Police failure on mental health put Kansas cop who killed teen in impossible position

If ever there were a case for rethinking how police in this country interact with people in emotional or mental crisis, the fatal 2018 police shooting of 17-year-old John Albers in Overland Park is it.

Albers was suicidal when he was shot and killed by an officer during an encounter that lasted about 30 seconds. But that doesn’t mean his death was in any way inevitable.

According to the report that should have been released years ago but only came out last week, Overland Park officers knew exactly what kind of call they were answering. Albers’ friends had called police and asked for a wellness check.

They told the 911 operator that he was home alone, chugging vodka, taking pills, “stabbing himself” and saying he wanted to die. “There’s blood,” the dispatcher said over the police radio.

“This kid has run from us before,” one Overland Park officer says over the police radio as he, in his cruiser, approaches the Albers’ home. He explains that Albers had wrestled with police on an earlier, unrelated occasion, and had bragged about fighting with them.

So when officers rolled up to the Johnson County subdivision where Albers lived with his parents, they knew all of that and more. That the department sent them in unprepared to deal with such a crisis was not only fatal to Albers and awful for his family and friends but monstrously unfair to the officer who shot him, Clayton Jenison.

His clear lack of the right kind of training adds up to negligence on the part of his police department. Yet what happened in Overland Park in January of 2018 happens often around the country.

Had a mental health expert been on the scene with police that evening, it might have changed the course of events that ended with an officer firing his pistol 13 times, striking Albers with six bullets in the arm, torso and head as the young man backed the family’s silver 2012 Honda Odyssey minivan out of the garage.

We can’t know, of course, what would have happened if Jenison had jumped out of the way and let Albers drive away. But we do know that we have to do everything possible to keep from letting this tragedy play out over and over.

Too many encounters turn deadly

Jenison would later say he went to the Albers home not to harm the teen, but to help him. But he ended up making a bad situation worse. And imagine the feelings of the friends who, trying to help, called 911 for a wellness check.

The teen’s mother, Sheila Albers, has called the report “victim blaming.” But whatever Albers had done as he struggled with mental illness does not mean he had to be shot 13 times, or at all.

Albers had spiraled out of control that day, beginning with an earlier arrest for shoplifting. He was released to his dad. His last text, we don’t know to whom because that was redacted in reports, was sent just minutes before he backed out of the garage. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past,’’ he said, quoting the prophet Isaiah.

His struggle had begun years earlier, and had been documented in police and mental health reports starting in 2015. There were multiple police-involved incidents in 2016 — domestic battery, intoxication, drug possession and the theft of his dad’s car.

While the current debate on policing in America largely relates to police use of deadly force when arresting Black and brown people, also at issue for years has been the high number of deadly police encounters that involve people with mental health issues.

Last July, Ky Johnson was shot and killed by a Kansas City police officer after Johnson shot another officer in the head. Officers had responded to a call about a man with his pants falling off screaming incomprehensibly and waving a gun at a McDonald’s at 31st Street and Van Brunt Avenue. He too, was in a mental health crisis, his family said.

‘I didn’t want to do it’

A white paper published by the National Library of Medicine details the need for a new kind of cop, one specially trained in mental health crisis intervention, because 1 in 10 police contacts is with people suffering from serious mental illnesses. Way back in 2013, a National Institutes of Health study concluded that officers trained in crisis intervention were less likely to use force when encountering individuals who, like Albers, are in the middle of an emotional or mental health episode.

So why does this keep happening?

Did officer Clayton Jenison truly have to shoot the young Albers as he backed toward him out of the family garage, then turned sharply in the street to do it again?

Jenison has probably asked himself that any number of times. It’s impossible not to feel for him while watching a wrenching 10-plus minutes of his dashcam footage. As the teen lay dying, Jenison is heard sobbing uncontrollably and lamenting that he repeatedly ordered the driver to stop. “I thought he was going to run me over, man,” he says. And “I didn’t want to do it!”

Law enforcement agencies absolutely must hire more mental health experts and train officers for situations like this.

As a result of the Albers tragedy, Overland Park has expanded its “co-responder” force of mental health experts to three, and has increased crisis intervention and de-escalation training.

Soon, the city’s mental health task force, created after Albers’ death, will recommend creating an entire mental health unit of the police department, of some 17 officers, to provide 24/7 mental health assistance to officers responding to mental health crises. The proposal was considered last summer, but didn’t pass.

To protect those in crisis from those sent out to help them, that’s got to change.