The fine line: Mental illness and crime

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By LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star

Jimmy Burke walked down the middle of 27th Street, trying to flag down passing cars for help.

When that didn’t work, he rang a stranger’s doorbell in the quiet Country Club neighborhood.

It was 2:45 on a cold winter morning, and Burke’s ringing was frantic. Then he twisted the locked front doorknob, and the woman inside grabbed her cell phone and called 911.

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Jimmy Burke has struggled with mental illness most of his life. "I'm kind of in my own little pursuit of happiness," Burke says, referring to one of his favorite movies. The 36-year-old illustrates the problem of how police should handle custody of people with mental illness. (William Lauer)

Jimmy Burke has struggled with mental illness most of his life. "I'm kind of in my own little pursuit of happiness," Burke says, referring to one of his favorite movies. The 36-year-old illustrates the problem of how police should handle custody of people with mental illness. (William Lauer)

That was Jan. 20.

Six months later, Burke is on probation for three misdemeanor charges that resulted from his brush with police who went out on the 911 call, and he’s frustrated.

The incident shouldn’t have led to charges at all, he said.

“I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes. I was ill,” Burke said.

Diagnosed with manic depression, Tourette syndrome, generalized anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, he was in the middle of a manic episode.

The night before, he tried to report himself as a missing person and went to two Lincoln hospitals trying to get help. By the time he pounded on the woman’s door, he said, he was “major manic” and desperate for help.

Lincoln Police Officer Jesse Hilger testified at Burke’s trial on April 19 that Burke dragged him out of his cruiser in the center of 27th Street.

But Hilger and the other officer who tried to get Burke into their car that night determined he wasn’t a danger to himself or others.

“Where’d the transition happen?” Burke asked last week. “Six months later, it still bothers me.”

He was either dangerous or he wasn’t, he said. Police shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.

Some say police and jails are dealing with more mentally ill people today than they did in decades past, because it’s harder to get someone committed to state hospitals, which have fewer beds than they used to.

Some say we’ve just gotten better at identifying mental illness.

The Lincoln Police Department spent 2,372 hours — roughly equal to 1½ officers’ total hours for a year — dealing with calls on mental issues in 2006. Some of those cases resulted in arrests, like Burke’s.

Assistant Police Chief Jim Peschong, who has been with LPD since 1975, said the calls always have been part of the job, but for whatever reason, there are more now.

Police work with people “until there are certain thresholds that you just can’t ignore,” he said.

Sometimes a situation reaches a point at which police have to do something because a crime has been committed, Peschong said.

And, he said, some mentally ill people know what buttons they need to push if they can’t otherwise get services in a crisis.

“I think that there is this fine line. And it’s a fine gray line,” Peschong said. “What does it take to wind up saying that this is really a mental health issue as opposed to this person truly committing a crime?”

Last year, dispatchers sent Lincoln police to more than 1,800 calls — on average five per day — involving mental health investigations or suicides. And they’re not quick calls. Officers spend an average of two hours on each.

“The reality of it is we carry guns and Tasers and pepper spray and things like that for crises — and when things are really bad, that’s what we are for,” he said.

But dealing with someone in crisis who needs medication or a counselor is just not in officers’ skill sets, Peschong said.

“We’ll be the first ones to admit that.”

Officers do get some training, and soon they may get more.

Dan Jackson, interim executive director of the Nebraska chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, said two Lincoln police captains are set to go to a Crisis Intervention Training in Omaha this fall.

“In my mind that’s a huge step forward,” he said. “Police and the court systems want a better way to respond to this.”

Jackson said the Douglas County Sheriff Office plans to send 10 percent of its force to the training. Omaha police are taking it, too.

“It gives them tools they don’t get in the academy,” he said.

Not yet anyway.

Jackson said the Nebraska Law Enforcement Training Center in Grand Island soon may make it an official part of training for new officers in Nebraska.

“We’re hopeful that this will spread throughout the state,” he said.

Right now in Lincoln, Peschong said, police are trained to assess a situation and decide if someone needs to go to a crisis center.

“Because we wind up dealing with so many of these … it’s really more of a procedural thing,” he said. “What does the law say? Is the person a threat to themselves or others?”

If an officer deems someone not to be a threat, Peschong said, options are limited. Officers might call a counselor if they know a person has been seeing one.

If they have probable cause to believe someone is mentally ill and dangerous, police can take a person into emergency protective custody to be evaluated.

In Lincoln, that means a trip to the Crisis Center at BryanLGH Medical Center West, where a mental health professional does an evaluation within 36 hours and forwards treatment recommendations to the county attorney, who can seek a commitment or not.

Scott Etherton, program manager of the Crisis Center, said when the center’s 15 beds are full, the hospital takes the overflow.

Some months they’ve begun at least half the days full, he said.

During the past fiscal year, Etherton said, about 400 people were admitted by law enforcement in Lancaster County — the majority from Lincoln police.

Peschong said police used to spend hours trying to find somewhere to take a person in crisis. He said that’s more rare today, but it’s still frustrating when some consider a mental health crisis law enforcement’s problem.

“It really doesn’t do any good for them to be sitting in the back of a police cruiser, either. And jails aren’t really equipped to wind up handling people in mental health crisis situation,” he said.

