Denver Post

What about help for families?
By Dawn G. Gregg

Thursday, July 17, 2003 - The uproar continues over the shooting death of Paul Childs. Like the rest of the city, I am outraged that the police shot a mentally handicapped person within two minutes of arriving at the Childs' home.

However, I am also terrified in a way few other people in the city can understand. I, too, am the mother of a special-needs child, a child whom I love and fight for every day. My son has autism, and occasionally when he is out in public he becomes hysterical. Sometimes he hits and kicks, and I have always been afraid that he might harm himself or someone else. Now I have the added fear that he might be shot.

In the media coverage of the case, I have not seen any serious discussion about mental disability. Post columnist Cindy Rodriguez made one comment that was insensitive and not very well researched, noting that the Childs family had called 911 for help 47 times in four years but that the police should not have become "surrogate disciplinarians." The problem isn't that simple because of the lack of alternatives for most families.

I have many friends with special-needs children. One has a child who appears to have similar symptoms to those of Paul Childs: grand mal seizures and poor impulse control. He also often ran away and pulled knives on his family.

My friend tried medication for her son's impulse-control problems, but it interfered with his seizure-control medication. She tried to get the boy into a boarding school for children with difficult behavioral problems, but because of his seizures, the school turned him out. She had the boy's father take him for a time, but when the son became too difficult, the father deposited him back on her doorstep. She fought her way through state agencies to find some way of helping her mentally disabled child, but no one would help.

As her son grew, it became increasingly difficult to deal with his attacks on her own, and she was forced to call the police when he got out of control. Finally, after one attack, she refused to take him back because she feared for her safety and that of her other children. Child protective services very nearly had her arrested for child abandonment. She probably would have been arrested if her son hadn't tried to attack some of the staff at the hospital.

Mental disabilities take many different forms, and often parents are left completely alone to handle problems that the rest of society doesn't want to deal with.

The Paul Childs incident is not just a problem of possible police misconduct. It is a problem of a society that does not provide families with alternatives to the police when they have a child like Paul. These alternatives can be expensive: in-home aides who can help manage and care for these children; special response teams trained to deal with the mentally handicapped; and the availability of trained therapists who can help these children find more socially acceptable behaviors for stressful situations.

So, when anyone calls for police reform in the wake of the Paul Childs case, please also call for improving support services for families with special-needs children. Both are desperately needed.