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EDITORIAL: New York should follow Western cities by sending mental health calls to experts

Buffalo News - 4/7/2021

Apr. 6—New York is missing a bet on a matter that, when the wager goes wrong, people die. The State Legislature wants to train police in New York City to better handle calls regarding people suffering a mental health crisis when it should be following the example of cities that are sending those calls to civilian teams trained in de-escalating those volatile situations.

New York has had enough tragic experience to know that sending armed police into such situations can quickly turn deadly. In Rochester and New York City, it has. In Buffalo, it's only by luck that it didn't.

It's not that police weren't provoked or that people suffering a mental health crisis can't be a danger to themselves or others. The point is that police aren't meant to be mental health responders and that their mere presence can constitute a threat to someone in the grip of a delusion.

Other cities are showing a better way. They are training civilian teams to de-escalate such confrontations and provide help where it is needed. As USA Today reported this week, Eugene, Ore., has operated a program like that for more than three decades, successfully enough that Olympia, Wash., and Denver are implementing their own similar efforts. The good news is that it appears to be working.

Denver began a pilot program last year and in its first six months, the trained civilian team responded to 748 of 2,500 emergency calls. No calls required police, and no one was arrested.

"It's extremely successful, and it's even better than what we had anticipated," Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen told the newspaper. "Right off the bat, we had officers on every shift saying, 'When can we get more of this and expand this?'"

It's impossible not to speculate that Daniel Prude might still be alive had a similar program been underway in Rochester. Prude, a 41-year-old man suffering a mental health crisis, died after police held him naked and handcuffed on a city street until he stopped breathing.

Here in Buffalo, Willie Henley might not have been shot in the abdomen and a police officer not attacked had a trained, civilian team responded to him last September.

A 911 caller had reported that a man was behaving erratically in the downtown area, swinging a bat and screaming for hours. Police responded and followed Henley for several blocks before he struck one of the officers with an expandable metal baton, according to the officer's attorney. In response, her supervisor fired two shots, striking Henley once.

Henley, 61 and homeless, was found not competent to proceed with his trial last moth and was sent to a psychiatric facility in Rochester. A question: Might a trained and unarmed civilian team have talked him down and found the care he needed without an officer being injured and without him suffering a potentially fatal gunshot wound?

There's no way to prove that, of course, but it's a fair observation that police officers, trained to maintain order through a command presence, are less likely than trained mental health professionals to have the necessary skills or temperament to safely defuse noncriminal, high-stress situations.

Buffalo is going half-way toward the standards that the three Western cities have adopted. Under Mayor Byron W. Brown's approach, a handful of licensed clinical social workers now work alongside police when they respond to calls involving mental health or substance abuse. It's a better idea, but mental health professionals and others have nonetheless criticized the plan as unsafe, in part because the Behavioral Health Team works only day shifts, Monday through Friday.

Police were never supposed to have this responsibility loaded onto their shoulders. It happened because, decades ago, the state moved mentally ill New Yorkers out of hospitals without providing the promised outpatient care. It's past time to relieve police of this burden and place it in more appropriate hands.

----What's your opinion? Send it to us at lettertoeditor@buffnews.com. Letters should be a maximum of 300 words and must convey an opinion. The column does not print poetry, announcements of community events or thank you letters. A writer or household may appear only once every 30 days. All letters are subject to fact-checking and editing.

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