Enabling Police Abuse of Disabled Persons

[From article]
The problem was that Mr. Boyd, 38, had a history of mental illness, and so was living in a different reality, one in which he was a federal agent and not someone to be bossed around.
“Don’t attempt to give me, the Department of Defense, another directive,” he told the officers. A short while later, the police shot and killed him, saying he had pulled out two knives and threatened their lives.
[. . .]
focused attention on the growing number of people with severe mental disorders who, in the absence of adequate mental health services, are coming in contact with the criminal justice system, sometimes with deadly consequences.
[. . .]
police officers find themselves playing dual roles as law enforcers and psychiatric social workers. County jails and state prisons have become de facto mental institutions;
[. . .]
“I think that this issue hits every city, every part of the country where you have people who are walking on the street who normally would have been under some kind of treatment or institutionalized,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum,
[. . .]
Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist and the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group in Arlington, Va., that promotes access to mental health care,
[. . .]
But officers can sometimes make a crisis worse, either out of fear or in a reflexive effort to control the situation and enforce compliance.
[. . .]
the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriff’s Association, based on informal studies and accounts, estimated that half the number of people shot and killed by the police have mental health problems.
[. . .]
According to a report by the New Mexico Public Defender Department, which offers free legal services to indigent clients, nearly 75 percent of those shot in 2010 and 2011 suffered from mental illness.
[. . .]
About 6 percent of the population, or one in 17 Americans, suffer from a serious mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Studies suggest that the mentally ill are involved in only about 4 percent of violent crimes. But when untreated, severe mental illness is associated with higher rate of violence, researchers have found.
[. . .]
“It’s like if we stopped treating heart disease until people had heart attacks,” said Ronald S. Honberg, director of policy and legal affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

After many years of institutionalized abuses of disabled persons, The New York Times quotes two persons who are economically embedded in the psychiatric industry and drug corporations. (By FERNANDA SANTOS and ERICA GOODE, "Police Confront Rising Number of Mentally Ill Suspects," New York Times, APRIL 1, 2014) Torrey promotes forced drug treatment and portrays disabled persons as dangerous and violent. NAMI gets $11 million each year from drug companies to promote drug treatment. Neither of these lobbyists speak for the rights of troubled persons who are often described by police as diseases. This article shows that disabled persons are being killed by police without accountability. It indicates that Times' editors ignore abuses of vulnerable persons and treat them as patients and prisoners, a problem for control instead of protecting their rights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/police-shootings-of-mentally-ill-suspects-are-on-the-upswing.html?hp&_r=1

Police Confront Rising Number of Mentally Ill Suspects
By FERNANDA SANTOS and ERICA GOODE

APRIL 1, 2014

New York Times