When insanity can get you killed

When hundreds of demonstrators recently took to the street to protest the police killing of seriously mentally ill New Yorkers, my main question was: What took you so long? New York is long overdue for a complete overhaul of the way we treat severely mentally ill people. And by long, I mean at least 33 years, the length of time since a 66-year-old grandmother named Eleanor Bumpurs was shot to death by police attempting to evict her from an apartment in the Sedgwick Houses.

Bumpurs was four months behind on her rent of $96.85. Less than a week before cops arrived, a city social worker and psychiatrist had visited her. She told them that then-President Ronald Reagan had vandalized her apartment.

The psychiatrist wrote that the elderly woman “is psychotic, does not know reality from non-reality.” Somehow, that information translated into an armed team of officers who tried to extract her from the apartment and found Bumpurs naked, terrified and holding a knife.

She was killed with a shotgun blast. I remember covering the ensuing demonstrations.

More than two decades later, too little had changed.

In 2007, I interviewed the anguished mother of a teenager named Khiel Coppin, who had called Interfaith Medical Center for help because her son was off his meds and acting odd. When the medical team arrived, Khiel wasn’t around — and when he did return and began raging and ranting, his mother called the cops.

“Come get me! I have a gun! Let’s do this!” Khiel shouted at the cops. He was holding a hairbrush. Cops fired 10 bullets into the teenager, killing him.

This year, like every year, we can point to half a dozen similar cases; that is why people are protesting. More power to them.

James Owens, a 63-year-old man who had wrestled with mental illness his whole life, was tasered, then shot to death by cops in January. He was holding a knife and a spoon.

In July, a 32-year-old man named Dwayne Jeune fell into the same fatal pattern at his Flatbush Gardens home. Family members called to report erratic behavior, after which cops arrived, shooting first with a taser and then bullets, killing Jeune.

And last fall saw a trio of tragedies. In the Bronx last October, a neighbor called cops and claimed a man named Ariel Galarza was agitated and holding a knife; he died after being tasered by cops — and it turned out the “knife” was actually a bottle of hot sauce.

That same month, 66-year-old Deborah Danner, who suffered from schizophrenia, was shot to death in her apartment. Sgt. Hugh Barry, who killed her, has been indicted and charged with murder.

And in November, Erickson Gomez Brito, who had struggled with addiction and depression, was shot to death in the Van Dyke Houses in Brownsville after scuffling with cops.

“Where have we come since Eleanor Bumpurs?” says attorney Sanford Rubenstein, who is representing several of the families of emotionally disturbed New Yorkers killed by cops. “The killing has to stop.”

According to the NYPD, as of late July, only 16% of NYPD officers were properly trained in how to handle cases involving emotionally disturbed people.

Mental health activist D.J. Jaffe has been a vocal critic of the city’s efforts, including the de Blasio administration’s Thrive NYC initiative. At a panel discussion hosted by the Manhattan Institute earlier this year, Jaffe said the city’s hotline and outreach efforts were largely wasted on the most seriously ill.

“When you have a disorder in your brain and you think you are the messiah, you are not going to go in for treatment. You like being the messiah,” Jaffe told me. “Forty percent of seriously mentally ill New Yorkers receive zero services — not counseling, not medication.” The best solution, he says, is to expand community-based outreach programs with the skill, patience and track record to connect with the very toughest populations — people who have fallen through the safety net and ended up on street corners and subway platforms, skipping their medication and talking to themselves.

In addition to heeding Jaffe’s advice, the NYPD should make sure 100% of officers are trained in how to deal with disturbed people, and do it quickly. That protocol should focus on keeping people safely contained — or even walking away altogether — until trained counselors can arrive.

Above all, we should avoid kidding ourselves about whether the city is making measurable progress in this area. The body count strongly suggests otherwise.