2 Utah stories end in tragic outcomes

The stories, unrelated in many ways but related in one significant way, happened to appear in the newspaper on the same day.

One was about the family of Brian Cardall, who died last summer after being struck with a Taser, filing a wrongful death lawsuit against police.

The other was about a Salt Lake City man, Roger Cantu, who was shot and wounded after a confrontation with police.

The two stories have four similarities:

 One, both involved people with mental health issues — Cardall was bipolar, and Cantu, according to his brother, was suicidal.

 Two, both involved 911 calls to the police by concerned family members — Cardall's wife; Cantu's brother — who spelled out the mental health factor.

 Three, neither man was armed.

 Four, both situations ended with the person needing help getting shot.

The man struck with the Taser died, the man shot by the gun wound up in the hospital.

Let the record show, then, that after the cavalry arrived, the result was more problems than if no one had picked up the phone in the first place.

It would have been better to call a pizza delivery man.

Police officers will bristle at the above assessment, of course, and no doubt respond that theirs is a dangerous job with volatile components.

But the outcome is the outcome — and it's not hard to postulate that Cardall and Cantu would both be better off if police hadn't intervened at all.

Sherri Wittwer, director of the Utah office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is acutely aware of the sensitivity required when dealing with mental health issues. It's why her office participates with police officers across the state in a crisis intervention training program.

A CIT-certified officer knows the vast difference between, say, a bank robber or a drug dealer and someone experiencing a mental breakdown — and knows that they need to be treated vastly differently.

The problem, as Wittwer notes, is that only about 10 percent of police officers in Utah are CIT certified.

"We need more trained officers, a lot more," she says.

Wittwer is quick to sympathize with, rather than criticize, police.