But that’s where a good percentage of them land.

According to a report issued by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2006, an estimated 64 percent of jail inmates had a history of mental problems or exhibited symptoms of one.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Law Professor Robert Schopp said people should be wary of the numbers. Who is defining “mentally ill?” he asked. What does it mean?

But mentally ill people do end up behind bars, he said, and it’s putting a strain on jails and prisons.

Schopp said a national shift in treatment is behind the trend.

In the 1960s, when people with mental illness committed relatively minor crimes, police picked them up, took them to the hospital and admitted them. Period.

It doesn’t work that way today.

“The more we close down the (mental) hospitals and the more we made it more difficult to commit people over the last 40 to 50 years, the more we have, whether we intended to or not, opted to shift those people into the criminal justice system.”

The question becomes how to most effectively deal with certain people. Schopp said it’s not good to shift seriously impaired people into jails because they can’t get into the mental health system. But it’s not good for it to be easy to commit people, either.

“We’ve got a balancing act there that we don’t necessarily balance very well,” he said.

Jimmy Burke’s trial on disturbing the peace, refusing to comply and hindering arrest played out in a Lancaster County courtroom three months after his arrest on that cold January night.

The Lincoln woman awakened by his desperate ringing at her door told the judge she knew something was wrong with the man outside. She said she opened her second-floor window, looked down and asked him what he was doing.

He was lost, he told her. He didn’t want to hurt her, he just wanted to come in. He needed help.

Help was on the way, she said.

Burke had wandered a mile from his Tierra Park apartment. Now it was dark and cold, and he didn’t know how to get home.

When police arrived, he demanded they take him home or to jail. But the officers told him he could walk home — it was a straight shot. If he didn’t leave, they said they told him, they’d arrest him.

Burke threatened to break all of the home’s windows or drive himself home in the police car. Police finally told Burke he was under arrest.

Good, he said. But he wanted to ride in the front.

The woman who called police said she could hear him getting louder.

“No, no, no. I will not get in the car. No, no,” she could hear him say.

He yelled for help, yelled between cussing and screaming that they were hurting him.

What happened next depends upon whom you ask.

Burke says police kicked the tar out of him for no reason.

Police say they tried wrist locks,  pressure point strikes to his head and knee and neck restraint to get the 6-foot-1, 350-pound man into the cruiser.

What’s clear is there was a struggle that ended with Burke headed for the Lancaster County Jail.

Brenda Fisher, an intake specialist at the jail, said it’s no different in Lincoln than anywhere else in the United States: The jail is seeing more mentally ill inmates.

It also spends more on medication for them, and staff members ask the jail’s consulting psychiatrist to do more evaluations, she said.

Last month, 238 of the jail’s average daily population of 492 took some type of medication, Fisher said. Of that 238, 98 received psychiatric meds other than antidepressants.

“It’s not uncommon for us to see someone who very easily clears the mental illness hurdle, but they’re not giving any evidence of dangerousness,” Fisher said.

The jail trains uniformed officers to recognize signs and symptoms of a major mental illness and to parse out what might be brought on by drug use. Those who book people into jail get especially good at it, she said.

“Very few people are happy to come through the door,” she said. “But how upset, how anxious, how angry are they? Are they having obvious problems coping? That’s what staff are looking for.”

Inmates with severe mental illness may have more trouble adjusting to jail in general, she said, but the most challenging inmate is one who comes in at a psychotic level, delusional and hearing voices.

“You have to provide a different kind of environment for that type of individual primarily for their own protection,” Fisher said.

They have special-needs housing at the jail for that reason.

And in 2003, the jail got a grant to divert people who have a major mental illness but can work with a case manager to resources in the community, she said.

In part, the mental health jail diversion program was begun to alleviate overcrowding by taking a different approach — one that could result in community supervision and support, help would-be inmates take care of their legal situations and address underlying issues that may be driving the behavior that led to their arrests, Fisher said.

“Mental illness is something that this correctional facility is very well aware of,” she said. “It’s not the case that someone comes here and they just sort of languish. There’s an effort made to the very best of our ability to get them linked up to support in the community so that hopefully they don’t return to custody.”

The key, Fisher said, is adequate community resources.

Lincoln has a lot of them, she said, but it also has intense needs, and there’s always room for more help. She hopes one day the net of services is wide enough to help those who aren’t a huge risk to public safety.

“My hope is that we’ll see a time come where those type of individuals are not brought into custody, but (are) provided a different kind of service,” she said.

Either way, Fisher said, there likely always will be a segment of a jail or prison population with mental illness.

Lancaster County Court Judge James Foster told Jimmy Burke  he believed he was having problems the night he was arrested, but that Burke still committed the crimes.

On June 1, Foster sentenced him to six months on probation.

“I want you to take care of yourself,” he said at the sentencing.

And Burke, a 35-year-old who has struggled with mental illness since he was growing up in Texas, is back on his meds, taking classes at Doane College and beginning a new job. He’s on a state advisory committee on mental health services and wants to work in Christian mental health advocacy one day.

“I really do feel optimistic, but I can’t do it alone,” he said at his apartment last week. “I feel like I walk a little bit of a tightrope.”

Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.