Shooting Death of Mentally Ill Bronx Woman Highlights Problem in Police Procedure, Advocates Say

The murder indictment of an NYPD sergeant last week highlights one of the most challenging aspects of police work — how to respond to a person having a mental-health crisis.

While experts say criminal liability may be difficult to prove, mental health advocates believe the case should be a catalyst for change.

The day after 66-year-old Deborah Danner was killed last October, Mayor Bill de Blasio called the shooting unacceptable. He recounted a conversation he had with Danner’s sister, Jennifer, who lived in the same building. Jennifer was standing in the hallway of Deborah's apartment, waiting to accompany her schizophrenic sister to the hospital as she had in the past.

“She told me she did not, in any way, expect to hear gunshots ring out. It was a very painful conversation to say the least,” de Blasio said.

This was not the first time the police had been called to Danner's apartment. But this time, 31-year-old Sergeant Hugh Barry didn’t follow proper procedures, the mayor said.

“There was certainly the protocol that called for deferring to the Emergency Services Unit that was not followed. There was obviously the option of using a Taser, that was not employed,” de Blasio said at the time. 

Last week, Barry was indicted on charges of murder, manslaughter and criminally-negligent homicide. But even if Barry failed to follow police protocol, that isn’t a crime, said John Eterno, a former NYPD Captain and associate dean in criminal justice at Molloy College on Long Island.

“His duty as a police officer is to use the minimum amount of force and to do whatever he can to try to stop the [situation], but his duty under the law is very different than the duty in the patrol guide,” said Eterno. “The duty under the law, article 35, clearly states he does not have a duty to retreat and that’s very different.”

Police officers don't have a responsibility to back off while under threat, or to wait for assistance. 

On the day Danner was shot, police were responding to a call about an emotionally disturbed person, called an EDP in police jargon, who was screaming in the hallway. Four officers and two Emergency Medical Technicians arrived at the seventh-floor apartment in Castle Hill. Danner didn’t want to let them in or go to the hospital, but eventually she opened the door. Prosecutors said when Barry got there, he rushed inside without seeking critical information about her.

Danner was sitting in her bedroom. Prosecutors said she was holding scissors and then “holding a wooden bat toward Barry.” He shot her two times.

NYPD officers receive hundreds of EDP calls a day. In June 2015, the de Blasio administration adopted a program to teach police how to respond. During a visit to the police academy last year, a police trainer, Detective Edward Scali, said one of the first things an officer should do is calm down.

“Our emotions get so high. We’re responding, you know, 60-70 miles per hour with the lights and sirens on,” Scali said.

In order to stay safe and improve communication, officers are told to assess the scene for danger, and then to gather information from the 911 dispatcher and anyone else who knows the person’s history.

When it’s time to approach a subject in distress, Scali said an officer should ask open-ended questions and let the person vent.

“If you can mirror what they’re saying to you and reflect back to them, almost paraphrasing what they said, you at least show a bit of empathy,” he explained. “By building that empathy, by sharing those feelings and emotions that they’re going through, you’re going to be able to build a positive rapport with that individual.”

The NYPD said more than 5,500 officers have received some form of this training, called Crisis Intervention Team. But Barry wasn’t one of them.

Carla Rabinowitz consulted on the training program as part of her work with Community Access, an organization that provides housing and other services for the mentally ill. She said the Danner case revealed a major problem with police procedure: there’s no way to get a trained officer to the scene of an EDP call.  

“There should be a way that the 911 operator knows that, OK, here’s the CIT officer in the area, let me dispatch him to the call immediately,” Rabinowitz said.

The NYPD didn’t respond to a question about how the department planned to address the issue of fully-utilizing officers with crisis team training. 

Officers at a scene can instead call in the Emergency Services Unit, which responds more aggressively to situations. They carry shields to protect themselves and bars that help them pin people to walls. The mayor said Barry should have called that unit in — but Rabinowitz said that there are only about 300 of these officers, too few to handle the high volume of EDP calls.

“They don’t get there in the first 3 or 4 minutes,” she said. “And even if they got there, they’re not the more compassionate officers we want.”   

Danner herself feared a deadly altercation with police. In a 2012 essay, she recalled Eleanor Bumpurs, a 66-year-old, mentally ill black woman who was shot and killed by an Emergency Services Unit officer in 1984, after she threatened his partner with a knife.

“They were not trained sufficiently in how to engage the mentally ill in crisis,” Danner wrote.

The officer in the Bumpurs case was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter. Afterwards, the NYPD started to require a senior officer on the scene before someone in crisis could be approached. On the evening Danner was killed, that officer was Barry.