MIAMI TOWNSHIP, Ohio — When the Miami Township Police pulled up to the scene of a shooting May 20, Chief Mike Mills said body camera footage of officers’ actions revealed they were hoping for a different outcome. 

They were called to the scene of a woman outside an apartment complex shooting a gun in the air. Footage showed officers attempted to deescalate, asking the woman by name to put the gun down. Instead, she fired at them and the police fired back, striking her twice. The woman later died from her injuries.

According to Mills, officers knew the woman as they had been called to previous mental health emergencies and referred her to treatment. Mills said all the officers who responded Friday have been off duty since.

Similar shootings happen often across the country. The Washington Post database, which has logged every fatal police shooting since 2015, reports in 22% of those cases, the person killed had a documented mental illness. 

The greater Cincinnati area has been working to address this issue for decades, partnering with UC Health’s Mobile Crisis Response Team for nearly 20 years and referring people to mental health services through the calls for service and through the court and jail systems. 

Come July, the city will also pilot a program that dispatches unarmed mental health professionals to non-violent mental health calls. 

Diane Wright, with Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services, has been on both sides of the equation, helping train officers in crisis intervention and managing referrals for service.

“Our hope is that we’re coordinating with those institutions so somebody can get connected to us and have treatment begin,” she said. 

To get a sense of what to expect in the field, Wright said officers from departments across the region will come to the clinic and shadow social workers and other behavioral health personnel as a part of their crisis intervention training. 

“It’s not necessarily what they thought they would be doing, trying to deescalate somebody who’s very upset or talk to somebody who’s suicidal so that can happen more effectively if you can include behavioral health personnel,” she said.

According to Mills, all of his officers at Miami Township have undergone similar mental health crisis and deescalation training.

Linda Gallagher, vice president of mental health and addiction services at the Hamilton County Mental Health and Recovery Board, believes there should be no upper limit on training for mental health, especially because she said those suffering from a mental illness are often those most in need of protection.

“They’re more likely to be the victim of a crime,” she said. “They’re very frequently much more of a danger to themselves than they are to anyone else.”

To support mental services throughout the county, the board funds crisis stabilization services across the region, including the mobile crisis team. Gallagher said the board’s goal is to prevent police emergencies before they happen. 

“People do recover, and they can get treatment and they do recover and lead very productive lives,” she said. 

In the Miami Township shooting, Mills said intervention until that point had been unsuccessful. He said the woman had refused previous referrals to treatment and hadn’t exhibited behavior that would require mandatory admittance to a hospital or mental health facility.

Gallagher said unfortunately that’s a common occurrence with mental health referrals. There is no surefire way to know when a crisis might escalate without intervention and until then it’s the patient’s choice to refuse treatment.

“There’s gonna be times when they don’t think they’re ready or they’re frightened or maybe they feel hopeless,” she said. 

In most cases, Gallagher said the best option is to leave the door open, keep the client engaged and continue to offer access to support and treatment, hoping it will be enough to provide a lifeline in case of a future emergency.

“Ongoing engagement, ongoing support, ongoing reaching out to individuals because one of those times they very well may say yes,” she said.