The first time we heard the phrase “suicide by cop” was two years ago. A Hilltown man, Ken Fortuin, had blocked off his driveway and set his own house on fire. Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said that he had worried “it would be suicide by cop.”

Fortuin was in a pickup truck in a field near his house when the sheriff’s emergency response team “more or less surrounded him,” Apple said. Fortuin had a gun with him.

Three armored military vehicles converged on the pickup truck. The sheriff’s office used its armored Humvee and an MRAP — a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, which it got from the Department of Defense as it was no longer needed in Iraq. The State Police had a BearCat.

“He had nowhere to go,” said Apple, noting the armored vehicles “allowed our response teams to get very close.”

An investigator with special training handled the negotiations. “We observed he had a firearm in his hand…No shot was fired,” said Apple. “You couldn’t have a better ending.”

An incident in the Hilltowns last month didn’t have such a good ending. State Troopers shot a man who came at them with a knife in each hand, according to Captain Robert Patnaude. He said that Carl Baranishyn Jr. had called 9-1-1 the night of April 22, threatening to kill himself or kill police.

Two Troopers arrived on the scene in a single patrol car. Both Troopers were out of the car when, on the dark road, Baranishyn came at them. “Numerous commands were made for him to drop the knives,” Patnaude said. “He kept coming. They were forced to shoot him.” He was shot three times. Attempts to revive him failed.

The next day, an Albany County medical examiner performed an autopsy and listened to a tape of the 9-1-1 call; he determined the cause of death was “suicide by police,” said Patnaude.

We don’t blame the two Troopers for Baranishyn’s death. They did what they were trained to do. They were the endpoint for a death that might have been avoided if there had been earlier interventions.

Patnaude explained that, in order for a taser to work, both of its prongs have to attach for the stun gun to temporarily knock down a person. If one prong misses or doesn’t penetrate, he said, “the subject is on you.” He said the same of shooting for a leg or a shoulder; stopping the attacker wouldn’t be a sure thing.

“When you shoot a gun, you aim for center mass, the chest area, to give you the most room for hitting,” said Patnaude. “You’re likely to miss a leg, which is narrow. The torso is where the vital organs are.”

There were no armored vehicles for the police to safely approach the knife-wielding man. The Troopers were faced with a deadly force and responded in kind.

Being the means of another’s death can be unbearable.  Rebecca A. Stincelli who maintains a website, “Suicide By Cop: Victims From Both Sides of the Badge,” offers this advice to police: “Consider that professional counseling does not diminish your character. Yes, you are a cop, but you are a human first, with frailties and strengths, all of which inform your character. You did what you had to do — what you were trained to do.”

The words of the captain and the counselor have something in common — police do what they are trained to do. That raises the question: Should they be trained to react differently in a situation where suicide by cop is a possibility?

Clinton R. Van Zandt wrote a paper for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, starting with firsthand experience. He was a negotiator who tried in vain to talk a man out of suicide by cop.

In 1981, William Griffin had taken hostages in a bank and told the manager to call the police and tell them, “If they don’t come into the bank and execute me, in one-half hour I’ll start throwing out bodies.” He stuck to his word, killing a teller before police shot him.

“Why did Griffin do this?” asks Van Zandt. “To our knowledge, prior to the Griffin case, never in the history of the United States had a hostage taker killed a hostage on deadline.”

Van Zandt’s research led him to this conclusion, “Most people know law enforcement officers are taught to use only the minimum force necessary to resolve an incident, and will use deadly force only in response to a life-threatening situation. The potential SBC [Suicide By Cop] knows and understands violence and uses the weapon of the law enforcement officer to commit the act of suicide by the hand of the officer.”

Van Zandt developed a list of 16 indicators of someone who might initiate a suicide by cop. Later research by Harvard Medical School colleagues Deirdre Anglin and H. Range Hutson, published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, found that one in 10 shootings by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies were suicides by cop, and that 98 percent were provoked by men — many with drug or alcohol dependencies and many with a history of domestic violence.

“If an individual is identified as a potential SBC, the police response should be low key and non-dramatic,” Van Zandt writes. “The infusion of lights and sirens only contributes to the carnival-like nature of confrontations between armed individuals and the authorities. The arrival of the media simply adds more fuel to the fire already burning within the suicide-prone person.”

If there are no hostages, if police are called to a scene like the one on April 21 — a deserted country road with no one in sight but the knife-wielding man — why not stay in the car and radio for help, or simply drive away, perhaps returning with a mental-health expert who could diffuse the situation?

Mind you, we’re not saying the Troopers on the scene that night were equipped to do this; they were following their training. But what if the training were changed?

The New York Times last month profiled police departments, like the one in Portland, Oregon, that are training officers to handle citizens with mental illnesses differently. The story started by describing a man on the Portland waterfront with a samurai sword — it was late and the area was deserted; when the police couldn’t get him to drop the sword, they ultimately disengaged and left him there.

Albany County this week is sponsoring training for local police to safely interact with people in the midst of mental-health crises. (See related story.) The Crisis Intervention Team training, developed three decades ago, is becoming more common as studies have shown that a quarter of the people shot dead by police have had a mental disorder.

“For us, the goal is just to slow down,” said Lieutenant Willie Flack III of the Albany Police Department, one of the directors of the CIT training going on this week. “We can sit there all day if need be,” he said of talking with and calming down someone in a crisis.

Such training is admirable. We urge our local police departments to consider it. Training that can diffuse a crisis would be safer for citizens and for the police officers who risk their lives to make our society safer.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer