Shooting of mentally ill man raises policing questions

Officers with the agency's mental crisis unit, trained in de-escalation techniques, went to Barre's house three times in the days before their final encounter on June 9.

Fearing for the customers' safety, the deputies and a Tulsa police officer who had arrived as backup opened fire, killing him as he tried to enter the store.

Beyond the dismally familiar questions about racial bias in policing, Barre's death shows how mental health issues challenge even veteran law enforcers who are trained in de-escalation techniques.

Four deputies detailed to the mental crisis unit receive special training in de-escalation, suicide prevention and handling combative people.

[...] Friday, Green said, none of the pickups resulted in a death.

About one out of every four people killed in officer-involved shootings has a serious mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a Virginia-based nonprofit that has trained police in crisis intervention in roughly 2,700 communities since the late 1980s.

Barre struggled for years with the hallucinations and dramatic mood swings of bipolar schizoaffective disorder, and had been committed four times for treatment at Tulsa mental health hospitals, according to his mother, Etta Barre.