These teams and their trainings grew out of Memphis, Tenn., in 1987 after police fatally shot Joseph DeWayne Robinson, 27-year-old who was in a mental crisis and cutting himself with a butcher knife.ĬIT programs and trainings soon spread from Memphis to thousands of departments across the country. Rochester created its Crisis Intervention Team in 2004 after a case similar to Prude's. Some Rochester police, in theory, were trained to do just that – to recognize and deescalate confrontations with someone in a mental health meltdown someone just like Daniel Prude. All of that is so important when deescalating such a scale of an event," she says of the Prude case. "Change your tone of voice, your body language, hell, you might have to get on the ground with him! Give him eye contact. Yes to calm talk and careful deescalation. Schulik and many others in the mental health field in the city are trying to change how the police respond to these kinds of crisis calls. Daniel Prude, and we don't want to see any more names," says Krystal Schulik a drug and alcohol counselor in Rochester. "We know what happened that night for Mr. "I placed the phone call for my brother to get help, not for my brother to get lynched," said Joseph Prude, who told police that his brother, Daniel, was having a mental breakdown and was on drugs.ĭaniel, who had recently arrived at his brother's from Chicago, had already been seen by a local hospital for erratic behavior and suicidal thoughts the previous day.Ī lawsuit by the Prude family says Prude was undergoing an "acute manic, psychotic episode." The Monroe County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, citing asphyxia due to physical restraint by police and acute intoxication from the drug PCP as causes of death. He was taken off life support at a local hospital a week later. They pressed his face into the pavement for two minutes, one officer pushing heavily on Prude's head, according to bodycam video of the encounter. Three officers pinned Prude to the ground as he became increasingly agitated. It was the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in the state. Officers handcuffed Prude and put a hood over his head, apparently to stop him from spitting at them. He was suffering a mental breakdown exacerbated by drug abuse. The 41-year-old Black man was wandering the street, naked and babbling. A light snow was falling when police confronted him. on March 23, Daniel Prude was unraveling. And the March asphyxiation death of Daniel Prude there during a police confrontation, which has badly shaken the city and its police and political structure, offers a vivid example of the shortcomings and misreading of CITs.Īround 3 a.m. Rochester had created one of New York state's first crisis intervention teams. Vivid example of the shortcomings of CITs Shots - Health News Is It A Meth Case Or Mental Illness? Police Who Need To Know Often Can't Tell Even some proponents and trainers of CITs now say the model has been misread and poorly implemented by many departments. Still, many departments appear reluctant to abandon a widely-used program for handling mental health and substance abuse crisis calls, called crisis intervention teams or CITs, even though the programs have proved largely ineffective. Then there's the recent police shooting of a homeless man in crisis in Buffalo, N.Y. One of the many examples: the recent shooting of a distraught 13-year-old boy with an autism spectrum disorder by Salt Lake City police after his mother called officers to report that her son was having "a mental breakdown." The teenager is recovering from serious wounds. There's anecdotal evidence that botched encounters between police and people in a mental crisis are up during the pandemic. Injuries, too, are common although they are less carefully tracked. Since 2015, nearly a quarter of all people killed by police officers in America have had a known mental illness. Many are calling for removing or dramatically reducing law enforcement's role in responding to those crisis calls unless absolutely necessary. Nationwide protests over police accountability and racial justice have reenergized longstanding efforts to fundamentally change how police departments respond to someone in a mental health emergency. Demonstrators march through the streets of Rochester, N.Y., earlier this month protesting the death of Daniel Prude, apparently stopped breathing as police were restraining him in March.
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