Police and the mentally ill: Wrongly prepared?

When police officers encounter mentally ill people on duty, violence often occurs. After several deadly incidents, the question arises: is something wrong with police training?

At the beginning of May, a video published on social networks made headlines nationwide. It shows a police officer punching a man who is lying on the ground in the face. The 47-year-old lost consciousness during the operation and later died in hospital. Whether the beating was partly responsible for the man’s death is still being investigated. But what happened?

A doctor from the Central Institute for Mental Health, a facility for people with mental illness, had called the police. A patient in the outpatient practice apparently needed help. Two police officers discovered the mentally ill man in downtown Mannheim. What happened next is still unclear to this day. The published videos do not show whether the man attacked the officials. Two eyewitnesses tell that SWR independently of each other that the police officers tried to hold the man down, who broke free and ran away. The police officers followed the man, who was apparently in a mental state of emergency, and used force to stop him.

Actually trained

The use of the police in Mannheim shows a fundamental problem in dealing with mentally ill people, says the criminologist and police scientist Thomas Feltes. Police officers are actually trained in dealing with mentally ill people to have a de-escalating effect, but this training can sometimes go back several years or even decades.

“That’s why they try, especially in situations like in Mannheim, where people are standing around, to bring the situation to an end as quickly as possible, that is, to fix and arrest the person as quickly as possible. And this sometimes results in excessive violence,” says Feltes was rector of the Police College in Baden-Württemberg for ten years.

Another video from Mannheim shows the officers apparently using pepper spray to stop the confused man. For the criminologist Feltes, the use of pepper spray is a fundamental mistake when dealing with people in an exceptional psychological situation. This would make people even more aggressive or react, panic and try to flee. Police scientist Martin Thüne from the Thuringian University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration also says that pepper spray usually causes the situation to escalate further.

Mannheim is not an isolated case

In 2013, a case in Berlin made headlines nationwide. At that time, near Alexanderplatz, a police officer shot and killed a schizophrenic man who was armed with a knife. In Bremen in 2020, a mentally ill 54-year-old died from police bullets after pulling a knife out of his pocket.

Also in Emmendingen near Freiburg, a mentally ill man was killed by a police officer with three shots. An employee of a rehabilitation facility called the police there in 2017 because a patient had apparently behaved loudly and aggressively. He also carried a knife. When the man approached the two police officers with it, one of them shot.

investigative process set up

From the point of view of the victim’s brother, the officials should have de-escalated. Roland Beyer says his brother didn’t understand the police officer’s instructions that he should put the knife away and lie down on the ground: “And that’s how pepper spray was used – and my brother was even more trapped felt driven – and then the shots were fired.” The public prosecutor’s office in Freiburg closed the investigation against the officials. They acted in self-defense.

According to Feltes, three quarters of the victims killed by police in recent years were mentally ill. An estimate, because there are no official statistics. But the experts agree: With better education and training, most of the deaths could be prevented. The state association of the German Society for Social Psychiatry in Baden-Württemberg is also calling for a rethink after the incident in Mannheim.

State chairman Klaus Obert says there must be more practice-oriented training for patrol officers – and this must be repeated regularly. The Baden-Württemberg state association of relatives of mentally ill people also shared this SWR said it was urgently necessary for contact with mentally ill people to become an integral part of police officer training.

Regular workouts

The state police chief of Baden-Württemberg, Stefanie Hinz, rejects the criticism of police training. She says that there is regular training and that is why she sees no acute deficits in training: “Our colleagues have to complete regular deployment training and dealing with people with mental and behavioral problems is a regular part of this training.”

On request, the interior ministries of all federal states shared this SWR informed that there are explicit units for dealing with the mentally ill in the training plans of all police schools. However, there is no mandatory further training for officers who are already active in patrol duty in any federal state.