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In Quick Response, de Blasio Calls Fatal Shooting of Mentally Ill Woman ‘Unacceptable’ In Quick Response, de Blasio Calls Fatal Shooting of Mentally Ill Woman ‘Unacceptable’
(about 3 hours later)
Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking in strikingly blunt terms, said on Wednesday that the fatal police shooting of a mentally ill 66-year-old woman in the Bronx was “tragic and unacceptable.” The essay recounted her long, aching struggle with mental illness, a battle that had begun some 30 years earlier.
The woman, Deborah Danner, had a long history of mental illness, and Mr. de Blasio said the sergeant who fired the fatal shot had failed to follow Police Department protocol for dealing with the woman. Filed away last year by a lawyer who had been helping the woman, the essay depicted a disturbing roll of memories, like the early morning spent roaming the streets of New York City with a knife in search a place to end her own life.
“It should never have happened. It’s as simple as that,” the mayor said at a midday news conference at City Hall, echoing the comments made by Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill earlier on Wednesday morning. And at one point, she described the fate that seemed to befall too many like her. “We are all aware of the all too frequent news stories about the mentally ill who come up against law enforcement instead of mental health professionals,” she wrote, “and end up dead.”
The sergeant, Hugh Barry, an eight-year veteran of the department, was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on modified duty within hours of the shooting, which happened early Tuesday evening in the Castle Hill neighborhood. On Tuesday, the woman who wrote the essay, Deborah Danner, 66, was fatally shot by a police sergeant in the bedroom of her Bronx apartment in a confrontation condemned in swift and striking terms by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill.
The action against the sergeant and the condemnation of his conduct were notable for how quickly and unequivocally the commissioner and the mayor responded to the shooting, which, like all police-involved shootings, will be the subject of lengthy investigations by the department and by prosecutors. Both the mayor and the commissioner said the officer had failed to follow the Police Department’s protocol for dealing with an emotionally disturbed person.
“What is clear in this one instance: We failed,” Mr. O’Neill said at a news briefing on Wednesday morning. “I want to know why it happened.” “What is clear in this one instance: We failed,” Mr. O’Neill said of the shooting. Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, called it “tragic and unacceptable.”
The episode was unfolding at a crucial moment, amid a heated national debate about race and the use of force by the police, and just one month into Mr. O’Neill’s tenure as commissioner. They pledged a thorough investigation, and even as the inquiry was still in its earliest stages, they took disciplinary action against the officer, Sgt. Hugh Barry, stripping him of his gun and badge and placing him on modified duty less than six hours after Ms. Danner was killed.
Mr. de Blasio said that the sergeant had failed to take steps that could have avoided the fatal confrontation, including waiting for the arrival of the specialized Emergency Services Unit, using his Taser or requesting that police negotiators be sent to the scene. “There was an opportunity to slow things down here and wait to get everything set up the right way,” he said. The fatal shooting recalled the 1984 death of Eleanor Bumpurs, another mentally ill woman killed by the police during a confrontation in her Bronx apartment building. It was a trying event for the city and for the department, and led to changes in how the agency responds to emotionally disturbed people. But more than three decades later, such encounters remain one of the most vexing and volatile parts of policing in New York and across the country.
The New York Police Department has expanded the availability of Tasers in the last year in an attempt to reduce the use of firearms, training an additional 4,000 officers to use the devices and nearly tripling the number in circulation. Just as the Bumpurs killing prompted outrage and protests, this killing, too, has aroused anger among ordinary people and elected officials alike. On Wednesday night, a group of demonstrators gathered outside the apartment building in the Castle Hill neighborhood where Ms. Danner was killed.
Several elected officials, including the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., and the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, as well as Ms. Danner’s sister, Jennifer Danners, called for an investigation by the state attorney general. One man held a sign that read, “Stop Police Terror.” Two women held yellow signs on sticks that read, “Justice for Deborah Danner.”
Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said that the office would review the shooting to see if it fell under the attorney general’s jurisdiction to investigate the deaths of civilians killed by law enforcement officers, a power created by an executive order by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in 2015. The killing of Ms. Danner, who was black, comes amid a national debate about policing and the use of deadly force by officers, particularly in confrontations with black people.
“We extend our deepest condolences to Ms. Danner’s family,” Ms. Spitalnick said. The fatal encounter began with a 911 call from a neighbor of Ms. Danner’s, who reported that she was acting erratically. It was not the first time the police had been summoned to deal with Ms. Danner, and initially it appeared the episode would end peacefully.
On Tuesday, the police arrived at the building around 6 p.m. after receiving a 911 call about an emotionally disturbed person. Neighbors said Ms. Danner had been acting erratically around that time. Sergeant Barry persuaded her to put down a pair of scissors she was holding in her bedroom, according to initial police accounts. But then, according to those same accounts, Ms. Danner picked up a baseball bat and swung at Sergeant Barry’s head. He fired twice, fatally wounding her, the police said. Several other officers were at the scene, but none of them, except Sergeant Barry, were in the bedroom.
