Photo: Richard Drew/AFP/Getty Images
Mayor Zohran Mamdani had less than a month on the job when the January 26 shooting of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old man with schizophrenia, in his family’s Queens home, underscored the urgent need for a new approach to how the city deals with people with mental illness.
The ritual captured on body-worn camera footage is unbearably familiar. Chakraborty’s family, desperate for help, asked a 911 operator for medical help but instead got police officers who drew their guns and shouted commands at the young man, who became more agitated and terrified and began waving a knife. Within seconds, gunshots.
Chakraborty is lucky to have survived the shooting, which looked a lot like the way cops killed Deborah Danner. And Kawaski Trawick. And Win Rosario. And Saheed Vassell. And many other New Yorkers over the years.
It’s time to break the cycle. Mamdani and a majority of City Council members have promised to fix a system that has been broken for decades. It’s up to the rest of us to make them keep their word.
“I think what’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work but they are not operating at the scale that they could be,” Mamdani told me shortly before Election Day. His plan is to create a Department of Community Safety that would expand the NYPD’s Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD), which pairs cops with social workers and psychiatric professionals to respond to calls that require a medical response rather than deadly force. Mamdani says the new agency would be funded with $605 in existing NYPD funds and $400 million in new revenue.
“35% of calls that Be Heard was eligible for, they did not respond to, and the police responded. And part of that is because it has been underfunded, part of it is because it has completely been deprioritized,” Mamdani said. “To me, the vision of B-HEARD has to be one where we have it present in every single neighborhood, and in the 20 neighborhoods of the highest need, that we have two or three teams. And that we increase funding for it by about 150%.”
According to an investigation by The City news organization, B-HEARD is being all but ignored, with 86% of mental health calls going to regular cops instead of the specialized teams. The City Council is set to hold hearings on the mayor’s still-evolving proposal, and should expect a lot of hot air from critics who are utterly clueless about the documented success other cities like Olympia, Washington and Eugene, Oregon, have enjoyed by using a different approach to these fraught situations. Mamdani, to his credit, has educated himself on the subject.
“In Denver, they have a STAR program. This is a program that focuses on low-level crime,” he told me. “In the neighborhoods where they focused, crime went down by 34%. Over the period of a number of years, they had 12,000 clinical interactions. Of those, only 3% required a medical hold.”
In addition to looking at other cities, New York should examine our own history. In 1984, seven years before Mamdani was born, New York Police Department officers shot and killed a 66-year-old Bronx woman named Eleanor Bumpurs in the course of trying to evict her from the Sedgewick Houses for nonpayment of several months of rent totaling $417.
Prior to the eviction, a social worker named Herman Ruiz and a Manhattan psychiatrist named Robert John had interviewed Bumpurs to inquire about her health. John got entry to the apartment by knocking on the door and saying “Hello Mrs. Bumpurs. I’m a doctor. We have come to help.” His handwritten notes informed the New York City Housing Authority that the grandmother was “psychotic” and “does not know reality from non-reality. Her judgment is impaired. She is unable to manage her affairs properly” and “is in need of hospital investigation and treatment.”
Remarkably, the medical interview took place while Bumpurs was holding a butcher knife. “I felt that she was holding the knife defensively, and she made no offensive gesture with it, neither did she threaten us verbally. She was not a danger to herself or others,” John wrote. This [was] a woman who was strongly experiencing, as far as she knew, people coming into her apartment at night, hearing voices, people speaking about herself and being threatened.”
The calm professionalism of the psychiatrist and social worker is worth noting. In a pattern that dates back to last year’s campaign, scornful conservatives, especially cops and ex-cops, routinely dismiss the idea that anyone but armed officers must be present at any encounter with an emotionally or mentally distressed person. The actual experience of the Bumpurs case strongly suggests otherwise.
Four days after Dr. John’s talk with the grandmother10 to 15 city workers, including heavily-armed members of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit, broke into her apartment shouting commands and holding shields, guns and a long restraining Y-bar. Less than a minute later, when Bumpurs charged at the intruders with her knife, Officer Stephen Sullivan killed her with two blasts from a shotgun. Sullivan was prosecuted for manslaughter but acquitted after a non-jury bench trial.
The incident inspired a generation of activists, artists and voters to demand reform of the NYPD. LaShawn Harris, a neighbor of Bumpurs who was 10 years old at the time of the killing, grew up to be a historian whose new book, Tell Her Story, a penetrating account of the Bumpurs case and its aftermath, should be required reading for today’s city leaders. “I wanted people to think about how we treat one another, particularly those who have mental health conditions and what we are willing to invest in and what and what we’re willing to hold our politicians accountable to,” she told me.
Mamdani says that sticking to his reform plan is part of “a larger story around the void that Democrats often leave in the debate around any of these issues. We sometimes are almost embarrassed about our own ideals and our own convictions and our legislation,” he told me. “I think that this is a real moment to make clear what those convictions are and explain why we actually have them.”
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