Oklahoma leads nation in rate of police shootings

Oklahoma police kill people at a higher rate than officers in any other state, according to two new reports that tally how many lives law enforcement have taken since the beginning of 2015.

Police are on course to kill nearly 1,000 people in the U.S. this year, according to data compilations by The Guardian, which counts 465, and The Washington Post, which records 385. The Post’s analysis looked only at shooting deaths, and The Guardian included deaths involving stun guns, speeding vehicles and asphyxiation.

Both accounts single out Oklahoma as the state with the highest rate of such killings: 4.4 per million people in the first five months of this year. It is trailed by Arizona, with 3.6. Most other states have about 1 or 2 per million residents.

In its count of 22 deaths for Oklahoma, The Guardian records some as happening at the end of high-speed car chases or after suspects fired at or attacked officers.

But in other cases, mentally ill people died after their family members called for help — deaths that the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma says officers could avoid with better training.

“One of the biggest issues in Oklahoma is that we see a lot of departments with very little training and experience in dealing with folks with mental health issues or who are under the influence of substances,” said Brady Henderson, the legal director for ACLU Oklahoma. 

Emotionally disturbed people can sometimes be violent or angry, but their behavior rarely stems from willful criminality, he said.

“Dealing with someone like that can be dangerous, but if officers are properly trained and the community has the right resources, there’s no reason someone should die in that situation,” he added.

Officers think in terms of threats, Henderson said, and not knowing how to respond to situations involving the mentally ill can put police on edge, with potentially lethal results.

In April 2015, police shot dead 83-year-old Richard “Buddy” Weaver in Oklahoma City after he allegedly stood on a street swinging a machete. Officers said they fired at him after he charged at them. The man’s neighbors reported that he suffered from mental problems.

In a similar situation in 2014, officers shot and killed 18-year-old Mah-hi-vist “Red Bird” Goodblanket, who was smashing windows in his parents’ home after becoming convinced his girlfriend was leaving him. The young man struggled with mental health issues for years.

His father, Wilbur Goodblanket, told NewsOK, “He just wanted help … They didn’t try to talk to him. They came in our home and shot him.”

With better training in how to approach people like Weaver and Goodblanket, police could have avoided using deadly force, Henderson said.

Joe Giacalone, a professor of criminology at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, told Al Jazeera that these situations can be very dangerous but that they don’t have to end in bloodshed.

“The No. 1 rule in handling an emotionally disturbed person is that you have to isolate and contain them,” said Giacalone, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department. “And as long as they don’t pose any threat to anyone else or the police, then you can take all the time you want to negotiate.”

Henderson and Giacalone stressed that officers need to find out as much as they can about the disturbed person before attempting to negotiate a situation.

“There really should be some written hostage negotiation techniques,” Giacalone said about police forces in the U.S.

Oklahoma does not have any standardized system for teaching police how to safely confront mentally ill individuals, according to Henderson.

Authorities in Oklahoma declined to comment on the number of police-involved deaths but did not dispute the numbers.

“I’m not going to speculate on why there are so many,” said Jessica Brown, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

Brown referred Al Jazeera to the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, which conducts courses for police, but the agency did not return a request for comment.

Henderson said training is only a short-term solution. He said investing in social services could help prevent people from putting themselves in dangerous positions in the first place.  

“Every shooting is avoidable somewhere down the line,” he said.