On September 16th, Scout Schultz, a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the president of the college’s Pride Alliance, was shot and killed by the Georgia Tech Police Department. With the facts of the case out in the open, popular response has mostly fallen into two vastly different camps of opinion, as a variety of people speak up about whether or not this shooting was reasonable. Some are condemning this as an unnecessary act of police violence, while others--citing Schultz’s repeated shouts of “Shoot me!” and the fact that Schultz themself was the one to call the police to the scene--reply that this was a “suicide by police,” and that the officers should not be blamed.

Suicide by police is not a phrase that belongs in our vocabulary.

Scout Schultz, a nonbinary transgender student (Schultz used they/them pronouns, a fact that is already being widely disregarded), was known to be mentally ill. They had engaged in at least one previous attempt to take their own life, and multiple suicide notes were found in their room after the shooting occurred. Adding this information to Schultz’s behavior towards the officers, and the fact that Schultz was the one to summon police to the scene in the first place, it can indeed be inferred that their intention was to be killed. This raises two prominent concerns: the lack of mental health care for LGBT individuals and the astounding prevalence of police brutality in the United States.

The issue of poor mental health in the LGBT community is one that is widely acknowledged, but rarely addressed in a productive manner. Some quick facts: LGBT youth are three times more likely to have a mental illness and four times more likely to attempt suicide than straight and cisgender members of their age group. The causes for this are clear: the majority of our world works on the daily to ensure that the LGBT community knows that they are reviled. Even for those of us who were raised in the supposedly liberal USA’s bubbles of tolerance, it’s impossible to entirely avoid the hatred coming from all sides: it resides in our distant relatives, in the media we consume, and, now, in our White House. This is to say nothing of the rest of the world; most LGBT people know that our very existence is illegal in 74 countries, and punishable by death in 13. The degree to which these facts can affect us, in insidious ways as well as conscious ones, cannot be underestimated.

Yet, rather than being readily available, mental health care is actually harder to obtain for LGBT individuals than it is for straight and cisgender ones. There is a massive lack of LGBT-specific training and understanding among therapists and psychiatrists, meaning that the people intended to assist with these mental health issues will often enough engage in macro- and microaggressions that worsen the patient’s condition. It is far from easy to find a provider with the specialization necessary to address the “minority stress” inherent in the lives of LGBT people, and even greater risks exist: homosexuality itself was categorized as a mental disorder in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) less than fifty years ago, and conversion therapy is still far from universally banned. And even if an LGBT individual were to find a well-trained, supportive, accepting mental health care provider, there is the problem of cost. The price of health care in the USA remains staggering, and seems positioned to grow imminently steeper for millions of individuals. This combination of factors makes sufficient mental health care nearly unattainable for people like Scout Schultz.

But the issue here is even bigger. The method of Schultz’s death is an unusual one: they did not, in fact, kill themself. Rather, they provoked police officers into murdering them. Or, to be more specific: they made a phone call to the police on their college campus, then approached the officers with a knife. And, in minutes, they were shot dead. “Suicide by police,” it would seem, is far more efficient than overdose or slit wrists--the latter methods both have a success rate of under 15%. As previously mentioned, Schultz had previously attempted and failed at suicide. It would appear that this time, they sought a method that was surer to work.

The most efficient way that Scout Schultz could kill themself was to provoke and be shot by the police on their own college campus.

The militaristic institution of the United States police cannot continue in its current form. The fact that an innocent, 21-year-old college student can take their own life simply by standing in front of a couple of officers is nothing short of horrifying. One can imagine that it would be less deadly to climb into a zoo enclosure and taunt the tigers than it is to wave a pocket knife at campus police. These officers were confirmed to have been armed with pepper spray, and a video shot at the scene makes it clear that Schultz did not engage in any movements immediately threatening to either of them. Any reader of this article should be able to put together a different way that events may have proceeded--but it seems that the officers, supposedly trained in de-escalation methods, could not.

Our so-called “keepers of the peace” are anything but. This is not a new fact. Organizations like Black Lives Matter continue to lead the fight against police brutality, and it is our responsibility to support and join them in any way that we can.

The death of Scout Schultz is the most recent in a chain of over 700 murders by the USA police in 2017.