How to stop the police from fatally shooting the mentally ill? The plan seems to be to switch to tasers.

The Philadelphia Police Department has begun issuing Tasers to some officers. Up to a dozen officers who completed a training program are carrying the electrical stun guns. ....

Healy calls the Tasers "just an additional tool." Police also carry pepper spray and batons. Officials hope to have about 160 officers trained in the program by the end of 2008.

There's a history of the Philadelphia police shooting and killing people in the throes of mental breakdown or crisis. While the shootings may be legally justified, they are tragic and potentially avoidable. In 2004, the Christian Science Monitor reported on the issue, highlighting Philadelphia. And in 2007, after the police shot and killed Charles Kelley ("the deranged 26-year-old man lunged at them with a knife, yelling, 'Kill me! Kill me!' - an apparent case, say advocates for the mentally ill, of suicide by cop"), Jill Porter wrote about seven such shootings from the past seven years.

She also reported that Philadelphia was finally responding to requests for a specially-trained 'crisis intervention team' (a model that had worked in Memphis, Tennessee) with a pilot program.

"We spent years meeting with police, being stymied and stonewalled by [former Police Commissioner John Timoney] and everyone else," said Sister Mary Scullion of Project Home. "They did not want to deal with it." ....

The CIT program will be piloted in some of the city's most dangerous streets: the East Police Division, which includes North Philadelphia and Kensington.

About 100 officers will be trained so one of them will be available "no matter what shift, day or night," said Carolyn Ulmer, manager of acute services for the city's Department of Behavioral Health, which has worked with police and other agencies to develop the program.

Last month, 911 operators completed training to help them identify when an emergency call might involve someone who's mentally ill.

If so, a CIT officer would be among those sent to the scene and "take the lead role" in handling the incident, Ulmer said.

If the pilot succeeds, it will be expanded to the rest of the department.

Hopefully this is continuing and will be expanded. Today's AP article about the PPD's adoption of tasers only mentioned a still-limited training effort:

Officials sifted through prison data on inmates who had mental health issues and decided to focus training on de-escalation techniques and tactics in three police districts in North Philadelphia.

Lt. Fran Healy says the specially trained officers will use Tasers as a less than lethal use of force during potentially violent encounters, especially with people in "mental crisis."

Yet the 2004 shooting of Julio Morais shows how persistant is the need for a thorough and widespread training program for the city police:

Julio Morais, 57, was killed by a single shot to the head after he allegedly struggled with officers who had come to his apartment to help social workers commit him to a mental hospital.

Police officials said a member of the department's SWAT team opened fire only after an initial attempt to subdue Morais with an electric stun gun failed, and then only when Morais lunged at the officers with a knife. One officer was slashed in the hand.

Clearly tasers alone can't solve the problem. The Christian Science Monitor reported that basic normal policing strategies may need to be set aside in interacting with mentally ill people:

People on both sides agree these individuals can be as dangerous to the public and police officers as rational criminals. But advocates say different police tactics could greatly reduce the likelihood of violence.

Much of what police officers are trained to do in dealing with rational criminals is dangerously wrong when it comes to the mentally ill, said Ron Honberg, legal director of the National Association for the mentally ill.

"Closing in on someone, sending out a SWAT team - these are prescriptions for disaster," he says. When officers "learn to keep their distance and talk soothingly, it significantly cuts down the chance of escalation."

And de-institutionalization combined with persistant shortage of adequate mental health care raises the likelihood these situations will arise:

[M]ore mentally ill people are on the streets than ever before - 500,000 more today than there were in the 1960s, when it was easier to commit them to institutions, says James Fyfe, deputy commissioner for training with the New York Police Department. Mr. Fyfe says NYPD dispatchers take a call from an emotionally disturbed person, or an EDP in police lingo, every 7.3 minutes.