Council bill would not save our sons
Our children, Mohamed Bah and Saheed Vassell, were killed by the NYPD and failed by New York City’s mental health system. We are part of a club we never wanted to join: families whose loved ones have been killed by police.
Mohamed, a 28-year-old honor student, was killed by NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers in his own home on Sept. 25, 2012. Saheed, a loving father, good son and great help to his community, was killed by the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group on April 4, 2018.
It doesn’t matter how much training the police get — it won’t prevent killings like those of our children or other New Yorkers like Iman Morales, Kawaski Trawick, and too many others.
The need to fix our broken mental health system, get police out of mental health, and make our communities safe is personal. We’ve been fighting for change since our children were killed.
This month, the New York City Council plans to pass a package of police reform bills, including one that claims to remove police from “mental health emergencies.”
We planned to give testimony at the beginning of a February hearing on this bill (Intro 2210), but were told the day before that, because we opposed the bill, we would not be allowed to testify at the start of the hearing.
This hurt us, not only because of the last-minute change, but because of how our sons’ names were used and how our testimony was treated during the hearing.
Councilmembers and members of the public testifying said Mohamed or Saheed’s names to validate their support for Intro 2210 — but we were there to oppose the bill and ask the City Council to withdraw it.
We’re not sure if councilmembers knew we opposed the bill, but they would have known, if only we hadn’t been pulled from the beginning of the hearing, at the last minute. We gave testimony in the afternoon, but it wasn’t acknowledged by any councilmember at the hearing. We felt disrespected and invisible, even though it’s the NYPD’s killings of our children that were being used to justify this bill.
We want change, but it must be change that would have saved Mohamed and Saheed’s lives. Intro 2210 would not have saved their lives. That should be the test for this kind of legislation.
Intro 2210 will legislate a permanent and formal role for the NYPD to respond in many cases where someone is thought to be having a mental health issue. That must be stopped, or more Black families like ours will lose their children. The bill sounds good, but the details are not.
Not only does Intro 2210 keep officers responding to many mental health calls, it doesn’t follow best practices and has no provisions for accountability for officers who will use excessive or deadly force, or engage in other misconduct. None of the officers who killed our sons were disciplined by the NYPD or held criminally accountable, and in Mohamed’s case, two of the officers are now suing the Civilian Complaint Review Board for trying to hold them accountable. The officers who killed Saheed didn’t even get assigned to desk duty. If there are no consequences for killing our loved ones in broad daylight, it signals that it is acceptable to kill and brutalize Black people, especially those struggling with mental and behavioral health issues.
New York City needs change, but we need the right kind of change. Quality mental health care for Black and brown communities didn’t exist for our sons — and Intro 2210 does nothing to change that.
Black and brown communities often have the least amount of access to mental health resources and care. We both tried to help our sons receive the care they needed, but the system failed us. We need a new approach to mental health care that goes far beyond Intro 2210.
We’re sick and tired of politicians using our children’s names while being unwilling to listen to us about what would have saved their lives.
We requested a meeting with Speaker Corey Johnson after the hearing last month, to discuss why we are asking him to withdraw the bill and stop it from passing. We still haven’t met with him.
Our message is clear: Take police out of mental health response, and invest in culturally competent mental health infrastructure that Black and other New Yorkers of color deserve.
We do not want any more families to suffer as we have.
To councilmembers and others who invoke Mohamed’s and Saheed’s names: Thank you for remembering our sons. We are asking you to listen to us, and stop Intro 2210 from advancing. Please don’t use Mohamed and Saheed’s names to justify a bill that would not have saved their lives, and that we oppose.