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‘Suicide by Cop’: How a Poorly Defined Term Shifts Accountability for Lost Lives
In the early hours of July 24, someone placed a call to Austin’s 911 dispatch. The male caller told the operator he was looking out of his window and saw a teenager who may have had a gun. He wasn’t certain it was a weapon, but the person was “messing with his waistband,” the caller said. He gave the address of a community park in northeast Austin, one with a playground and a basketball court.
When police arrived only minutes later, the only person there was 17-year-old Anthoneil Williams II, a sociable, upbeat teenager, one who had never gotten in trouble with the police before. In body camera and surveillance footage of the incident, he appears to lift up his shirt and reach for his waistband.
The three responding officers all pulled their triggers—not just once, but enough times for at least two officers to empty their chambers and reload. They kept firing after Williams had already hit the ground. Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services was called to the scene after officers determined no one else was around, but Williams died on that playground at 4:25 a.m.
Afterward, the officers discovered there was no gun in Williams’ waistband—only a water bottle. They also found that Williams had placed the call.
Almost immediately following the shooting, Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis—who’s held the job since 2024—said, “All points are indicating that this was a suicide by police.”
That didn’t sit well with people who knew Williams or with some in the community. Cluren Williams (no relation), an activist whose own brother was shot by APD in 2017, called the characterization “irresponsible” and “dehumanizing.”
Chas Moore, founder of the Austin Justice Coalition, told the Texas Observer: “I just can’t believe that a 17-year-old Black boy had somehow become privy to a world of ‘suicide by cop.’”
Moore added that he’s concerned by the normalization of the concept that APD applied to Williams. “It just shouldn’t be a thing. This is the only profession in the world where you could, presumably, put yourself in a position to be killed by them,” he said. “There’s no suicide by Chick-fil-A server, suicide by a firefighter, suicide by teacher.”
Anthoneil Williams II (GoFundMe/Anthoneil Williams)
The label “suicide by cop” is divisive. It’s a term that shifts the blame for a police shooting to the victim and insulates police from liability—and one that can fundamentally alter how officers respond to an emergency call. It’s become one of the major lenses through which people view and understand police shootings, but the frequency, the attributes, and even the validity of the concept are ill-understood.
There are indeed documented cases of people intentionally getting police to shoot them. In some instances, these people tell family members beforehand. Some leave suicide notes or tell 911 dispatchers what they’re about to do. But in most cases, the situation is less clear-cut, leading to a broader use of the label.
The Observer analyzed media reports of 100 incidents from the past 20 years that involved the ubiquitous but poorly defined theory. These included cases in which someone was shot and killed by police and cases in which someone was arrested or died by suicide after reportedly attempting or threatening suicide by cop. In the majority of cases, police are the ones using the label, and they’re not always clear about why they think it applies. In some cases, police say the victim told officers to shoot or had told dispatchers that they were suicidal—but not always.
In several cases, the theory was actually used as a defense strategy when a trial followed an altercation with police. If a person shoots at an officer in an attempt to get the officer to shoot back, that could convince a jury that a shooting wasn’t attempted murder but, rather, attempted suicide. On the flip side, officers may have an easier time justifying a shooting if they can argue they were forced into it.
The reported instances stemmed both from mental health calls and from reports of crimes. Williams’ shooting, which was never logged as a mental health call, took place while the Austin City Council debated and later approved the city budget, which included more than $1 million allocated to restructuring the local emergency dispatch, separating it from APD. (In Williams’ case, the 911 operator asked if the caller needed police, fire, EMS, or mental health services, and he answered “police.”)
Austin has had a dedicated mental health police unit since 1999, which trains officers to respond to mental health calls; some cities have moved away from police responses in these cases, though this model can struggle for lack of funding.
In more than a third of the analyzed cases, news stories confirmed the person had a gun. In several cases, the weapon was actually a replica or BB gun, or the police misidentified something like a water bottle.
There’s a reason that the label can be used in so many different circumstances: There’s no real consensus on what distinguishes suicides by cop from other police shootings. Some critics have dubbed it “junk science” and compared it to debunked concepts like “excited delirium,” the purported spontaneous death of people being restrained by police.
“Suicide by cop draws on real-world examples—in this context, of people who want to die at the hands of police—and manipulates the definition to encompass a much larger category of cases,” wrote a University of California, Berkeley law professor in a 2025 article in the California Law Review.
The term was reportedly coined by a police officer-turned-psychologist in the 1980s, and in the two decades following, several studies purported to further refine the concept. These researchers determined that anywhere between 10 percent and a third of police shootings each year were actually suicides by cop. But, in 2026, there is no national database that tracks this highly subjective label.
