I've seen mental-health calls to police from both sides. More training is needed.

Too often in America, calling police for help with someone undergoing a mental-health crisis is like playing Russian Roulette.

If you’re lucky, the responding officers will have good intentions, a background in crisis intervention training and some non-lethal tools that can help resolve an episode without deadly force.

But in too many instances the opposite happens, and someone dies.

That's what happened in Philadelphia, where two officers answering a family’s call for help fatally shot a Black man who refused their repeated commands to drop a knife. The victim, Walter Wallace Jr., suffered from mental illness and, according to relatives, was undergoing a crisis when he was shot.

Roughly 1 in 4 people shot and killed by police in 2016 had a mental illness, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, which analyzed information from a Washington Post database tracking fatal shootings by officers. And a 2015 report by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found that police recruits typically spend just eight hours in crisis intervention training.

...

You can read the full article on the USA Today’s web site here.