Police Shootings in New York, Colorado, and Mississippi Raise Alarm Over Calls for Help That Turn Deadly

• Christian Glass, Corey Maurice McCarty Hughes, and Daniel K. McAlpin were killed this year by police called to help them.
• Each seemed to be having a mental health crisis and either called 911 themselves or family called to help them.
• Officers killed those they were called to help in at least 178 cases over 3 years, The Washington Post found.

Christian Glass, Corey Maurice McCarty Hughes, and Daniel K. McAlpin, men who each appeared to be experiencing mental health crises, are among those who have been killed this year by police called to help them — their deaths illustrating alarming instances of requests for police assistance turned deadly.

Earlier this month in New York, mental health specialists were dispatched with state troopers as part of the Ulster County Mobile Mental Health crisis team to help McAlpin in his home.

The despondent McAlpin, a resident of Wawarsing, refused to drop a knife he was holding, though reports do not indicate he had threatened anyone with the weapon. While it’s unclear what prompted the escalation, officers tased McAlpin and tried to arrest him, at which point he advanced toward officers and was shot, ABC News 10 reported. The New York Attorney General is investigating his death.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Hughes, who needed regular treatment for paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, was killed in July by officers who had been called by his parents to transport him to a psychiatric facility — something they had safely done about 16 times before, Mississippi Today reported.

Department officials said Hughes struck one of the responding officers with a “blunt object” before being shot. The circumstances surrounding his death are currently being reviewed by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations.

In Colorado, the June shooting death of 22-year-old Glass is similarly under investigation, with his family calling for charges to be filed against the officers — who were supposed to be there to help.

Lethal calls for help

In at least 178 cases over three years, law enforcement killed the individuals whom they were called to assist, according to an analysis of fatal police shootings by The Washington Post.

In multiple cases, like those of Glass, Hughes, and McAlpin, the individuals were likely experiencing mental health crises and either called 911 themselves or loved ones called in attempts to help them. Some were holding or brandishing weapons at officers — or what appeared to police to be weapons — but police policy experts told Insider such cases should not have called for lethal force, especially when officers knew they were responding to potential mental health calls.

Bodycam footage recently released by lawyers representing the Glass family has prompted an investigation of the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Department by the District Attorney after video showed officers repeatedly escalating the interaction with the 22-year-old.

Bodycam footage has not been released to the public in the cases of Hughes and McAlpin.

“He trusted the police to come help him. Instead, they attacked and killed him,” Simon Glass said during a press conference about the death of his son. “The killer shot Christian five times just to make sure.”

Glass made a paranoid, rambling call to 911 after he’d had a minor crash and his car became stuck on the side of a mountain road in Colorado. When officers arrived, advised by the operator that he may be experiencing a mental health crisis, Glass refused to exit his vehicle, saying he was “terrified.”

“He said he was scared — the first thing you do when people say they’re scared is not do other things to make them more scared,” Dr. Joel Dvoskin, a clinical and forensic psychologist who creates and assists with law enforcement trainings, told Insider.

After nearly 70 minutes of trying to coax the amateur geologist from his car — despite a Colorado Patrol officer saying “no crime” had been committed and the patrol should move on — officers made the decision to break the passenger side window to remove Glass. At which point, the hysterical 22-year-old grabbed one of his short rock knives, brandishing it at officers and appearing to cut himself.

Officers then fired bean bag projectiles at Glass and tased him. All the while, Glass screamed and made no effort to exit the vehicle. Ultimately, after he swung at an officer trying to remove him from the car, Glass was shot five times and killed by an officer identified as Clear Creek County Sheriff Deputy Andrew Buen.

Deputy Buen is currently being sued over an excessive force incident that occurred in 2019, in which the officer was accused of choking and kneeling on a man, HuffPost reported. Manuel Camacho, who survived the interaction with Buen, despite fears he might suffocate, also alleged in his suit that the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Department failed to properly train the deputies involved in the incident.

 

Rathod | Mohamedbhai LLC

Retired LAPD Sergeant Robert Grant III told Insider the incident commander on the scene “exhibited poor scene management,” and called the shooting “questionable,” but acknowledged officers had taken their time assessing the situation.

In the bodycam video, officers can be heard saying they cannot remain on the scene and it is “time to move the night on,” prompting their decision not to leave, but to break his window.

“A person with a knife in a car would not appear to pose any danger to any people, and shooting someone to prevent suicide is illogical,” Dvoskin told Insider. “So what about doing nothing?”

Dvoskin was not the only expert who suggested officers should have done nothing or waited Glass out instead of trying to break the window as he posed no threat at the time. Stanley Kephart, a retired police chief and expert in police best practices, told Insider that with Glass locked in his car, the scene in Colorado was “static” and offered plenty of opportunity to find a way to call his family and have a mental health officer respond.

“Officers sometimes fail to use resources they know or they should know they have available to them, but responsibility for the end outcome is assigned to the officer who fired and their supervisor,” Kephart told Insider, adding that the incident “does not meet the standard of care with law enforcement officer’s training.”

No place to escalate

The cases illustrate the trend of police officers not only being more frequently relied on as first responders for mental health crises — issues for which they are not usually adequately trained or equipped — but the escalatory practices of standard policing.

Dvoskin told Insider the “command voice” most officers are trained to begin civilian interactions with is “counterproductive” at best, especially in calls where someone might be experiencing a crisis.

“In police training they tell cadets to use a command voice — I don’t know who made that up, but it’s stupid,” Dvoskin said. “Training should say ‘you always start with please and thank you and if you have to escalate, then escalate,’ but if you start at the top there’s no place to escalate.”

In Glass’ case, Dvoskin said, there were also missed opportunities for one of the other six officers to step in to prevent continued escalation and potentially save the man’s life.

“The errors were simple but important and tragic — they should have considered the option of doing nothing,” Dvoskin said. “But more than anything it was a failure to be an active bystander.”

Abigail Tucker, a psychologist who along with Dvoskin co-founded Heroes Intervene, an active bystander training program for first responders, told Insider that law enforcement culture maintains a hierarchy where officers are not empowered to interrupt when they see each other acting inappropriately or escalating civilian interactions.

The key to shifting law enforcement response and encouraging officers to stand up to one another, she said, is to train an alternative mindset that sees intervention as protecting one another.

“We’re really trying to flip the concept of loyalty and say ‘if my job as your peer officer is to have your back, I want to make sure I have your back in all situations, and that includes if I see you making mistakes,'” Tucker told Insider, adding that it individual departments must develop a “culture that says ‘I’m gonna make sure that you’re not going to make a mistake that could cost you your career, or could cost you your life, or could cost somebody else’s life.'”

‘An aggressive bully is always going to be an aggressive bully’

For the Glass family, while training may be part of the equation that could have saved their son, they believe there is a larger problem with policing that contributes to aggressive interactions with civilians.

“Police talk about training, but really training is not enough,” Sally Glass said at a press conference about the death of her son, adding there are “too many bad apples” in the police force: “It’s in the recruitment. You know an aggressive bully is always going to be an aggressive bully. And I don’t know how you can train that characteristic out.”

Deputy Buen returned to patrol two days after shooting and killing Christian. Sally and her husband consider their son’s death to be a murder and are seeking charges against him and the other officers at the scene, alleging a systemic failure by the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Department to protect him.

“We have to pray for us in America to make this a less violent country,” Sally Glass said. “I think a lot of people now would agree that there’s a systemic problem with policing. It’s too aggressive; they escalate at every opportunity… Pray for our son, pray for a structural change in policing in this country so these killings and beatings of the public stop. They should be protecting us, not attacking us.”