Officer shoots 13-year-old boy with autism after mom calls 911 for help, Utah cops say

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Another story of the risks of involving the police for mental health crises. Sad situation policing is in this country…

When Golda Barton called 911 on Friday for help calming down her 13-year-old son, who is on the autism spectrum, she expected a crisis team to de-escalate the situation.

But when Linden Cameron ran away from police, an officer opened fire, KUTV reported. Barton says her son has injuries to his shoulder, both ankles, intestines and bladder.

“He’s a small child,” Barton said, according to the station. “Why didn’t you just tackle him? He’s a baby. He has mental issues.”

Salt Lake City police said they had been called to a report of a boy having a “mental episode” who had “made threats to some folks with a weapon,” The Salt Lake Tribune reported. No weapon has been found.

Barton says she told officers her son, who had been upset over his mother’s return to work, was not armed. “He just gets mad and he starts yelling and screaming,” she said, KUTV reported. “He doesn’t know how to regulate.”

Mayor Erin Mendenhall of Salt Lake City pledged a swift and transparent investigation in a statement on the 10 p.m. shooting, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

“While the full details of this incident are yet to be released as an investigation takes place, I will say that I am thankful this young boy is alive and no one else was injured,” Mendenhall said, according to the publication.

Nationally, scores of people experiencing mental health crises have been injured or killed by police who had been called for help, The Washington Post reported.

“Police were called because help was needed, but instead more harm was done when officers from the SLPD expected a 13-year-old experiencing a mental health episode to act calmer and (more) collected than adult trained officers,” reads a statement from advocacy group Neurodiverse Utah.
 
The police are often called to schools when there is an unruly child because schools can’t handle him/her. In this case, the mother could not handle him. The police were told.
Salt Lake City Police Sgt. Keith Horrocks told reporters officers were called to the area due to a “violent psych issue” involving a juvenile who was “making threats to some folks with a weapon.”
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The incident is being investigated.
 
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Shoot an unarmed 13 year old, who is running away? That’s hard to justify.
 
Nepperhan said:
Shoot an unarmed 13 year old, who is running away? That’s hard to justify.
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I’ve just been watching the Netflix documentary called LA92 and it had been a while since I’d seen the footage of Rodney King, but it lead me to think, if that wasn’t based on them being racist, how do a group of 10 or twelve armed police not realize how to subdue one person? Could it be that because of the culture of rugged individualism, that even when police are trained in teamwork, they can never actually operate as a team. It goes against the nature of rugged individualism.

In this story, I believe the mother could have gathered together 10 neighborhood women and achieved what the police couldn’t achieve.

Anyway, that thought is something that came up as I watched the Rodney King footage again.
 
Motherwit said:
Could it be that because of the culture of rugged individualism, that even when police are trained in teamwork, they can never actually operate as a team. It goes against the nature of rugged individualism.
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No, working as a team doesn’t go against rugged individualism. Properly done, they work hand in hand. Mehta is opposed to rugged individualism is authoritarian collectivism.
 
This so sad. I’m not surprised that it isn’t getting any attention from the normal police apologists on here. You know that if there was a weapon in their vicinity they would have claimed that they felt threatened.
 
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The police’s job is to catch criminals and subdue threats to the community.

The police’s job is not to “calm down” agitated, mentally ill young people. My first reaction is that there needs to be some other crisis response team that one can call in that situation. However, the first time the mentally ill person hit a crisis responder or otherwise acted violent, the police would probably be called anyway.

I suspect there is a lot more to this story.
 
Opinions with out facts are not good. When the facts are presented, we will know what happened.

If Police did wrong, then the Justice system needs to handle it.
If police did no wrong, then what? Then better training.

I wait to see what happened first. I was not there.
 
What could possibly have occurred that makes shooting a 13 year old with autism justifiable
 
Maybe a call from the mother who said her son is acting violently and is armed?
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Obviously she shouldn’t call the police, and I think it’s weird that she apparently wanted the police to tase her autistic child or shoot him with rubber bullets. However all I can ask is how grown adults could stand in front of a 13 year old child and shoot him with a firearm. Even if he was waving a knife right in front of them I find that hard to justify (and it seems like there was no weapon at the scene).
 
toabb said:
Barton says she told officers her son, who had been upset over his mother’s return to work, was not armed. “He just gets mad and he starts yelling and screaming,” she said, KUTV reported. “He doesn’t know how to regulate.”
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He was unarmed .
 
I can’t even fathom why the mother called the police. A couple of adults should be able to subdue a 13 year old.
 
In my area 911 reaches emergency medical as well.

Maybe she thought the dispatcher would send an ambulance or mental health team.
 
ConcernedAmerican said:
A couple of adults should be able to subdue a 13 year old.
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Apparently no other family members were present or able to assist. If my neighbor’s kid was going ballistic I wouldn’t intervene unless people’s lives were at stake. The possibility of being sued or charged with assault exists.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a neighbor also called 911 and that’s why there’s conflicting reports about the kid being armed.
 
While I can understand the police using guns to shoot a person when he/she imposes an immediate threat to another person’s life. American police in general does not appear to be competent enough to handle such kind of situations and often escalates the situation.

8 years ago, I was visiting a friend of mine in NYC. As we were walking near Penn Station, we suddenly heard sirens everywhere and saw at least 20 police cars passing by. When we watched the news later that evening, it turned out that a person who appeared mentally ill waving a knife around was shot and killed by the NYPD. According to the video footage, the man appeared to be SURROUNDED, HOLDING NO HOSTAGE, FAR AWAY FROM THE POLICE AND BYSTANDERS, AND WAS NOT CHARGING AT THE POLICE either when he was shot at least 15 times by a large number of cops. And this was in the most iconic city that’s supposed to represent the highest standards of the USA.

8 years later, I’m very happy that I’ve left the USA for Japan, a country with about 40% USA’s population but fewer than 1000 murders per year NATIONWIDE; an ASIAN country where I don’t have to worry about anti-Asian racism; a country where I don’t have to worry about losing my job for saying something politically incorrect; a country where I don’t have to wait for like 10 hours at the ER and then get hit with a $1600 medical bill just for washing out some foreign objects in my eye.

Lastly, for that unlucky man who was shot by the NYPD 8 years ago, if he were to be in Japan (luckily we don’t have many of them here), the police would have caught him alive with this:
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

Picture: Yamanashi Prefecture Police training with this tool, called Sasumata.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
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