Austin Arrest Of Woman With Mental Illness Draws Fire

AUSTIN, TX — The recent arrest of an Austin woman for allegedly assaulting an officer has yielded dual focus on how police interact with the mentally ill and the protocol involved when arresting an undocumented immigrant in a city that touts its empathetic stance toward migrants.

Tania Silva, 21, was arrested by police last Thursday, July 19, by police in what began as a welfare check requested by family members describing her to be in the throes of a mental health crisis — calls that followed a missing person report for the same woman, Officer Destiny Winston said during a Tuesday press conference.

Upon arriving at 3103 Edgedale just before 7:30 a.m., police found the woman clutching a small dog. According to police, Silva expressed desires to harm herself. Her actions prompted officers to attempt to secure a hospital stay for the woman as they continued to negotiate with her to cooperate, the police spokeswoman said. Winston added that a mental health officer was dispatched to the scene to better handle the situation given the woman's mental state.

"He did his due diligence and called nearby hospitals to locate a bed for Silva so she could get the help that she needed," Winston said.

Yet despite her mental state — and a known history of mental episodes familiar to police — the decision was made to handcuff the woman. Winston said the decision was based on Silva's allegedly aggressive behavior, her past episodes and an aversion to men. Knowing this, Winston said a female backup officer also was dispatched to the scene.

After explaining she'd need to relinquish the dog, officers then made the decision to handcuff the woman, Winston said. "Based off of Silva's prior aggressive behavior described by callers," Winston said, officers made the decision to take her into custody "...for the safety of not only herself, but others as well in order to transport her to the hospital, again so that she could get some help."

That's when the situation broke down. As police reached for the dog to return it to its owner, Winston said the woman became aggressive towards the officers.

"So when officers attempted to remove the dog and get Silva into handcuffs, she became agitated," Winston told reporters.

A "physical disturbance" ensued before Silva dropped to her knees, Winston said, at which time the small dog she had been holding was retrieved. After being handcuffed, Silva allegedly twice landed kicks to one officer's midsection before scratching him, "...causing him pain," Winston said.

Despite relatives' later assertions that police previously had transported Silva to the hospital without incident during mental episodes, she's now charged with assault on a public servant — a second-degree felony. And in an age of heightened deportations — urged on both by the Trump administration and Gov. Greg Abbott whose stance on immigration has proved intractable — Silva may also be deported.

While Silva languishes at the Travis County Jail, the Immigration and Customs Enforcment (ICE) has placed a detainer on her — a hold of up to 48 hours preventing her release — to allow an agent sufficient time for travel (usually from the San Antonio field office) to fetch her and proceed with deportation proceedings.

The case has galvanized immigrant advocates who gathered outside the Travis County Correctional Complex on Tuesday demanding her release. Among them were Silva family members, including her sister, Pamela, and father, Rosendo Segovia. Concurrently, a petition calling for her release has been circulated.

"We are here to demand justice for a young woman who is in crisis," a Workers Defense Project member said at the spontaneous rally. Tania struggles with mental illness and was arrested when her family called 911 for assistance. Now Tania faces an ICE hold, and we cannot get her into hospital care unless the ICE hold is dropped."

Silva's sister described her sibling as a good person who despite her mental illness contributed to her community by tutoring children and advocating for animals. Silva's father also vouched for his daughter's personal attributes: "Tania is a very sensitive, strong and capable young woman," he said in Spanish, adding she is is studying to be a veterinarian at the Alamo Community Colleges.

But she didn't return from school last Wednesday, prompting family members to call police. The following day, police were called for assistance once she was located.

"The police who normally have helped us transport her to the hospital in many occasions when she gets sick," the father continued "This time they escalated the situation with little attention to a person who suffers from mental illness, and took her to jail where they filed charges instead of taking her to the hospital as we asked because that's what we usually do."

Segovia said his daughter has been in jail for nearly a week without taking her needed medications. He wondered if police were equipped to recognize that his daughter required hospitalization. "She is sick, and needs help," Segovia said. "She is not bleeding. Perhaps the police needed to see her bleeding and injured physically to understand she needed medical attention, but her brain is deteriorating and we fear the damage from her jail stay might be irreversible."

Winston painted a slightly different story, saying officers tried many times to deescalate the situation before one of the officers was physically assaulted: "To be clear, officers tried several deescalation techniques," Winston said. "They explained to Silva over and over that they were there to help her, even before they got on scene attempted to have a female officer present because they had the prior knowledge that Silva was aggressive toward males. So they tried to explain, they tried to make her comfortable. The ultimate goal was to get Silva the help that she needed, and that's why the officers were there. Unfortunately, it did turn into a violent incident where an arrest had to be made."

Deescalation has become something of a buzz term for the APD, particularly in the wake of several high-profile incident of what many critics have viewed as police overreach in dealing with mentally ill suspects. After recently being named permanent police chief after serving in an interim role for 16 months, top cop Brian Manley vowed to community members he would instruct his rank and file to exhaust all other deescalation techniques when confronting suspects before force is used.

