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Over A Third Of People Shot At By LAPD In 2015 Were Mentally Ill
LAPD (Photo by steve lyon via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
Today the LAPD released a 300-page report that lays out the many ways that it has used forced against civilians from 2011 until 2015. The troubling statistic that popped out of the report is that 14 out of 38 shootings from 2015 involved the mentally ill. Compare that to 2014 when 5 out of the 26 people shot by police were considered mentally ill.
"We did see a troubling increase with mental illness," said LAPD Capt. Greg McManus during his presentation covered by KPCC. "That's an increase we are looking at."
The report itself glosses over these numbers and says that "the augmented training on deescalation of force and mental illness were significant avenues of success for the Department and its employees."
Here are some more statistics on the 38 people shot by police last year:
21 were killed
36 were men
22 were Hispanic, 8 were black, 5 were white, 2 were Asian/Pacific Islander
3 had no gun, though police believed they did (a "perception shooting")
19 were carrying a gun
5 fired at officers
12 had a gun in hand
13 were armed with something other than a gun
20 were between 30 and 39 years old
Officers were, on average, 46.3 feet away, when they fired (compared to 121.6 feet last year)
One high-profile 2015 LAPD shooting included a bipolar man shot in an ER room. The department has continued to be dogged by criticism over the 2014 shooting death of Ezell Ford, an unarmed, mentally ill man. The shooting was ruled justified.
The report has all sorts of statistics about these shootings, including the time of day, the day of the week and a breakdown by division. The report also delves into officer-involved shootings that weren't hits, other uses of force outside guns, as well as deaths and injuries in custody.
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At today's commission meeting where the report was unveiled, Black Lives Matter showed up to protest the anniversary of another high-profile LAPD shooting death: Charley Leundeu Keunang was shot on Skid Row a year ago in an incident caught on video.
Black lives matter stop Lapd police commission meeting in protest over skid row shooting pic.twitter.com/IDdrrPhgge
— Annie Gilbertson (@AnnieGilbertson) March 1, 2016
The Los Angeles Times says the police commission also plans to review another upcoming report on use-of-force that spans 10 years. Assistant Chief Michel Moore told the Times, "There's things that I'm sure we're going to discover in this report; others will raise questions that we'll not have answers to that will cause us to dig deeper and to look further. At the end of the day, the instances in which we use force ... is extremely rare. But at the same time, each incident is one too many if it can be avoided."
Related:
Police In Los Angeles County Kill About 1 Person Every Week
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