By all accounts, in the early morning hours of March 23 last year, Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Rochester, New York, man, was having a psychotic break. Prude’s fate was sealed after his brother, trying to help, called 911. Police responded by handcuffing the naked Prude, pinning him to the ground and suffocating him to death.
“Mr. Daniel Prude was failed by our police, our mental health care system, our society, and by me,” Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said during a press conference about the incident.
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Over the past year, the use of 911 calls to dispatch police in psychiatric emergencies is coming under long-overdue scrutiny, and momentum is building to divert these calls to mental health crisis teams. Such reforms, advocates say, could have prevented interactions with law enforcement that ended the lives of Prude, Nicolas Chavez, Walter Wallace Jr., Angelo Quinto, Deborah Tanner, and countless others who were met with weapons rather than psych care.