Death Sentence for Bipolar BIPOC Man
We are nearly ten years down the road, and nothing has changed. In Tulsa, Oklahoma on Oct. 21, 2011, Elliot Williams’ relatives took him to an Owasso hotel “because Elliott had not slept in days and was having psychological issues,” according to the court’s ruling. A breakup with his wife had left Williams despondent and he caused a disturbance in the hotel lobby.
Owasso police responded and the situation escalated. Williams, who relatives said had been diagnosed as bipolar in the military, said he wanted to die and did not comply with officers’ commands to sit down.
Rather than wait for a mobile mental health unit to arrive, Owasso police pepper sprayed Williams and took him to the city jail. Once there, Williams descended further into psychosis, hiding under a bench, taking off his clothes and barking like a dog.
Though inpatient beds are often scarce, Owasso police did not attempt to find a mental health facility that would take Williams. Instead, they decided they couldn’t handle Williams and took him to the Tulsa Jail, booking him in at 1:50 a.m. Oct. 22, 2011.
After more than five days on the concrete floor of his jail cell, Elliott Williams died naked, cold and alone, unable to move.
Hungry and thirsty, Williams screamed for help but couldn’t convince anyone at Tulsa’s David L. Moss Detention Center to help him.
Detention officers at the Tulsa Jail tossed three styrofoam trays of jail food at his feet, but Williams could not retrieve them. Though Williams begged for something to drink, he couldn’t pick up the styrofoam cups of water they placed near him.
One day turned to two, three and four days. On the fifth day, none of the jail’s staff bothered to enter Williams’ cell, Medical Cell #1.
The jail’s medical staff began to wonder if Williams might actually be paralyzed from a broken neck, as he claimed. But those in charge did nothing to find out whether his claims were true.
Instead, they watched him slowly dying on a video camera.
We all know and agree that #BlackLivesMatter, and a Washington Post database confirms that of all the police killings in the U.S. since 2015, 1,500 or roughly 23% were black people. In contrast, about 12% of the U.S. population is black. Clearly this is disproportionate and wrong.
But did you know that same number, roughly 1,500 and 23% of those killed by police were mentally ill? Yet people with a severe mental illness only amount to a little over 4% of the overall population. I am not aware of any data for people like Mr. Williams who was both bipolar and black. That’s just a death sentence, as we saw here.
In my case, I tried to go to a hospital during my first (unmedicated) manic episode. Instead, the police stopped me, beat me up, charged me with trespassing and disorderly conduct, took me to jail, beat me up again, and psychologically tortured me until they could up the ante to felony terrorist threats. But I was lucky. I look white. Therefore I am alive to tell the tale.
While there are several groups of lawyers who fight for the mentally ill’s civil rights, like the ACLU and the Judge Bazelon Center for Mental Health and the Law, and groups of mental health professionals, there was no grassroots organization for bipolar and other mentally ill victims of police brutality to join together as a community seeking to end such state-sponsored violence.
We need to keep the police and mentally ill people separate. Here, in Mr. Williams’ case, the police were waiting for the compassionate mental health response team to arrive, and they couldn’t help beating up Mr. Williams and breaking his neck. That’s why at https://bipolarlivesmatter.org, we advocate for repurposing Dial 311 as the separate dispatch number for mental health crises. Compassionate care teams should be the first to arrive, if the situation is non-violent like my case and Mr. Williams. Police should sit a block away if needed. We also need to get rid of the vagrancy laws that allowed the police to approach me and Mr. Williams in the first place. Training police to be non-violent is great, but they are law enforcers, not mental EMTs. We need mental EMT’s.
#BipolarLivesMatter
