According to the Time article “Black, Disabled and at Risk: The Overlooked Problem of Police Violence Against Americans with Disabilities”, ⅓ to ½ of all deaths by police officers are individuals who have a known mental illness. This, like the number of POC murdered by police officers, is extremely disproportionate to the population of mentally ill that live in America. In other circumstances, police often conduct misguided “mercy arrests”(Earley) that lead to permanent records for POC mentally ill patients that create difficulties with gaining jobs because of the trifecta of being black, mentally ill, and having a criminal record, despite anti-discrimination ADA laws. 

 Often, alive or dead, these victims are framed as drug abusers instead of the self-medicating and sick population that they are.  Frankham’s qualitative study shows how one newspaper, the Washington Post, tend to describe those who suffer from mental illness instead as those who suffer from drug disorders that are  within binaries like being “clean” or not clean. This creates a subjugated population that focuses on the result of their sickness and not the cause, since often drug disorders are poor attempts at self medication. Overall wheat this does is paint Mentally ill and POC deaths d to the public as the death of someone shameful. 

There is a cylindrical relationship between discrimination by the public and police and the mental illness itself. Police discrimination can cause heightened
 stress which increase mental illness in the POC population, and mentally ill homelessness and arrest encounters can lead to discrimination by the police. Even though institutional and medication help can only be gained if a person is an active threat to themselves or others, this interaction leads many people of color to avoid calling in incidents with their sick loved ones for fear of brutal results. 

There is hope; in Eugene, Oregon, there is a special non-emergency line for mental health situations that sends “a team of medics and crisis-care workers” that redirects almost ⅕ of their calls that would otherwise be handled by armed police officers. The benefits, and limitations, of the Crisis Intervention Prevention(CIT) programs for police training are studied as a resolution for dealing with mentally-ill Americans. However, there is still a “revolving door” happening in the justice system. This is described in Earley’s book as the movement from hospitals to prisons to court and back to hospitals again. Mentally ill patients receive enough care in an institution to be coherent at court but are then deprived of care within the jail that they are sent afterwards. This causes renewed mental instability in court, who sends the victims back to the institution to become stable (enough) again. There is still much to be done with America’s treatment of the mental ill, especially in marginalized groups like POC.