Rethink Crisis Response

PEOPLE WHO CALL 911 SHOULDN’T GET AN ILL-TRAINED POLICE OFFICER, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY’RE DEALING WITH A MENTAL HEALTH EMERGENCY.

- SALLY SATEL

“‘The only thing we’ve accomplished is becoming the world’s largest incarcerator, sending people with mental health and addiction issues to prison...,’ [NAACP director Robert] Rooks said.”

MIKE RIGGS

“BLACK BEHIND BARS”

NOVEMBER 2011

“PLEASE JUST SEND one police car, please don’t have your weapons drawn, please take him to the hospital.” These are the words that many families with a mentally ill loved one have learned to say when crisis strikes. Sabah Muhammad and her siblings have spoken them several times since 2007, the year her brother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He had been a standout student and star running back at his high school near Atlanta, but everything changed around his 18th birthday. “He would become catatonic, barely moving, just staring into space,” Sabah explains. “Sometimes he locked himself in his room for weeks, refusing food, except to come out of his room at 3 a.m. to make toast that he blackened to carbon ‘to get the poison out.’”

Mute and malnourished, he would not allow family to take him to a psychiatrist—but he desperately needed help. The only option in the Muhammads’ Atlanta jurisdiction was a 911 call to report a psychiatric emergency, which tended to bring the police, multiple squad cars with lights flashing, and the ominous specter of armed agents encountering a young black man in a delusional state. So Sabah and her family would call the police, and pray.