In a 2014 bulletin, the FBI defined suicide by cop as “a situation where individuals deliberately place themselves or others at grave risk in a manner that compels the use of deadly force by police officers.” The various studies try to identify characteristics of suicides by cop: Someone seems to intentionally seek out danger, they have or appear to have a weapon, or they escalate the situation when police arrive.
But all those characteristics could be at play in any police shooting where the victim didn’t want or intend to die. So police end up making the determination of someone’s suicidality, which mental health professionals note is tricky. In a 2020 article published in a journal by the American Psychiatric Association, the authors write: “When evaluating a patient, it is impossible to predict whether that person will take his or her own life.”
Until recently, training for how to deal with a potential suicide by cop incident didn’t exist. In 2019, the national Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) created the first training guide on the subject, with the imperative: “Responding to a possible SBC call: Your goal is to resolve it so that everyone goes home safely.”
Officers are instructed to take cover, “make small requests” rather than “bark[ing] orders,” refrain from pointing their guns, and be patient.
Chuck Wexler, executive director of PERF, told the Observer that even after decades of hearing the term suicide by cop, he wasn’t clear on what it meant. After researching the theory and publishing the guidelines, he said the goal of using the label is to “prevent tragedies” and better understand police shootings.
“The term that we use is to explain the set of circumstances, but in no way to diminish the tragedy,” Wexler said.
After Williams’ death, protesters—including his school friends and his father—interrupted a city council meeting, rallied outside city hall, and entered the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, where they chanted: “Jail killer cops.”
To reporters, 16-year-old former classmate Ameer Alogaili emphasized how he’ll remember his friend: “a little kid at a park” who could always “put a smile on everybody’s face.”
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Observer Masthead Additions and a Farewell
I’m proud to announce that the Observer has hired Mary Tuma, a freelance contributor since 2020, as a staff writer covering reproductive rights and politics starting late next month. Mary has been a leading reporter on repro rights in Texas for more than a decade, including during her years on staff at the Austin Chronicle. See her story from this week about the state’s maternal mortality commission to get a sense of what’s to come:
After nearly four years as a McHam investigative fellow and then a staff writer at the Observer, Josephine Lee has returned to working as an educator. The body of work that Josephine put together here was ambitious, creative, empathetic—and she made a concrete difference through her reporting in the lives of Texas public school kids. You can find all her stories here to see an example of the Observer at its best.
July/August 2026 cover (Illustration by Clay Rodery)
Last, I’m excited to welcome Jason Buch, another longtime contributor, to the masthead as a special investigative correspondent covering border affairs, criminal justice, and civil rights. In this freelance role, he’ll regularly contribute the kind of hard-nosed reporting for which Observer readers already know and appreciate him.
See Jason’s work for the Observer here.
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What the Data Says About Electricity Shutoffs During Sweltering Texas Summers
In July 2024, the city-owned electric utility in Georgetown recorded two disconnections for nonpayment for every 10,000 residential accounts it served. In Garland, outside Dallas, the city-owned utility recorded 250, data shows.
Same state, same month. Neither utility was covered by the state rule that restricts cutting off power during a heat advisory.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC—which regulates the state’s electricity market—rules bar a retail electric provider from disconnecting a customer for nonpayment in any county where the National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory, or has issued one on either of the two preceding days. The rules, according to an agency spokesperson, “specifically apply to retail electric providers in the ERCOT region.” Municipal utilities and electric cooperatives answer to city councils and member boards instead. Asked whether the commission tracks what those utilities do, the agency said in a statement: “The PUCT does not collect or maintain disconnection data from municipally owned utilities or electric cooperatives.”
But for the first time, federal data makes that patchwork visible. In April, the U.S. Energy Information Administration released its first federal count of residential electricity shutoffs broken out utility by utility. Texas recorded more than 3 million residential disconnections in 2024, more than any other state. The survey counts disconnection events rather than distinct households, and one account can be shut off more than once in a year.
Among the utilities the heat rule does not reach, the range is extraordinary.
Measured against each utility’s average monthly shutoff rate from March through May, Georgetown’s midsummer rate fell 98 percent, from 1.44 disconnections per 100 accounts to 0.03. San Antonio’s CPS Energy fell 94 percent. Austin Energy, 61 percent. Denton, 58 percent.
Garland’s fell 17 percent. Greenville’s fell 4 percent. Bryan’s rose 14 percent. In Castroville, west of San Antonio, it rose 62 percent, and its July figure of 3.89 per 100 accounts is the highest single month of any municipal utility in the cleaned dataset, though on a base of only about 1,285 accounts.
