The Milwaukee County District Attorney is investigating the death of a 22-year-old West Milwaukee man who died after being tased by police.
Adam Trammell suffered from schizophrenia, so mental health advocates are watching the case develop.
Officers entered Trammell's home last May, after receiving calls from a neighbor that he was behaving erratically. He was tased repeatedly and died soon after he was taken to the hospital.
It wasn’t the first time Trammell had come in contact with police. On his first run-in with the law, Trammell was outside naked when neighbors called police; he ran away from them and was tased when he was caught.
Last May, Trammell's neighbor called police, saying she'd seen him running around naked. Police burst into his apartment and found him in the shower, where they tased him.
A report from the medical examiner says the Taser shocks were a significant condition leading to Trammell's death.
On both occasions, Trammell may have been under duress because of his schizophrenia. That's according to Martina Gollin-Graves, CEO of Mental Health America of Wisconsin. She says episodes of schizophrenia disorient people.
“Some typical symptoms might be visual hallucinations or auditory hallucinations, meaning that they either see things that are not rooted in reality or they hear voices and so that can disorient people and make them paranoid, or make them feel fearful, or sometimes follow the direction of the voice that might lead them into an unsafe situation.”
Gollin-Graves says symptoms of schizophrenia vary from person to person, but officers can be trained on how to deescalate such situations, and lessen the chance of unfortunate outcomes.
Some of that training has already been implemented in police departments across country and the Milwaukee Police Department is one of them.
During one training session, the instructor said officers may need to be less aggressive when approaching people who are acting erratically or fearful.
He said that can make the police appear less threatening. However, some officers said doing so is contrary to training tactics they had learned.
The instructor insisted that safety remains a priority: “We're not trying to teach anything that is going to violate those safety rules that we've trained, so if the situation dictates that you have reason to pat down because you believe there's a threat to your safety, themselves or somebody else, then legally you can do that.”
The way the deputy director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, Mary Collins, sees it, potentially deadly force only should be used as a last resort. She says the primary duty of law enforcement should be to preserve human life.
The ACLU has kept close watch on how law enforcement treats people with mental illness -- for instance, the dehydration death of a man in the Milwaukee County Jail.
Three jail workers were charged with felonies in that case earlier this week.
“We need a place where everybody’s rights are respected and people of color, people with mental illness feel protected by the police and not unfairly targeted or alienated," Collins says.
There should be more training for officers around de-escalation, she says, and using unarmed responses when someone is having a mental health crisis.
Two of the officers involved in the West Milwaukee tasing incident are still on active duty, while another transferred to another police department.
The West Milwaukee Police Department isn’t commenting on the ongoing investigation into Adam Trammell's death.
