BY TONY BOUZA
On Oct. 18, 2016, Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old black woman, was shot dead in the Bronx by an NYPD sergeant responding to a 911 call that said she was acting erratically. She was brandishing scissors and then a baseball bat she swung at the sergeant.
Ms. Danner had written an essay, “Living with Schizophrenia,” in which she described her helpless capture by the illness. A terrifying depiction of her dilemma.
The sergeant’s action was described as a failure and still another investigation was launched. The New York Times called for sending “mental health professionals to accompany officers on calls like these.”
Yes.
Minneapolis is considering a mental health co-responder program that would embed mental health workers with cops responding to calls involving mental health issues.
If you just look at the homeless population, one of the features that immediately pops out is that about a fourth are mentally disturbed; a fourth are addicted (drugs or alcohol); a large contingent is single mothers with kids; and the rest “other.”
Minneapolis police once led experiments on domestic abuse that resulted in the adoption of arrest as the best approach. The study was led by America’s foremost criminologist, Dr. Lawrence W. Sherman, and was widely adopted.
Sherman studied “hot spots” and how some locations contributed, disproportionately, to crime and violence.
Many experiments, reforms and innovations were funded by the McKnight Foundation and its leader, the wonderful Virginia McKnight Binger.
That was then. This is now.
The Minneapolis Police Department has the chance to adopt training and response methods that address the great challenges posed by a population of the mentally disturbed who have been loosed on the streets by the closing of mental care facilities. This was made possible by the development of drugs to control much aberrational behavior. Only problem was how to insure they take their medicine.
We live in an age where the police are assigned to respond to problems—racism, economic inequality, addiction, mental disturbances—for which they have scant training and few resources beyond the local jail. As we’ve seen, this has led to tragic—yet often preventable—results.
I will confess I am not sanguine, but I do believe that silence is acquiescence.
Heidi Ritchie, aide to Council Member Jacob Frey, Ward 3, wrote: “Mayor Hodges has also proposed funding for a co-responder pilot program in which a mental health specialist would respond alongside officers on mental distress calls for service. In addition, all new officers are receiving the Crisis Response Training, which trains officers to respond to and deal appropriately with mental distress calls.”
