Metzl: Police Need to Be ‘More Sensitive’ to Mental Illness and ‘Inherent Racism’

HARRIS-PERRY: "Joining us is the director at the center for medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt university and research director for the save Tennessee project. I thought of you immediately when I heard there had been a shooting of a civilian whose family called the police, in this case, not because there was fear, but, rather, there was a need for assistance and the young man is shot and killed by the police." 
MCDONALD: "Absolutely, that’s right. This tragic situation just yet again proves the myth that we hear in the aftermath of many shootings, which is people with mental illness are threats that, you know, we need to go take away all the guns from the people with mental illness. In fact, in the real world, people are mental illness are far, far more likely to be the victims of shootings by police or increasingly by armed civilians. The reason that’s the case is because in moments of tense encounter, people fall back on stereotypes. Stereotypes of race, of class, but also of mental illness, and they misperceive symptoms of mental illness as threats. One example would be in Albuquerque where untrained police officers not only unduly shot people but the victims were people with mental illness. I worry, again, what’s going to happen as we increasingly ask armed civilians to kind of intervene in conflicts. I think we’re setting ourselves up for more of this. The last point about this, I think we learn in the history of these shootings, in Albuquerque and Chicago and other places, it’s not just enough to train officers to understand mental illness. That mental illness stigma intercepts with a bunch of other stigmas. There’s race, there’s not enough handgun training. If we’re really going to intervene in this particular problem, we need to not only address training officers to be more sensitive to symptoms of mental illness but also inherent other issues."