Last week, Toronto police shot and killed Michael Eligon, a mentally disturbed man who had escaped from Toronto East General hospital. He was wandering the streets of East York, allegedly threatening people with two pairs of scissors. Immediately after the shooting, witnesses began questioning whether it was a necessary use of force. Now the media is doing the same.

The Star spoke to Joyce Jones, the foster mother who cared for Eligon from when he was 12 until he turned 18. From their article:

“I was talking to him on the phone that very morning,” Joyce Jones, 85, told the Star. “He called me three times that morning. At 6 o’clock, 7 o’clock, 8 o’clock. She (her daughter) saw the police cars and all the commotion.” Eligon, 29, was shot at about 10:15 a.m.

Jones, who lives in Mississauga and raised him from age 12 to 18, didn’t know exactly why he was being held. The hospital “never told me,” she said.

But the National Post takes a crucial step back to look at other, similar incidents that have taken place in recent memory. As their staff reporter Megan O’Toole puts it:

In addition to Mr. Eligon—whose case is currently under investigation by the province’s Special Investigations Unit amid allegations of excessive force from some witnesses­—several other mentally unstable individuals have died during recent altercations with police. In October, police shot 52-year-old Sylvia Klibingaitis dead after she lunged at them with a knife; in August, 45-year-old Charles McGillivary, developmentally delayed and unable to communicate with police, died while resisting arrest; and a year earlier, police shot 25-year-old Reyal Jardine-Douglas dead after he brandished a knife on a TTC bus. The SIU cleared police of criminal wrongdoing in all three cases.

McGillivary, who is mentioned briefly in the Post article, died when police tried to arrest him near Christie Pits in August. He was a 46 year old with the intelligence of a child. The incident happened when he was out with his mother, on his way to a pizza place. She told the Star that McGillivary's death was probably a result of cardiac arrest.

In an attempt to quell criticism, the police opened their crisis-training facility to reporters earlier this week, to show that they do plan for these types of contingencies. Be that as it may, what we have here is a pattern of similar deaths. And where there's a pattern, there’s usually some kind of systemic cause.

If Toronto police were adequately prepared for these types of situations then they’d be flukes, and no reporter would be able to write up a litany of them on deadline.

Maybe we need to try a little harder.

Blog image by theonewhodidntrun, via Flickr.