The warnings did not stop. The federal survey counts final notices, the formal warnings utilities send to customers behind on their bills, separately from the disconnections themselves. Across Texas municipal utilities in the cleaned federal data, the average monthly final-notice rate rose about 10 percent between spring and mid-summer, from 4.3 per 100 accounts in March through May to 4.7 in July and August, while the disconnection rate fell 66 percent over the same stretch. The two measures moved in opposite directions. Fewer shutoffs in July and August did not come with fewer warnings, and no state rule required these utilities to ease off during the hottest months of the year.
Comparing same-month totals, disconnections equaled 32 percent of the final notices these utilities sent in March, 7.7 percent in August and 31.2 percent in October. The data does not link a particular notice to a particular shutoff, and a warning sent in one month may not produce a disconnection in that month.
One explanation for a summer lull would be timing rather than restraint. Utilities often wait until a customer is more than 90 days behind before cutting service, so mild spring bills would show up as low summer disconnection numbers. Jonathan Kim, research and communications manager the Energy and Policy Institute, which analyzed the federal data, said the rising notice figures cut against that. The Pattern, he said, “undermines the ‘low bill’ hypothesis somewhat.”
At CPS Energy the gap was stark. In July it reported 33,000 final notices and 404 disconnections.
CPS has a written policy that would seem to explain that pattern. Its terms of service say it will not disconnect residential service on a weekend or during an extreme weather emergency, and in summer will not disconnect while a heat advisory is active anywhere in its service area, or for two calendar days after it lifts. That closely tracks what the commission requires of retail electric providers, and on weekends CPS’s ban is unconditional whereas the state rule allows disconnection if staff are on hand to take payment. None of it is required: the commission’s rule does not apply to CPS Energy.
“Municipal utilities often have extreme weather policies or practices of their own, however, and these can be more or less protective than those required of regulated utilities,” said David Konisky, co-director of the Energy Justice Lab, which tracks disconnections nationally. “One consequence of this patchwork of policies is a lack of clarity for customers.”
The annual totals broken down by ownership type complicate that local picture. In 2024, utilities classified as investor-owned in Texas recorded 33.3 disconnections for every 100 residential accounts, according to an Observer analysis of the same cleaned data. Municipal utilities recorded 11.8. Cooperatives, 10.1. Nationally, the order runs the other way: municipals lead at 13.7, cooperatives at 10.2, investor-owned utilities at 9.1.
Two of Texas’ largest power companies account for roughly 92 percent of the state’s investor-owned disconnections, and neither sells electricity to the customers those figures cover. CenterPoint Energy recorded 954,139 disconnections against about 2.5 million accounts, a rate of roughly 38 per 100, though that annual total covers only 11 months because its July figure is blank. Oncor recorded 1,241,425 against about 3.5 million accounts, or almost 34 per 100.
Often, neither company made the decision. Across the state’s competitive market, the company that owns the wires does not sell the power. A retail provider holds the account and sends the bill. When a customer falls behind, the retailer asks the delivery utility to disconnect, and the delivery utility carries it out, which it can do remotely through a smart meter. The federal survey records the company that executed the order, not the one that placed it.
“We unfortunately do not have disconnection data for the retail energy providers who are often the ones ordering these disconnections,” said Jonathan Kim, research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that focuses on retail energy markets. He called the Texas investor-owned rate “an indictment of energy affordability and consumer protections in Texas.”
There is a second problem with the protection, and it is not unique to Texas. Disconnections here fall through the summer and peak in October.
“Disconnections tend to be lower in the summer months, when heat-based utility disconnection protections are in place, and higher in the fall months, after disconnection protections are removed,” said Sanya Carley, who co-directs the Energy Justice Lab with Konisky. “We assume this phenomenon is due to households acquiring arrearages during periods of protection and then being immediately at risk of disconnection once the protections end.” The lab observed the same phenomenon after pandemic-era state moratoria expired, she said, with significant spikes once they lifted.
If that holds, a heat advisory does not erase what a customer owes. It delays the disconnection while the unpaid balance keeps growing.
What arrives later is not necessarily milder. “Even if utility disconnects occur after the peak summer heat, they can result in inadequate or dangerous indoor temperatures,” said Michael Depland, communications director of Texas Housers, a housing research and advocacy group. Losing service also affects a household’s ability to refrigerate food or medication, he said, and unpaid balances can draw late fees or be sent to outside debt collectors.
Karen Lusson, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and author of a July report on disconnections during extreme heat, said legislatures should require all utilities, cooperatives and municipal utilities included, to follow both temperature-based and calendar-based prohibitions. Short of that: “Public utility commissions can send letters to these non-regulated entities and encourage them to abide by the same rules as regulated public utilities.”
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