This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by phone at 988, or online at https://988lifeline.org/.A directory of mental health providers in Jefferson County is available at mentalhealthlou.com.Louis ville Metro Police officers’ killing of 28-year-old Katelyn Hall has advocates and family members questioning the city’s response to people in mental health crises.Police and EMS responded the night of March 27 when Hall, a biracial woman, was suicidal and harming herself. They fatally shot her after she came out of an apartment bathroom, holding a broken piece of porcelain. While the city has a 911 deflection program, which can provide a non-police response for mental health calls, the team at MetroSafe decided the situation didn’t qualify. Now, city leaders are reassessing whether to send out both a mental health professional and an officer in higher-risk situations.At a rally over the weekend, advocates and mental health professionals demanded justice for Hall. Shaun Spencer, a community leader, read a statement on behalf of Hall’s grandmother, Sandra Fields.“[Katelyn] needed compassion. She needed patience. She needed trained support,” she said. “Instead, what she received cost her her life.”Fields wrote that if Hall’s life is to mean more than this tragedy, it has to lead to better training and a better response.Other speakers likewise questioned if the city’s response program is the best it can do.LMPD officials, for their part, called Hall’s killing “heartbreaking” and said it wasn’t the outcome that the officers or the department wanted. They said they were open to changes to the response program.Officials did, however, appear to justify the shooting. At a press conference last week, Deputy Chief Emily McKinley said the situation that night could have been “extremely lethal.”LPM News reviewed the body camera footage and compared it to the police department’s existing policies for how officers should handle a person in crisis. We also spoke to experts and advocates about what alternative approaches could prevent another shooting like this from happening again.The basics of what body camera footage showsJust before 8 p.m. on March 27, LMPD officers and other first responders were dispatched to an apartment after Hall’s cousin called 911 and said she was seriously hurting herself.Hall had locked herself in the bathroom. The first official on scene, Officer Robert Baker, spoke to Hall and received anguished, agitated responses. Hall’s family at the apartment told him she might have possession of broken glass. Baker quickly radioed in to ask if any nearby police could bring less-lethal tools. A few minutes later, other first responders arrived. They decided to break the lock on the bathroom door, and Baker assigned roles for how they’d manage the possible use of force.“I’ll be hands, can you have less-lethal out, and can you be lethal?” Baker said to other officers in the room. As they broke the lock, one turned on a Taser.Then officers tried to pry the door open. First responders heard the sound, audible on the tape, of something breaking inside the bathroom. Hall shouted, “I will kill anyone who tries to save me.”Officers talked about waiting for backup. A firefighter offered to break the door off the hinges, and another officer – not Baker – agreed. Right after the firefighter popped the hinges and backed away, Hall opened the broken door, holding a jagged piece of porcelain. Police say it was 8 to 12 inches long and they believe she broke it off from the toilet.“Alright hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, hey, hey,” Baker called to her.She took a couple steps forward, and he and another officer – identified by LMPD as Robert Gabbard, who police say walked in as they broke the hinges – shot her. Seven shots are audible.Then, police say, first responders provided emergency medical aid. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.Examining police attempts to de-escalate the crisisThe ensuing public debate concerns whether officers could have used de-escalation tactics more effectively and avoided a fatal confrontation with Hall.LMPD’s Standard Operating Procedures are like a rulebook for police action. One section gives guidance on how officers should deal with “a person of diminished capacity,” which includes people like Hall when they’re suicidal and behaving in “irrational, bizarre, or unpredictable” ways.In a mental health emergency, LMPD policy “strongly” encourages officers to “create distance, wait for appropriate backup, exhaust de-escalation tactics, and consider disengagement.”LMPD policies say the first officer on-scene – Baker, in this case – should wait until another officer arrives before talking to the person. Baker did speak to Hall before others arrived.The policies also say only one officer should directly talk to the person, although they may need to switch to a new designated speaker. Footage shows Baker and another officer both talked to Hall at different points, trying to get her to let them help her.The rulebook says officers should be non-threatening, use open-ended questions when possible and avoid “sharp, authoritative commands.”Baker’s efforts to de-escalate included asking Hall, “What’s going on with you? Can you talk to me? You got people out here worried about you.”He and the other officer who spoke to Hall asked how