Related article:
Police: TASER on nude man violated policy
By Reid J. Epstein
Newsday
NEW YORK — The New York City Police Department must create a crisis intervention unit to respond to mentally disabled or disturbed people, state Sen. Eric Adams said yesterday on the Brooklyn block where an emotionally disturbed man died in police hands last week.
Psychiatric patient Iman Morales, 35, climbed naked onto his Bedford-Stuyvesant fire escape Wednesday and fell 10 feet to the ground after he was stunned by a Taser gun fired by an officer from the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit. Morales fell on his head with nothing to cushion his fall.
Adams (D-Brooklyn) said if the NYPD does not create a crisis intervention team by year’s end, he will introduce legislation in Albany that would force them to do so. Adams said law enforcement agencies in other parts of the country have adopted such rules and the NYPD should do the same. “Our model of policing these situations is not acceptable anymore,” said Adams, a former NYPD captain.
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the department’s top spokesman, issued a statement yesterday that did not directly address the call to create a crisis intervention unit.
“The NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit responds successfully to over 80,000 calls annually involving emotionally disturbed persons, by far the most experienced of any law enforcement agency,” Browne said. “In virtually all instances, department training and guidelines are adhered to.”
Browne said last week that the Emergency Services Unit officers had no plan for what to do after stunning Morales. He added that the lieutenant in charge of the operation and the officer who fired the Taser are under investigation because their action violated departmental guidelines that state the Taser “should not be used ... in situations where the subject may fall from an elevated surface.” Adams was joined on Tompkins Avenueby representatives from the groups 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the Grand Council of Guardians and The National Latino Officers Association. Marq Claxton, the co-founder of the black officers’ organization, said the NYPD should follow the lead of police departments in Texas and California, which have established crisis intervention teams to handle situations involving mentally disturbed people.
“It is a matter of protecting and preserving human rights,” said Claxton, a retired NYPD detective.
Adams also called for the police department to attach video cameras to the end of its Taser guns. The cameras, he said, would record any incidents in which a Taser is used to determine whether the department’s rules have been followed.
Copyright 2008 Newsday