Before Yong Yang was shot by Los Angeles police inside his parents’ Koreatown home last week, his mother called mental health officials for help.
Myung Sook Yang said her 40-year-old son was experiencing a severe bipolar episode, and she specifically reached out to the county mental health department (DMH) before the shooting to avoid law enforcement.
Within hours of the call, her son was dead — killed while holding a kitchen knife in his family’s living room, police said.
On Tuesday, LAPD officials issued a department release Annual Use of Force ReportThat saw an increase in the number of officer-involved shootings, from 31 in 2022 to 34 last year — more than any other big-city U.S. department.
Officers partly attributed the increase in the number of people shot who, like Yang, were holding sharp objects during mental health or substance use-related crises — a trend the department has seen. struggled for years to curb,
At an emotional news conference Thursday at the headquarters of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, Yang’s family and their attorneys demanded answers about DMH’s decision to request law enforcement.
In between sobs, Myung Moon Yang said: “There’s a reason I called the mental health department, not the police; “This was so they could help him, not shoot him.”
“I thought they would help him and take him to the hospital,” he said. “Instead, they shot him, and we want an explanation as to how that could have happened.”
As she spoke, her husband Min Yang pressed her shoulder to console her.
Yong Yang’s family said that he had been struggling with his mental health for a long time. Although he was never violent, he had previously been placed on a so-called 5150 hold by authorities, the up to 72-hour detention of anyone deemed a threat to themselves or others.
In recent years, his mother said, he has learned to keep the symptoms at bay through “prayer, playing tennis, yoga, exercise, hiking.”
Still, his family said, he sometimes had events like the one that happened the day he was shot. Worried that they could no longer care for him, the family contacted DMH for help for two consecutive days.
Yang’s father told reporters that his son’s behavior was not dangerous on May 2, when a representative from DMH came to the family’s home in the 400 block of South Gramercy Place for an evaluation.
Min Yang said the doctor spent less than two minutes talking to Yang before deciding to call the police.
After officers arrived, he said, they told him and his wife to wait outside while they tried to contact Yang, and did not inform him until much later that his son had been shot. Was.
The family’s attorney, Robert Sheehan, said that based on the information they had, police did not use any less-lethal weapon to subdue Yang, despite having “full knowledge of the son’s mental health history.”
“The LAPD sent nine officers, military-style, into the house to execute a 40-year-old mental patient,” Sheehan said. “It actually gets worse: Officers did not inform mother after brutal murder that they had shot her son.”
Messages left seeking comment from LAPD and DMH spokespeople were not immediately returned Friday.
Sheehan said the family is demanding an independent investigation.
He said officers failed to provide immediate medical attention to Yang, and “destroyed all physical evidence at the crime scene.”
“They destroyed every stain of blood, every hair follicle, every piece of physical evidence that could have told us what those officers did inside the apartment to kill the boy,” he said.
He said the family was preparing to file a government claim against the city, a common precursor to a wrongful death lawsuit.
An LAPD news release issued the day after the shooting gave an apparently different account of the incident, saying that officers were called to the scene after Yang tried to attack a DMH employee.
The DMH worker first told arriving officers that Yang posed a danger to others, leading to the decision to request more police and notify the department’s mental health assessment unit, the police statement said. According to the release, officers decided to enter the home after several unsuccessful attempts to convince Yang to come out himself.
After Yang refused to come out, officers used a key to enter the residence and say they found Yang holding a knife. Within moments, he “advanced toward the officers and fired shots at one officer,” the release states.
Paramedics were called to the scene and he was pronounced dead, according to the release. No officers or spectators were injured.
James N., president of the Korean American Federation, said DMH held a community presentation in Koreatown just a few weeks ago to inform families of people living with mental illness about the resources available to them. Attendees were told they could call DMH instead of police for non-violent emergencies, he said.
An said he had spoken to interim LAPD Chief Dominic Choi, who assured him the incident would be thoroughly investigated.
Community members had met with Choi, the city’s first Korean American chief, and Mayor Karen Bass a few days before the shooting to discuss recent attacks in the area. Most attendees were satisfied that city officials were listening to their safety concerns and were hopeful that the meeting was a step toward “rebuilding” their relationship with the police department, An said.
But Yang’s death, which was widely covered by Korean-language media, left the community with “a lot of questions,” he said.
Thursday’s news conference came amid renewed scrutiny of the LAPD’s use of deadly force. Statistics released this week by the department showed that Los Angeles police had twice as many on-duty shootings as their counterparts in Chicago, a city with about 4,000 more officers and 1.3 million fewer residents than L.A. .
The report shows that more police shootings in L.A. were fatal than any other comparable departments, including New York City, which had four fewer incidents overall despite being a larger city and force.
Several members of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the department’s civilian oversight body, expressed concern over the numbers at their weekly meeting Tuesday. Commissioner William Briggs questioned whether the department could do more to handle encounters involving people carrying edged weapons such as knives and swords, which have led to a large number of shootings.
Department officials said the reasons for the disparity are complex and require more time to understand.
The department has expanded its training to deal with people in emotional crisis, although its leaders have acknowledged that not all mental health emergencies require the presence of armed police.
He has pushed for these non-criminal calls to be handed over to the Systemwide Mental Assessment Response Team, or SMART, which pairs officers with county mental health therapists who are trained in peacefully deescalating standoffs with the mentally ill. , who may not respond well to yelling. Orders and flashing police lights.
According to department data, Smart responded to about 6,534 emergencies last year, a fraction of the roughly 43,000 calls for service involving people suffering from mental illness or experiencing a behavioral health crisis. Calls involving weapons or threats of violence are still almost always referred to police.
Police officials had previously blamed understaffing in the county for deficiencies in coverage by mental health co-responder teams, though Choi told the commission Tuesday that the county has made progress in hiring more therapists in recent months .
Earlier this year, city officials launched a Pilot program that sends trained, but unarmed civilians The plan is to evaluate its performance after a year, and potentially expand it citywide, for certain mental health emergencies in three police divisions.
The initiative, modeled on the Cahoots program started in Bend, Oregon, consists of two teams of mental health therapists who are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for non-violent situations that are typically policed. , such as welfare checks and making calls. For public intoxication and indecent exposure.
Department officials have repeatedly said that despite increased crisis intervention training and new less-lethal weapons designed to incapacitate rather than kill, officers are not always equipped to handle the majority of mental health calls. Additionally, police say these types of calls have the potential to quickly escalate into violence.
Los Angeles was one of the major US cities that pledged to develop and invest in new emergency responses that would provide trained specialists to provide assistance to homeless people and those suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues. Used to use. But similar efforts have failed in cities like New York.
Activists argue that such efforts are extremely underfunded and, in some cases, still too closely tied to law enforcement.
Some initiatives have struggled to bring crisis intervention options to scale. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Fire Department recommended ending a pilot program because officials said it didn’t actually free up first responders and hospital emergency rooms.