they could help her. At one point, Baker asked, “Can you unlock the door, sweetheart?” She screamed back “no,” after which they broke the lock.Laquisha Moore is a trauma-focused, licensed professional clinical counselor and is best friends with Hall’s aunt. With de-escalation, things like pitch, tone and modulation matter, she said. So does patience.Moore said she doesn’t think police communicated “clear and simple choices” to Hall, and she was concerned by how Baker shouted when she came out of the bathroom.She also said it seems like officers “closed in on her instead of creating space. And I don't know if that has to do with the way the environment was set up.”The part of the bedroom that’s visible on the footage appears cramped, with items strewn around and multiple first responders in the space.“They are trained to prioritize control and safety and rapid decision-making and stuff like that,” she said of police. “They prioritize compliance over de-escalation.”All LMPD officers get 40 hours of Crisis Intervention Team training as recruits, said LMPD Deputy Chief Emily McKinley at a press conference Friday. Some later do advanced training.McKinley indicated a fatal outcome like this is rare. She said police responded to 3,200 crisis intervention calls last year. Less than 3% resulted in officers using any type of force, she said, and less than 1% involved injuries to anyone.Deciding whether to use force, and how muchLMPD policy says every use of force “must be objectively reasonable as viewed from the perspective of a reasonable officer on-scene.”In mental health emergencies, police should use force only if there’s “an imminent threat of harm to the person, or others, and force is reasonably necessary to mitigate” it.Deadly force isn’t permitted if the person in crisis is only a threat to themselves. But police officials say the situation changed when Hall came out of the bathroom.“She was holding the [piece of broken] porcelain at shoulder level. The officer was probably the distance from me to you, about three to five feet,” McKinley, the deputy chief, told a reporter at Friday’s press conference. “She absolutely could injure – seriously injure or kill – the officers.”Could police have stopped her with something other than a gun?LMPD officers are only supposed to use deadly force if “other reasonable uses of force and de-escalation techniques have been exhausted or would clearly be ineffective.”Body camera footage shows officers discussing less extreme force. Baker asked if nearby police could bring other tools, and he later designated one person with a Taser to potentially use less-lethal force before they broke the door’s lock.McKinley said all patrol officers carry a few less-lethal tools: A Taser, pepper spray and an expandable baton. Some officers also have bean-bag shotguns.In response to Hall’s death, she said LMPD wants to ensure bean-bag shotguns are “evenly allocated throughout our patrol divisions.”Ultimately, the only type of force anyone used on Hall was deadly.Moore, the counselor and friend of Hall’s aunt, said officers need a better understanding of how a person’s mental health affects their behavior.“They don't have a good discernment about that. Because if they did, they would not have saw her as a threat,” she said.“And I know that they didn't know her. And so maybe there is some bias on my end, because I know her when she's not in crisis, ” she also said. “But it's like, basically, they weren't able to recognize her behavior as a symptom, instead of defiance.”At Friday’s press conference, McKinley said officers are taught a decision-making model, prioritizing who’s at the most immediate risk, to “help them process tense and uncertain and rapidly evolving situations.”McKinley said courts consider several factors in cases where police use force during a medical emergency, like: Was the person in crisis incapable of rational decisions? Were they an immediate threat of serious harm to themself or others? Was the force police used reasonably necessary to reduce that threat?Reporters at the press conference asked about officers’ decision making on-scene and if officers could’ve taken her down with a tackle or a Taser. McKinley said LMPD’s multi-layer investigations will examine that.Jeffrey Coots, director of From Punishment to Public Health at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said trained mental health professionals, generally, are equipped to handle situations where someone is suicidal and hurting themselves.Counselors can’t take a door off its hinges and they don’t have a gun.“All they have is their dialogue, and they're very adept at using it,” Coots said.He said it’s common for local officials to decide police alone should respond to crises like Hall’s. “Like, ‘We're the ones who carry weapons so we respond to violence,’” he said of the argument.But when communities invest resources in deploying mental health professionals alongside officers, and trust with the police department grows, they show their effectiveness.“And we're not going to have a 100% success rate. But we can minimize these types of incidents if we reconstruct the way that we've organized these systems and put real funding behind it,” Coots said.