Year after year, mental health remains one of New York City’s biggest policy challenges, as lawmakers, mental health advocates and clinicians work on measures
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 cou
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When officers from the Rochester Police Department arrived on the scene of a family dispute involving a 9-year-old girl in emotional distress in January, a brand-new tool was at the city’s disposal: Rochester’s new Person in Crisis team. Launched earlier that month, the PIC team was created as an alternative response to mental health, substance abuse and other emergency calls that would normally involve police or paramedics. Instead of police officers being the first responders to these calls – and risking the potential that the encounter could escalate into a violent one, as was the case in the death of Daniel Prude in Rochester last year – a two-person team of crisis intervention counselors and social workers would show up with the aim of de-escalating, assessing what level of care the person in crisis needed and helping to connect the person to the relevant resources, such as a mental health urgent care center.