When mental health crises become a police matter, everybody loses.

At around 9:30pm last Tuesday, a man was seen holding a knife to his throat at the Seattle Waterfront. Chilling bodycam footage of the incident showed the man approaching the officers on scene with his hands up saying “do do it, please kill me.” Those were his final words before shot and killed by police. While an investigation into the incident is ongoing, all it takes is seeing the 90 second video to be sure that something is wrong. No one joins the force to help a desperate man commit suicide. There has got to be a better way.

In most police academies, cadets are trained to subdue a violent attacker, fire a handgun and rifles with precision, and to use lethal force under strict conditions. However, short of some rudimentary de-escalation techniques, they are rarely trained in how to handle encounters with those who are mentally ill. Once a mentally ill person encounters law enforcement, it is often too late. A study from the Treatment Advocacy Center found that severe mental illnesses are involved in at least 1 in 4 and as many as half of all fatal police shootings.

It is unfair to these officers that our nation’s mental health crisis has turned mental illness into a police matter. The long-term solution is to improve Seattle’s mental health system so that police are not the primary responders for mental health emergencies; in the meantime, police need to be better trained in de-escalation skills that can help save their own lives as well as those who desperately need their help.

No cop starts a shift hoping to end a life, a decision made even more complicated when taking the life of someone so clearly mentally ill. Police have the very tough job of making life and death decisions, under pressure, with limited information. We owe it to these officers to provide them with the tools and training they need to conduct the full scope of their duties, which often involves encounters with people who are disturbed, agitated, or mentally ill.

Tuesday’s incident highlights the importance of complementing tactical training with training in “soft skills'' that create a critical space between the first encounter with a suspect and the decision to use lethal force. It is in this critical space that law enforcement can hopefully avoid a violent encounter altogether and mean the difference between life and death.

This failure to prepare police for the breadth of their duties contributes to over 1,000 fatal police shootings each year, needless killing of some of the most vulnerable members of our communities, and a large and growing distrust between law enforcement and their communities. If we don’t train our law enforcement differently, we will keep seeing these terrible outcomes.

It would be unfathomable to send a law enforcement officer into the line of duty without a service weapon, and yet we send them to interact with the public with only the people skills that they brought along with them to the job. Officers deserve to also be armed with a full set of tools to avoid violence, collect information, and prevent the need for lethal force. Not only will these skills better equip officers to do the most common and often most difficult aspect of their jobs - connecting with people - they will save the lives of many people who are desperately seeking their help.