Abstract

According to the Washington Post’s 2015 data documenting fatal police shootings, at least one fourth of people murdered by police in the United States had a mental illness. This percentage has remained the same in 2016 and 2017. Their public database of police brutality cases analyzed trends of race, gender, location, age, and signs of mental illness. However, there are many questions left unanswered. Since police are the first responders to all mental health crises under the term “welfare check” or “wellness check”, how many of these cases were prompted by a welfare check? Are these mandatory police “checks” on wellness a correlative to civilian death? How many of these individuals killed by police were suicidal? And for those who were suicidal, is there evidence that these fatal interactions were Suicide by Cop? This content analysis consists of news reports for 256 cases of fatal police shootings of mentally ill civilians in 2015. There were over 600 articles analyzed for the themes Suicidality, Suicide by Cop, Welfare Check, and Physical Threat. The data shows that over half of the 256 individuals killed were suicidal, nearly 43% of the cases had evidence for suicide by cop, and roughly 44% of all interactions were prompted by a welfare check. Race was found to be a key factor in these cases. The race of the civilian victim was found to be a crucial factor in the distribution of these statistics. These findings suggest the need for continued research on suicide by cop and the intersection of race, mental illness, and police use of force as well as an intervention for first responder policies and procedure.

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