SOURCE:WaPost… ALLGOV Mentally_Ill_Shot_to_Death_in_U.S._in_2015

Police in the United States have fatally shot 124 mentally ill people so far this year, according to The Washington Post.

The paper found that the vast majority of the 124 were armed, not with firearms, but toy guns, knives or other implements that are less lethal than a gun.

In most cases, the officers weren’t responding to reports of a crime, but to calls from relatives, neighbors or others who said a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically, including 50 victims who said they wanted to kill themselves.​

The newspaper also found that more than 50% of the 124 were killed by officers whose agencies did not provide the most current training available for dealing with the mentally ill. “And in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous,”

Source: The Post’s Wesley Lowery, Kimberly Kindy and Keith L. Alexander