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Schoolyard Shooting Tragedy Spurs Plan to Provide Experts : County to Assist Police With Mentally Ill

"The Police Department in the past has been in the position where we did not know what to do or where to take people (who appeared to be mentally ill)," Jones said. "It was totally frustrating for us, as well as dangerous for the community.

"This will give us a better chance of spotting the Tyrone Mitchells beforehand and preventing some of them," said Cmdr. James Jones, who represents the Police Department on the multi-agency committee that devised the plan.

The plan would also provide for more extensive training of police officers in how to recognize the mentally ill and keep encounters with them from turning violent, and familiarize them with services that are available around the clock to assist with mentally ill offenders.

Under the proposal, the Los Angeles County Mental Health Department would assign mental health experts to the city's busiest police stations to help officers identify and handle the mentally ill, and the Police Department would beef up its one-man mental evaluation unit to 11 members, including a psychologist, and computerize its antiquated card-file system of keeping track of mentally ill offenders.

"Now we'll have a method to bring that person to the attention of the mental health system, hopefully before some kind of violence occurs. We won't catch all of them, but it we can prevent just one incident like the school shooting. . . . "

Showed Signs of Trouble

Even before the shootings, Tyrone Mitchell had a history of bizarre, threatening behavior, and was known by friends and relatives to keep an arsenal of weapons in his home. He was not being treated for mental illness at the time of his attack, though county officials had declared him "unemployable" five years earlier because of an "anxiety neurosis" characterized by excessive fear or dread.

Police had been called to the Mitchell home several times in the years before the shooting, in response to reports from relatives and neighbors that Mitchell was threatening them or firing weapons into the air at passing airplanes. But Mitchell was prosecuted only once--for firing a gun into the air--and spent only four days in jail.

In fact, just two months before the schoolyard shooting, police responding to a "family-dispute" call confiscated a shotgun from Mitchell but had to return it to him in February when his uncle refused to press charges. Three weeks later, the same shotgun was found with two other weapons beside Mitchell's lifeless body in the second-floor room from which he fired his deadly fusillade.

Prevention Possible

Under the proposed new system, still in its preliminary planning stages, police officers trained to recognize symptoms of mental illness could have arrested Mitchell and brought him in to be evaluated by their station's mental health expert, or the department's mental evaluation team.

If he were deemed violent, Mitchell could have been committed to a psychiatric institution for examination and treatment, or channeled to a community-based treatment program for help if his mental problems were not considered severe.

"We're trying to find a way to divert people that would be more appropriately treated by mental health away from the criminal justice system," Jones said. "People come to our attention all the time and we wind up booking them and putting them in jail, when the root causes of their action are psychiatric.

"Putting them in the criminal justice system is not going to prevent their anti-social behavior. Psychiatric treatment might."

Approval Required

The proposal still needs the approval of all the agencies on the task force, Jones said, adding that it would cost about $600,000 to fully implement the program.

Funding would be sought by the Police Department through a budget increase that would have to be approved by the Police Commission and the City Council.

The county would pay for the services of mental health experts through state funding, budget increases or cuts in other programs, a county spokesman said.