Sergeant Barry, who was in uniform, entered Ms. Danner’s seventh-floor apartment and found her in a bedroom holding a pair of scissors, the police said. At some point during their exchange, she put down the scissors, picked up a baseball bat and tried to hit him with it, the police said. The sergeant fired two shots, striking Ms. Danner in her torso. In faulting the officer’s actions, Mr. de Blasio said Sergeant Barry should have waited for more specialized officers to respond to the scene. The mayor also noted that Sergeant Barry was equipped with a stun gun that he could have potentially used to try to subdue Ms. Danner.
The whole exchange lasted about 15 to 20 minutes, and the shooting occurred in close quarters, the police said. Ms. Danner died at Jacobi Medical Center. “There was an opportunity to slow things down here and wait to get everything set up the right way,” Mr. de Blasio said.
Wallace Cooke Jr., who said he was a cousin of Ms. Danner’s mother, said Ms. Danner learned she had mental illness when she was in college. New York City has begun providing its rank-and-file officers with more advanced training on dealing with people with mental illness. But the training, begun last year, has reached only about 4,400 of the Police Department’s roughly 36,000 officers, and Sergeant Barry had not done the four-day training regimen. Know as Crisis Intervention Training, the program has been used for years in many other police departments in the United States.
“I resent her being dead this morning,” said Mr. Cooke, a former police officer who retired in 1984 after working for 15 years at the 26th Precinct in Harlem. “It’s totally unnecessary to kill a mentally ill person.” Ms. Danner had interacted with the police before under similar circumstances, according to the mayor and a family member, likely at least one of the more than 100,000 calls for such people that the department responds to every year.
For many, the shooting was an echo of the fatal police shooting in 1984 of another 66-year-old woman, Eleanor Bumpurs, who was shot twice with a shotgun as officers were trying to help marshals evict her from a public housing apartment. The officer who shot her, Stephen Sullivan, said that Ms. Bumpurs was armed with a kitchen knife, and Officer Sullivan was later acquitted of a manslaughter charge. Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the union that represents Sergeant Barry, said he fired only after Ms. Danner swung the bat at his head, “fearing for his own life, as well as the lives of others.”
Mr. Diaz said in an interview that he appreciated the commissioner’s tone of remorse but that the circumstances of Ms. Danner’s killing called out for review. Mr. Mullins criticized Mr. O’Neill’s response to the shooting, and said it was motivated by “political expediency.”
“Was it absolutely necessary to shoot Ms. Danner once, let alone twice?” he said. “A 66-year-old elderly woman with a medical condition is dead today. We all have to do better.” “By making such a blanket statement so early on in an investigation,” Mr. Mullins said, “Commissioner O’Neill was, in essence, denying due process by supplanting public opinion and putting an expectation of results in the minds of the people who will ultimately investigate the case.”
Mr. de Blasio said that the police had been called to the building because of Ms. Danner’s behavior several other times. The encounter between Ms. Danner and Sergeant Barry lasted about 15 to 20 minutes, and the shooting occurred in close quarters, the police said.
She had not worked for years and lived alone, Mr. Cooke said. The police did not release an image of the bat or the scissors that the initial accounts described Ms. Danner as having used. Typically when officers shoot someone, the department will releases photographs of the weapon the police say the person had.
Ms. Danner’s sister, Jennifer Danner, joined several elected officials, including the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., and the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, both Democrats, in calling for an inquiry by the state attorney general.
Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said the office would review the shooting to determine whether it fell under its jurisdiction to investigate the deaths of civilians killed by law enforcement officers, a power created in 2015 by an executive order by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in the aftermath of a grand jury’s decision not to indict a police officer in Eric Garner’s death.
Wallace Cooke Jr., a former police officer, said he was a cousin of Ms. Danner’s mother.
“I resent her being dead this morning,” said Mr. Cooke, who retired in 1984 after working for 15 years in the 26th Precinct in Harlem. “It’s totally unnecessary to kill a mentally ill person.”
Charles J. Hargreaves, a lawyer for the state’s Mental Hygiene Legal Service, said he represented Ms. Danner in a case over her guardianship.
He said his heart sank when he learned the shooting was at a building on Pugsley Avenue, where he remembered her address was, after meeting her there in 2015.
“When I heard the news I thought, oh my God, it can’t be her,” Mr. Hargreaves said. He recalled the essay she had given him that so poignantly described the challenges of her mental illness, titled “Living With Schizophrenia,” and then reread it.
“I hadn’t read it in a long time,” he said. “It was even more prescient than I remembered.”