From Olathe to NY subway, seriously mentally ill people keep dying of our indifference | Opinion

Bodycam footage of an Olathe police officer fatally shooting 27-year-old Brandon Lynch in his home on New Year’s Eve shows the man with a badge and a gun barking orders at the man with schizophrenia in a full-blown mental health crisis.

For a few seconds, the officer uses a soft tone with him: “We need to sort out what’s going on. Come here.” But when Lynch closes his bedroom door and yells at the officers to get out, the officer opens the door again, sees that Lynch has a stun gun and starts screaming at him that he’s under arrest.

At one point, Lynch tells him to go ahead and shoot, and throughout the exchange, he begs police to leave him alone. “What did I do? I didn’t do anything,” he tells the officers. “I just want to f--ing clean.”

The final seconds of the video take place in the living room, where there’s a Christmas tree. Lynch, who is holding a small butterfly knife, starts walking toward the officers with his arms at his side, again saying, “Get out of my house.” We hear three shots and the video fades to black, along with the young man’s life.

The whole encounter lasted only a couple of minutes. Police were called there by Lynch’s sister, who was locked in her room and had told them he’d attacked her and that she was bleeding from the mouth. Lynch, it’s true, was armed.

So maybe, as Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe announced this week, the shooting was justified under Kansas law. Maybe, as Howe said, the officer “properly used deadly force,” though I did not see him properly or even improperly use any deescalation techniques.

This just keeps happening, in any case, because our mostly theoretical mental health system is not set up to keep it from happening.

Where do you turn for help for a loved one in serious trouble? Even with insurance, waiting lists for inpatient care are long and care itself is sparse.

That’s true all over the country. But in Kansas, the situation is even worse than in most other places because the Republicans in Topeka haven’t expanded Medicaid.

We blame the ill, along with those who love them most

We talk a lot about mental illness, but don’t care enough to fund its treatment, leaving families on their own, with predictable results.

Then, when a person in crisis is killed, we pretend that no other outcome was possible and blame the person who died, along with those who loved him most.

I’ve written a lot about the seriously mentally ill over the years, and have not seen attitudes change all that much. At the beginning of my working life, in Texas, my editor joked nervously every time I visited the Terrell State Hospital that I should be careful not to catch anything weird while I was out there. (And no, it wasn’t even funny the first time.)

The homeless mentally ill folks I spent a lot of time with in California this last year are in general treated by the public like they should have the good taste to disappear, and life on the street is so dangerous that they often do, too.

I do dare to hope for better from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court concept, which will force at least some of those too ill to know they need help into treatment, not for the usual 72-hour hold, which has no chance of helping anyone, but for up to two years. He’s taking on his own allies by pushing for this, since the ACLU and the disability lobby want to protect the sacred right of even the most severely ill people to refuse treatment. Spend any time at all on the street, though, and you’ll see that those pushing their carts around in circles yelling at no one have along since been stripped by their disease of the ability to know what they’re rejecting.

It’s a combination of fear, hatred and indifference that keeps us from intervening, and then excusing whatever horror happens to them. When I wrote critically about the former Marine who held homeless mentally ill Jordan Neely in a choke hold for almost three minutes on the F train, I got some of the most hateful mail I’ve ever received, and that’s saying something.

Daniel Penny, the man who killed Neely on the New York subway, should be knighted for his “chivalry,” said one. Neely “was insane!’’ said another, and so had to be put down. Many others said that since Neely had a history of punching and threatening people, Penny deserved medals and more. This on-the-spot application of the death penalty was heroic, they said, and my disagreement made me “a piece of garbage.” One letter was so antisemitic I reported it to the FBI.

As someone who rode the New York subway every day for five years at the height of the crack epidemic, when the city was much more dangerous than it is now, I do understand why people are nervous. Maybe six weeks ago, a mentally ill woman in Sacramento started hitting me out of nowhere, and I was rattled by that, not even so much for what was happening as because I didn’t know what was going to happen next.

But to see others practically celebrate the death of a man who, scary or not, did not have to die, scares me a lot more than those suffering from the cruel disease of schizophrenia do.

I don’t see Olathe cops as celebrating Lynch’s death, but if better treatment options had been available, those officers would have been much less likely ever to find themselves in his living room.

And the truth is that seriously mentally ill will keep dying unnecessarily as long as we — lawmakers, but also we who elect and influence them — don’t care enough to keep them alive.