Saving the next Saheed Vassell
The killing of Saheed Vassell by NYPD officers — and the city government’s defensive response to community outrage over the killing — demonstrates that New York still has much room for serious discussion and immediate improvement when it comes to handling the volatile intersection of serious mental illness and public safety.
Everyone agrees that the killing of Vassell, a man with psychiatric problems, was a tragedy. Storming around the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in an agitated state on the final day of his life, waving a metal pipe as if it were a pistol, Vassell needed help from city government, not a fusillade of bullets.
Some local advocates have been sharply critical of the de Blasio administration.
“People are outraged that, once again, we're dealing with a situation where an African-American male has lost their life,” said Mike Tucker, founder of Lay the Guns Down Foundation. “Why? Why hasn’t there been preventive actions to stop these types of killings?”
The Brooklyn Movement Center, which has been working on community anti-violence initiatives for years, issued a statement calling for more accountability from City Hall.
“Despite the mayor and First Lady touting their mental health initiative, they continue to be silent about the repeated killings of people in emotional distress by police, which now totals at least 11 in the past four years,” said Anthonine Pierre, deputy director of the center.
I spoke with author D.J. Jaffe, whose book “Insane Consequences” specifically points to shortcomings in New York’s treatment of the seriously mentally ill.
Vassell, says Jaffe, “was somebody who’d been taken to the hospital multiple times by police without incident, then was released by the hospital without appropriate followup treatment. So I blame the mental health system for not seeing that the most seriously mentally ill get treatment.”
According to Jaffe, the de Blasio administration’s massive ThriveNYC mental health program is more focused on the “worried well” than the seriously disturbed.
“Families of the mentally ill beg and plead for treatment and cannot get it,” Jaffe told me. “The mayor keeps saying, ‘Call 1-800-NYC -WELL.’ If you call that phone number, what happens is it takes two days to get an outreach worker to come — a minimum of two days, if they come. And most of the time they’ll tell you, ‘Call the police.’ ”
The NYPD has complicated matters by releasing a highly selectively, creatively edited reel compiled from surveillance cameras. The edits zoom in on Vassell at various moments, freezing on frames that show him pointing a silver pipe at startled pedestrians. Transcripts of some 911 calls — not the actual audio — were released to the media.
In its haste to justify and exonerate the officers who killed Vassell, the NYPD ended up looking like an organization with something to hide.
We don’t know what the officers — as opposed to the NYPD’s video editors — actually saw when they arrived on the scene. We don’t know what warnings or instructions, if any, were conveyed to Vassell before he was shot.
And we don’t know whether neighborhood coordination officers assigned to the sector of the 71st Precinct were specifically aware of Vassell, who reportedly had dozens of encounters with cops in the past, including a hospitalization in 2011 and a call from Vassell’s mother in 2014.
City leaders — including elected officials, police commanders and community activists — should agree to take a few important steps to prevent a repeat of this disaster.
The fact that Vassell was shot at 10 times suggests the NYPD should reconsider its current training, which allows officers to use whatever level of force is needed to neutralize a perceived threat.
In 2016, San Francisco — in the wake of an incident in which cops shot a knifewielding suspect 21 times — began training officers to fire twice and then assess the situation before shooting again. New York should study the experience and see whether a similar change can be attempted here.
To increase community trust, stunts like the NYPD’s video creation should be banned as a matter of policy. Instead, a full release of raw, untouched footage — including audio of 911 calls — should be presented to the public as soon as possible. And we need a public debate over whether ThriveNYC should direct more attention and resources toward making sure that health workers, hand in hand with cops, serve as first responders when serious mental illness is known or suspected.
Above all, we should all resist the urge to justify past actions and attempt some fresh thinking about how to keep our mentally ill friends, families and neighbors safe.