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The San Gabriel Valley Tribune and  
The Pasadena Star Tribune (CA)

June 13, 2002

Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

OPINION EDITORIAL
Pass AB 1421: Promote treatment, don't mandate tragedy

by police chiefs Bernard K. Melekian and Joseph Santoro 

We keep adding names to the California Peace Officers' Memorial.

Fresno County Sheriff's Deputies Dennis Phelps, 47, and Erik Telen, 26, are the latest two Fresno law enforcement officers to die in the line of duty.

Both allegedly were killed by people with severe mental illness, neither of whom, predictably, were taking medication.

Deputy Phelps didn't have to die. It was his second week as a patrol officer, and what should have been a routine traffic stop ended with his brutal murder. Mark Charles Volpa Jr., 21, is said to have shot him in the face and killed him, afterwards taking his badge, handgun, police radio, and cruiser.

Deputy Phelps won't be the last: California's archaic treatment laws prevent people from getting help until they either present a danger to themselves or others or are virtually comatose.

It is common sense. When a person becomes dangerous enough to meet the standard to get help, they are dangerous enough for a tragedy to happen. Law enforcement officers across the state are being forced into situations of conflict with people who are extremely sick. And this is bad for everyone.

In Volpa's case, his lack of treatment led him not only to kill a deputy, but to spark a full-scale manhunt, purportedly shoot at a police helicopter, and hold law enforcement officers at bay in a final four-hour standoff that ended in his death.

Two people died unnecessarily because one was not receiving treatment, and two families are bearing grief they didn't have to bear.

If Assembly Bill 1421 - approved by the Assembly 65-1 but not yet past the State Senate - had been law a few weeks ago, Deputy Phelps would be alive and Mark Charles Volpa would today be on medication for his manic depression.

Volpa's family reported that he was released from a psychiatric ward two weeks before the shooting because he was "no longer a danger to himself." With a long history of problems and suicide attempts, Volpa obviously needed help. But under current California law, unless Volpa or someone like him is obviously dangerous or chooses help, there is nothing anyone can do.

If someone has a heart attack, paramedics do not refuse treatment until that person can rationally request treatment. If someone with Alzheimer's wanders away in the middle of a cold night without shoes, nursing home workers do not wait for that person to ask to be taken back inside where it is warm.

It is society's job to help those who cannot help themselves. Nobody knows this better than law enforcement officers. And nobody knows more than we do the dangers of facing down a person who has had a psychotic break, who is not rational, who may believe we are aliens or that we mean them harm.

AB 1421 would make available to counties an intensive and supervised court-ordered treatment program that for many would mean stability and recovery. The standard of eligibility for the program would encompass not just those who are dangerous, but also those who had been rendered incapable of making rational treatment decisions, people no doubt like Mark Charles Volpa.

As we grieve for our lost officers and their families and friends, we also realize that people like Mark Charles Volpa and those with severe mental illnesses are also memorialized and grieved by their family and friends because of a law that allows severe mental illnesses to go unchecked.

The void in our system often results in police officers becoming armed social workers. This frequently results in violent confrontation with law enforcement officers where both police officers and severely mentally ill people are injured or killed. Estimates show this type of preventable tragedy occurs four times more often than similar tragedies in the general population.

There is no memorial to the approximately 15 percent of people with severe mental illnesses who commit suicide because of lack of treatment.

We don't carve into marble the names of the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 inmates in California's jails and prisons with severe mental illness (L.A. County jail is de-facto the nation's largest psychiatric hospital), many of whom, though still living, have lost their lives to treatable illnesses.

And we have no monument dedicated to the one-third of the homeless population who live and die on our streets in a world of state-sanctioned delusion.

Let's remove the need for any memorials and make sure we don't add any more names to the police memorials that already exist.

Let's change the law so that it promotes treatment instead of mandating tragedy. We urge our legislators to end this cycle of madness by passing AB 1421.

Bernard K. Melekian is chief of police for the Pasadena Police Department; Joseph Santoro is chief of police for the Monrovia Police Department.

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