‘That did not have to happen’Some advocates have questioned not just how officers responded to Hall that night, but the city’s entire system for handling people experiencing a mental health crisis.Lyndon Pryor, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League, said he believes the situation was completely avoidable.“I don't want to go so far as to say that somebody could have absolutely prevented Miss Hall from taking her own life, but we absolutely could have prevented the state taking her life,” he said. “That did not have to happen.”For Pryor, a critical mistake was made at the outset: No trained mental health worker was ever dispatched to the apartment.Louisville’s 911 deflection program operates on an either/or system; either a call is routed to a trained social worker or a police response is provided. MetroSafe dispatchers make that decision based on a set of criteria.If someone is experiencing suicidal thoughts, having a mental breakdown or seeking help for addiction, those are situations where a social worker can respond, speaking to the person over the phone or dispatching a mobile crisis response unit to their location. But if someone is armed, committing a violent crime or has already taken steps to harm themselves or others, the program requires police to respond.Not every alternative 911 response program in the U.S. is like this.For example, Durham, North Carolina’s Community Safety Department has mental health clinicians available over the phone or in-person, like in Louisville.Durham also has a third type of response model, known as a co-response, where a mental health clinician can respond alongside trained officers to crisis calls with a higher safety risk.Gabriela Solis Torres oversees the Alternative Response team at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab.Solis Torres said local governments have traditionally only had three potential answers to a 911 call: send police, the fire department or EMS. That meant they were often sending police to handle mental health, substance use and homelessness, even if officers weren’t trained in those areas.“So, setting up this fourth system really helps us make sure that we’re getting the right response for everyone who calls 911,” she said.Solis Torres said a lot of the calls that local 911 operators field fall into the category of low-risk mental health or quality of life concerns. Deflection programs like Louisville’s are perfect for that.But putting someone on the phone with a social worker or sending an unarmed crisis response team isn’t appropriate for when there’s violence or weapons involved.“It feels like a little bit of a mismatch of, like, ‘Well, why isn’t this team going out on these types of calls?’” Solis Torres said. “I think part of it is like they’re not set up to, essentially, to go on these more riskier calls.”In Durham, Solis Torres said there’s a continuum of options for alternatives to a typical police response.There, a licensed clinician and CIT-trained officer ride together as a team of two in an unmarked police car. The co-response team is available seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., to respond to calls with a higher risk of violence.The co-responder program comes with its own unique set of challenges and considerations, though.There must be clear rules about who takes the lead when on scene, the officer or the social worker. This type of program has also received some pushback from mental health workers, who say the presence of armed police officers can prevent de-escalation.The co-responder model has been on Louisville Metro’s radar for years, but city officials have so far decided not to implement it.The U.S. Department of Justice recommended it as part of its report in 2023 that detailed numerous allegations of LMPD systematically violating residents’ constitutional rights. Information about co-responder programs was also included in a 2022 evaluation of Louisville’s deflection pilot program.Matt Mudd, a spokesperson for Mayor Craig Greenberg, told LPM News in a statement that LMPD and the city’s Office of Behavioral Health are now looking into how it could implement a co-responder program.“This work requires building the right structure, clear protocols, comprehensive training, and appropriate staffing to ensure it is effective from day one,” Mudd said.Mudd said the city is exploring alternatives as part of the Community Commitment, Greenberg’s version of the police reform plan initially proposed by the DOJ.As part of the plan, Louisville Metro and LMPD have agreed to “develop policies, protocols, and training regarding response to calls where both LMPD officers and behavioral health professionals are on the scene.”The Greenberg administration has not provided a timeline for when a co-responder program could be launched, but Mudd said they are “moving with urgency.”Without some changes in the near term, Pryor, with the Louisville Urban League, said the public’s trust in the city’s deflection program will continue to erode.If people aren’t confident that calling 911 is going to help, they simply won’t call. And that, he said, won’t lead to “healthy outcomes” for anyone.“What kind of position are we putting families in where they're like, this person clearly needs help, but I can't trust the people on the other end of a phone line to be able to send the appropriate help?” he said.Pryor said events like the killing of Katelyn Hall are leaving families “in a hopeless predicament.” ...read more read less