Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore disclosed Tuesday that nearly one-third of shootings by city officers in 2021 involved a person the department perceived to be struggling with mental illness—an increase of 21% over this point in 2020.
The trend matches a citywide surge in overall LAPD-involved shootings. Officers have fired their guns 31 times so far in 2021, up nearly a quarter from this time last year.
L.A. city police resources are stretched thin. Department records show the agency has roughly 300 open positions and nearly 500 less officers on patrol than it did in August 2020.
In June, the L.A. Police Commission revealed response times for LAPD mental-health units remained “extremely slow.” It regularly “would take hours” for the specially-trained unit to respond to relevant calls, said Commissioner William Briggs.
Lagging response times may be a symptom of a surge in calls directly to the department’s Mental Health Evaluation Unit (MEU). The unit fielded 9,725 calls in 2020, the largest number of mental-health response requests in at least three years.
That number grew even as the LAPD scaled back the number of specialized units it could deploy in a single day—from 17 to 13. The cut reportedly stemmed from officers quitting or requesting transfers to other teams, not budgetary restrictions.
At a public meeting in June, MEU officers speculated their unit should be responding to significantly more calls than those that have actually been routed to them—up to 13,000 such calls, the department estimated.
At least 20% of police calls for service involve a mental health or substance use crisis, the American Psychological Association estimates.
“The demand means that these resources are not always available to the officers in the field,” said MEU commander Capt. Chris Waters.
By the end of summer, 59 officers and 27 clinicians from L.A. County’s Department of Mental Health comprised the MEU’s staff. The unit hopes to grow each unit by another 25%.
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