Lisa Fernandez
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Despite a police supervisor’s earlier statements to the contrary, the San Jose Police Department has a written policy to automatically send specially trained officers to calls when it is “known or suspected’’ that a mentally ill person is involved in a disturbance.
Police officials clarified their policy this week following a front-page article in the Mercury News on Sunday that quoted a police department supervisor who said dispatchers don’t automatically send out Crisis Intervention Team, or CIT, officers when mentally ill people are threatening to harm others or themselves.
But the department’s new statements raised some additional questions about the May 10 fatal shooting of Daniel Pham, a mentally ill man who had sliced his brother’s neck with a knife and was killed by two police officers after he refused to drop his weapon.
A CIT officer was not sent to Pham’s house that day, even though the person who called police said she thought Pham was mentally ill. However, San Jose police wouldn’t say whether they failed to follow their own policy on dispatching a CIT officer in this instance, explaining they could not comment because Pham’s family has filed a wrongful death claim.
“The situation was dynamic and evolving and violent,’' Assistant Police Chief Daniel Katz told the Mercury News this week. “A CIT officer wouldn’t have made a difference.’'
San Jose police this week provided the Mercury News an officer duty manual which states: “It is the policy of the San Jose Police Department to utilize the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) officers to respond to calls for service involving known or suspect mentally ill individuals when circumstances are appropriate.’'
It is difficult to assess whether the department’s real-world practice regularly follows the duty manual protocol, because, the department no longer tracks or keeps records of when CIT officers are called out.
In the story last Sunday, the Mercury News quoted Sgt. Teresa Jeglum, the department’s CIT trainer, as saying there is no automatic trigger to send out CIT officers because of a “staffing shortage.’' After the story ran, Jeglum later told department spokesman Sgt. Ronnie Lopez that she misinterpreted the reporter’s question, and doesn’t recall exactly what answer she gave.
Lopez said there is no staffing shortage; roughly 25 percent of the department’s force is CIT-trained, which mimics industry standards. CIT officers receive 40 hours of training and learn to recognize mental illness and techniques to defuse volatile situations. About 0.5 percent of the department’s annual 430,000 calls for service involve mental illness.
No one disputes that the frantic call regarding Pham’s attack on his brother was far from clear.
On transcripts provided for the first time earlier this month, the brother’s girlfriend who first called 911 answered, “I don’t know. I think so,’' when the 911 call-taker asked if the attacker was mentally ill. A dispatcher also quickly learned that there had been a previous “5150,’' or mental illness at the Branbury Way home.
But there was confusion because the caller used Pham’s Vietnamese name of “Son,” while the dispatcher records showed the past disturbance had been for “Daniel.’' The transcripts also show that Pham’s brother, Brian, told police that Daniel was high on drugs. In a separate interview with the Mercury News, Brian Pham said he stood on the front lawn begging officers not to shoot his brother because he was mentally ill.
Pham’s father, Vinh Pham, also has told the Mercury News he did not know the formal diagnosis of his son, but said Daniel acted paranoid, at times, and had been taken for psychiatric help three times before by police. Vinh Pham said his son had stopped taking his lithium for some time before May 10.
Lopez still insisted that the information provided that day wasn’t enough to prompt dispatchers to “start a CIT officer’’ because: “We did not know that this call was specifically related to a mental illness. Officers thought they were responding to a straight-up assault with a deadly weapon.’'
Simply seeing a “5150'’ on a computer screen isn’t enough to call out a CIT officer, Lopez said. It’s common, he said, for 911 dispatchers to find previous mental disturbance records at specific addresses, but it often turns out that the person with the mental illness has moved away.
Katz, the assistant chief, acknowledged that the “I think so’’ comment “could” have pushed the call into a “suspected” mental disturbance call. He wouldn’t comment on whether the CIT protocol was followed, citing the pending wrongful death claim the Pham family filed Oct. 30 against the city. But Katz did say: “I feel comfortable they handled the call appropriately.’'
The claim alleges that the officers “negligently and carelessly failed to follow generally accepted police practices.’' A grand jury in October did not indict either of the officers.
Katz said it’s also important to note how fast everything was taking place. Just 2ï¿1/2 minutes elapsed from the time the caller said, “I don’t know. I think so,” to officers arriving, and then another two minutes before Pham was killed.
There is also a question of what the call taker heard that day. Police won’t allow the call taker to be interviewed, citing the Phams’ claim, and they won’t say if they’ve discussed the matter with that person.
But Communications Division Manager Cameron Smith said he recently listened to a recording of the 911 call several times and heard “I don’t think so’’ in response to the question “Is he mentally ill?’' It wasn’t until Smith saw the written transcript that said “I don’t know. I think so’’ that he realized his mistake. If a call taker suspects that someone is mentally ill, Smith said, it’s typical to ask follow-up questions about specific diagnoses and medication. In this case, the transcript shows the call taker jumped directly to another line of questioning: Where was the girlfriend located in the house?
Lopez cautioned that a lot was happening all at the same time that day.
“Now, we have the luxury of time to analyze this,’' Lopez said. “But we don’t have Tivo and we can’t press pause. We managed to do the best of our ability at the time.’'
Copyright 2009 San Jose Mercury News