This article includes discussion of mental illness and police killings.
Early in the morning on August 21, Lil Nas X was arrested by Los Angeles police while walking around in underwear and cowboy boots; he was later charged with four felonies, accused of “battery on a police officer” and resisting arrest, as reported by NBC News. Before news came of the arrest and charges, TMZ publicized footage of the musician, whose legal name is Montero Lamar Hill, during the episode, and online commentators questioned whether the clips were part of a “stunt.”
That speculation was clearly disproven by the seriousness of the charges, as well as comments from Hill’s father, Robert Stafford, to the media. Stafford described crying with Hill in jail, separated by glass. “For a 26-year-old to have to deal with what he’s dealing with — to be a breadwinner for a lot of people, the inability to change his mother’s situation, and the pressure he puts on himself…” Stafford told The Times, referencing Hill’s mother’s documented struggles with addiction. “We shed tears with each other for a minute. And I had to tell him that ‘what you’re going through is normal.’ We all have breakdowns every now and then, but the difference is, yours gets played out in the public eye.”
I live in a city where people regularly experience mental health episodes in public, forced into visibility because they are unhoused, moving between shelters, or they are otherwise vulnerable. Many of us have seen a friend or family member have a mental health crisis, easily identified by a loved one’s uncharacteristic mannerisms or behavior, or just something seeming “off.” Concerned people generally call 911. According to the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, in one “large” US city, wellness-check requests accounted for about 7% of all 911 calls — more than theft or noise complaints, and about as much as calls about domestic violence. As the Policing Project notes, “rarely” are those calls in reference to a “suspected crime,” but in most cases the police are sent to respond.
This has happened to my family members too: A mental health episode was worsened by an inability to reach mental health care — because of long wait times and defunded social services — and meant the only treatment this person could get came via police.
Why is this a problem? Generally, police aren’t trained or qualified to respond to mental health crises, and can often further activate the person in need of care, even making them distrustful of those offering support, including their own family or medical team. This family member of mine was traumatized by their experiences with the mental health system, including police and treatment centers — experiences that sometimes resulted in being physically injured. It made them less open to the mental health care they needed because they associated it with violence and confinement they had been through.
It took years of working with health care providers who respected my family member’s autonomy and right to participate in their own health care plan — and distance from an experience that criminalized and victimized them — to save their life. It took just as long to mend relationships between them and other relatives, myself included, because of the intensity and difficulty of helping someone who can’t protect themself during a police interaction, while also negotiating with police on their behalf.
This person has experienced periods of incarceration and institutionalization, but they have also gotten the chance to heal. We now understand that how they were treated for being “crazy” wasn’t only not their fault, it was wrong.
But many are not so lucky.
“There is no evidence that sending the police to conduct welfare checks is effective in reducing harmful outcomes,” the Policing Project states. On the other hand, writes abolitionist and disability studies academic Liat Ben-Moshe in the introduction to the groundbreaking book Decarcerating Disability, “conditions of confinement” — meaning incarceration, but also mental health facilities and other institutions — “may cause further mental breakdown for those entering the system with diagnoses of ‘mental,’ psychiatric, or intellectual disabilities.”
When you bring the element of policing into a mental health crisis of any kind, the risks can increase exponentially — even becoming deadly: According to the Washington Post, over a three-year period, police officers shot and “killed the individuals they were called to assist” at least 178 times.
Furthermore, it's impossible to downplay the role of race and other identities that Hill holds, like queerness, in the severity of treatment and risk. Argues Mey Rude in Out on August 22, “For Black men [in particular], a mental health crisis can be deadly.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the second leading cause of death for “African Americans between the ages of 15 and 24,” with Black men being four times as likely to die by suicide than Black women. And, as Rude continues, “as a Black gay man, he's even more at risk.”
As we saw with the death of Jordan Neely, racism and ableism — that is, discrimination based on disability — against those we perceive as visibly mentally ill can even result in politicians and media outlets celebrating your death at the hands of a vigilante.
In 2023, 30-year-old Neely, a Black man who was unhoused and had been a longtime subway performer, was choked to death on the New York City subway by a 26-year-old white ex-Marine named Daniel Penny. In December, Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide for the death of Neely. On the New York Post's cover the following morning, Penny was credited with “protect[ing] subway riders” — from a man accused of yelling — while Mayor Eric Adams apparently recognized Penny’s actions as “doing what we should have done as a city.”
I refuse to imagine the horrific potential outcomes if Lil Nas X had been without a public profile, the privileges attained through his Grammy wins, family members that cared for him, and the pure chance that he survived that police interaction. What has already happened is horrific enough. I know from personal experience with my loved ones that our way of “dealing” with the mentally ill is much like how we treat those we see as “criminals.”
When people are arrested to ostensibly “help” them, this can create — or for many, perpetuate — cycles of incarceration. They may be pushed into psychiatric institutions for the mentally ill, which also rely on carceral ways of functioning, such as denying autonomy and agency to those held there, physically restraining patients, and more. This is why so many who study ableism and the institutionalization of the mentally ill, like Ben-Moshe, call for mechanisms for people to control their local police forces as well as their own treatment.
Hill pled not guilty to the four felony charges, which, if convicted, could result in up to five years in state prison. We know that incarceration is not the answer for mental illness, and is likely to worsen mental health. In Hill's own limited statement on the experience, he acknowledged the suffering caused by his initial interaction with police: “That was terrifying, that was terrifying, that was a terrifying last four days,” he said in an Instagram Story video, his only public comment so far about the arrest. “But your girl's gonna be all right.”
If you or someone you know is going through a crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or find the Trevor Project's crisis services here.