Focus on deescalation comes after people later deemed to have been suffering mental issues were shot by police during confrontations:

• In February, Morgan Rankins, 25, was fatally shot by a police officer after she allegedly walked toward him after a car chase while brandishing a knife. Pastor Joseph Parker of David Chapel Missionary Baptist Church later told media outlets the woman suffered from mental illness and took medication to control her condition.
• Days before that police shooting, the city doled out $3.25 million in a settlement to the family of David Joseph, 17, killed the prior February after being fatally shot by an officer. Geoffrey Freeman, the since-fired officer who killed the youth, claimed he feared for his life after the child ran toward him unarmed and unclothed while acting erratically and speaking incoherently in what was later deemed to have been a mental breakdown.
• It's unclear if another suspect also shot by police in February was mentally ill, but even the official police account notes he pointed a gun to his own head at one point during a standoff with law enforcement officials — a tactic not normally associated with those in control of their faculties. Still, seven police officers would eventually discharge their weapons in a hail of bullets that killed the suspect. Patch later reached out to the Austin Police Department to determine the level of police response. "I can tell you that two of the officers are patrol [APD], two are SWAT and three are Narcotics," a police spokeswoman told Patch while declining to identify the officers and suspect."The rest of your questions are part to [sic] the open and ongoing criminal and administrative investigation into this incident," the spokeswoman wrote via email.

The new focus on police deescalation appears to be taking hold of late. This past Sunday, police declined to press charges on a man barricaded in his car while threatening to harm himself who held police at bay for several hours. Rather than arrest the man, police said they opted to take him to the hospital for evaluation after the early Sunday episode at 11901 Hobby Horse Court, not far from the upscale Domain Northside mixed-use development. Typically, Austin police send out the whole SWAT arsenal — armored vehicles, robots, hostage negotiators and the like — in dealing with barricaded suspects, while an officer on a megaphone shouts commands to surrender toward eventual arrest of suspects.

But this past Sunday, the tactics used on the barricaded man were decidedly subdued and prolonged toward a peaceful resolution. Yet police declined to identify the race and age of that detainee, citing medical privacy provisions outlined under provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, legislation that provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information. The man's hospitalization rather than arrest gave him the cover of privacy, as an officer speaking to reporters after the the incident suggested.

Whether that man is Anglo is conjecture given the HIPAA shield yielded by his hospitalization, and that statistical datum may never be known given the privacy provision to include it in the mix in assessing potential police profiling. Silva, on the other hand, is Hispanic with questionable documentation status, and her arrest comes amid a crackdown on undocumented immigrants living in the city — enforced action stridently endorsed by Gov. Greg Abbott whose efforts have led to a ban on so-called "sanctuary cities" more hospitable to immigrants.

Last year's passage of Senate Bill 4 — legislation championed by Abbott — gave police greater leeway in asking about immigration status during even the most benign encounters with residents amid a broader anti-immigrant sentiment at the federal level. The legislation calls for greater cooperation with ICE in reporting undocumented residents, with penalties included for law enforcement officials deemed uncooperative that include possible jail time.

Whether the tactics of SB4 and/or the current anti-immigrant climate fueled by the Trump administration that's taken hold nationwide played a role in Silva's arrest also is the subject of conjecture. The official line is she was aggressive toward officers as they tried to take away the dog she was holding to detain her.

But some critics wonder if profiling played a role this time, particularly given previous police assistance in helping Silva's family with her hospitalization.

Critics also question the use of handcuffs on a woman known to be mentally ill. In her press conference, Winston cited Austin Police Department policy dictating any person transported in a police vehicle must have the restraints. But she did note some exceptions: Those of advanced age, physically injured detainees or those with a disability that prevents the handcuffs placed behind their back, in which case they are handcuffed at the front or secured with flex cuffs, Winston explained.

Yet it's unclear from Winston's narrative if the officers involved had the proper training in dealing with the mentally ill. Lacking such training — particularly via Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs that have gained in popularity among law enforcement agencies nationwide — can lead to quick escalations when dealing with the mentally ill, according to the PowerDMS blog.

Studies show that people with mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than other suspects, according to the blog. Furthermore, the Washington Post reports that one-quarter of police shootings in 2015 involved people “in the throes of emotional or mental crisis.”

In most of these cases the individual in question was armed, but police officers weren’t responding to reports of a crime, according to the Post. “More often, the police officers were called by relatives, neighbors or other bystanders worried that a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically,” the Post reported. “More than 50 people were explicitly suicidal.”

Silva was not armed when she was arrested, but holding a small dog. While local law enforcement and federal agents mull over what to do with Silva, her family simply wants her out of jail and in a medical setting. During the rally outside the jail, her father pleaded with ICE to remove the detainer that would enable her hospitalization and called for empathetic residents for support.

"We are desperate," Segovia said. "We ask for relief from Austin police officials to have her urgently transport her to the hospital so she can get the medical treatment she needs." He also called for ICE to release their detainer in order for that medical treatment to be sought. "Please, I offer my plea to this city. The empathy you have demonstrated I very much appreciate. I ask for the solidarity from the good citizens of Austin who are always characterized by their love of the people so that this time my daughter might be be tended to at the hospital she urgently needs."

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>>> Tania Silva booking photo via Travis County Jail records