Police Killing The Mentally Ill: A Third Of The People Killed By Cincinnati Police Were Mentally Disabled

Out of the 18 people killed by Cincinnati police since 2010, at least six had been diagnosed with mental disabilities, a local report said Thursday.

Officers attribute the statistic to lenient policies for purchasing guns, claiming that sufficient background checks would prevent the mentally ill from acquiring lethal weapons that often lead to fatal confrontations with police.

Roger Ramundo, who had been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and anxiety, was shot and killed in July 2013 at the age of 32 after he had refused to take medicine and roamed the streets with his handgun. Ramundo’s mother called 911 to warn officers that Ramundo told her that there would be “a bloodbath” if anyone attempted to take him to a mental hospital. Police initially tasered Ramundo at a local bar on a night he had been drinking heavily, but then proceeded to shoot and kill him after Ramundo took out a handgun and fired a shot.

"These people are roaming the streets of our city unmedicated and unsupervised and in many cases they are armed as well," former Cincinnati Police Union President Keith Fangman, told local reporters.

Roughly 25 percent of the 462 people who had killed by police in the first six months in 2015 were “in the throes of a mental or emotional crisis,” the Washington Post reported in June 2015. And least 50 of those 124 mentally ill people in the report that were killed were explicitly suicidal. More than half of those killings were performed by city police agencies that hadn't provided its officers with training specifically deigned for dealing with people who were mentally disabled.

Police departments throughout the country have been criticized for their response to situations involving mentally ill people, as many confrontations turn fatal instead of officers using peaceful means.

After a Justice Department report was released last week denouncing officers of the Chicago Police Force for their use of excessive "force against people in mental health crisis where force might have been avoided," the department announced Monday it would be implementing a training course that would teach officers how to identify and respond to those diagnosed with mental illnesses.

Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said the department’s goal was to have 35 percent of its officers to complete the course by the end of the year. The course, designed by experts on mental health, entails officers talking to mannequins and actors in order to recognize the symptoms of someone who might be mentally disabled, while also instructing them on the protocol to appropriately respond without violence.

There were 1,091 killings by police throughout the country in 2016, 258 of which were mentally ill, according to a Guardian report.