminish people with mental illness into “criminal” or “non-criminal,” as the CPD still does, is to steal from them their humanity, in all its complexity, nuance, and possibility for change. In crisis, my brother has been violent toward family members before. I have no idea what part of that is his responsibility and what isn’t. I don’t know what burgeons up from his paranoia and despair. All I know is I don’t want him dead.

In the end, I bluffed my brother, and it worked. After 18 hours of unanswered messages and calls, I texted an ultimatum and a deadline: let me know you’re still alive by noon, or I’m calling the cops. “[I’m] fucking fine don’t fucking call the police,” he texted back, and there I had it: proof of life. I didn’t call for the wellness check.

Our loved one’s death or forced removal from our community are the risks we take, us lovers and roommates, siblings and parents, of the seriously mentally ill, if we call for “help.” But we need help, desperately.

Last Thursday, I sat in my friend J’s tent with him and a woman who kept up a constant, low murmur of conversation with someone only she could see. She smoked crack out of a broken pipe as she talked; several hospital patient bracelets circled her wrist.

J was frustrated and worried. He’d met the woman, who I’ll call S, the day before, wandering the South Loop barefoot, her eyes wide and straining. Having been in a psych ward a few times himself, after asking S her name, her age, and where she was from, J had asked her if she’d been given any psych meds at the hospital. S said yes. “Are you taking them now?” J asked. “No,” she said, then “ultrasound,” and raised her sweatshirt to reveal her pale, pregnant belly.

S followed him as he walked, across a busy city highway and right into his tent. He gave her his cot and slept on the ground. Today, in an effort to keep her safe, J was sticking by her side, but this vigilance came at the expense of his own well-being. If J couldn’t leave the tent, he wasn’t panhandling, which meant he wasn’t managing his own addiction or eating any food.

I asked S if there was anyone I could call for her: she said no. Texting with a Night Ministry outreach worker, I asked her if I could take her picture to share with him; she said no. The outreach worker, hustling my messages to the right people, replied that the evening outreach team would try to make contact with S at J’s tent between 4 and 6 PM. It was 2 PM. Because neither J nor S had a phone or a watch with which to track time, S’s best bet was to stay put. Out of options, I gave everyone clean pipes and multiple Big Macs.

J came with me on the McDonald’s run. “Don’t go through my stuff again,” he admonished S as we left, “and if you go outside, put on your shoes.” The area he stays in, full of rose bushes gone wild, is a shooting gallery, a secluded outdoor spot where people go to inject drugs in relative safety. Forced to operate swiftly and with no city sanitation support, drug users discard their needles on the ground, and J was worried S would get poked.

At the McDonald’s, he vented. “I don’t know what to do, man,” he said. “I want to help take care of her, but I don’t know how long she should stay.” In the end, there was nothing more he could do: when he woke up early Friday morning, S was gone.

J’s dilemma was different from the one I had faced with my brother—S was a stranger to him, and as an unhoused person who uses drugs, J risked his own freedom and safety if he called the police—but ultimately the outcome was the same: there was no one he could call for immediate help who wouldn’t send a police officer.

Various efforts to bring people other than cops to mental health crises have advanced around the country: crisis-intervention programs have rolled out in recent years in Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, and California. A Denver initiative that began sending mental health specialists instead of police to crises in 2020 has even been correlated with a decrease in low-level crime.

In July, the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline debuted, offering an alternative to calling 911. An analysis by WBEZ and MindSite News noted that most Illinois calls still go to out-of-state call centers, which can reduce responders’ familiarity with local resources available to callers.

Last year, Chicago started a program dubbed Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE), which sends a team comprising a paramedic, a mental health clinician, and a police officer to 911 calls involving mental health crises. Still in its pilot phase, CARE operates in select areas of the city, and only between 10:30 AM and 4 PM on weekdays.

The police department also has “Crisis Intervention Team officers,” police who have attended 40 hours of training in “the signs and symptoms of mental illness” and “how to interact, intervene, and de-escalate situations with persons in crisis.” 911 callers can specifically request a CIT officer. But they’re still cops, and still bring guns to mental health crises. In addition, according to the Policy Surveillance Program, police officers can initiate involuntary commitments in 28 states, including Illinois.

Our loved one’s death or forced removal from our community are the risks we take, us lovers and roommates, siblings and parents, of the seriously mentally ill, if we call for “help.” But we need help, desperately. For decades, my family has tried to provide my brother with the kind of care and first response our society won’t. If our love and labor alone could keep him safe and well, it would’ve worked already. Instead, it’s quite literally making us sick.

Love might be unconditional, but our own relationships and jobs, our own safety, the health of our own minds and bodies, have their limits. I understand why people make that call, despite knowing who it will summon and the potential violence those called will bring. I, too, have held my phone in my hand, weighing options that offer too few choices—and too many risks.

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