One month after police fatally shot an Ozone Park teen in mental distress, lawmakers have renewed questions about the New York City Police Department’s ability to respond to people in the throes of a crisis.
City Councilmembers pressed NYPD leadership Thursday about the circumstances that led to the death of 19-year-old Win Rozario, who called 911 in an alleged attempt to get help for mental health issues in March.
The renewed attention on Rozario’s death comes a week after Attorney General Letitia James released officer-worn body camera footage showing that officers Matthew Cianfrocco and Salvatore Alongi entered the Rozario family home and shot the teen to death in less than three minutes – even as his mother attempted to shield him with her own body.
During a City Council budget hearing on Thursday, a number of lawmakers sought answers from NYPD leaders about why a mental health call so quickly led to a New Yorker’s death.
Councilmember Yusef Salaam, who represents East Harlem and chairs the public safety committee, said that it was evident that both officers responding to Rozario’s call exhibited “inexperience” in mental health crisis response, from the language they used to their lack of de-escalation tactics, and “to be quite frank, the disregard for the safety of those in that home that day.”
“It seems to me that NYPD officers may not be the best equipped to respond to those incidents themselves,” Salaam said, pointing to crisis response models that include behavioral health clinicians and social workers.
The NYPD allocates $2 million a year to the training of police officers for crisis intervention, said Terri Tobin, chief of interagency operations at the NYPD. The agency’s total proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year is nearly $6 billion.
Councilmember Diana Ayala, who represents parts of the Bronx, East Harlem and the Upper East Side, said that is “not enough” to adequately prepare officers, and ultimately prevent harm to people with mental illnesses.
“This is not the first rodeo,” Ayala said. “This has happened to too many families.”
Crisis intervention training is a four-day program given to officers to prepare them for de-escalating mental health crises, Olufunmilola Obe, chief of training at the NYPD, said during the hearing. Only half of the officers on patrol have received that training, but the NYPD is implementing annual tactical sessions as a refresher, she said.
Obe added that one part of crisis intervention training depicts real-life scenarios played by NYPD actors. The shooting of Rozario could be presented as one of these scenarios, she said.
New York City also has co-response teams that consist of two law enforcement officials and a behavioral health clinician to respond to mental health crises. But the teams, formed in partnership with the city Health Department, do not respond to 911 calls – they are designed to respond either before or after a crisis occurs.
Currently there are no teams of officers and behavioral health clinicians that respond to 911 calls where there is a mental health emergency, Tobin said.
When pressed about whether the NYPD should offload mental health calls to other city agencies, Tobin responded that the police have worked with the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services and New York City Health + Hospitals to start a 911 response team that included a social worker, but the funding for that effort was moved to the B-Heard program, which sends EMTs and social workers to mental health-related 911 calls instead of police officers. The expansion of the B-Heard program has since been put on pause due to fiscal constraints and does not currently operate in Rozario’s district.
As the B-Heard program remains on pause, calls for more police resources raise concerns for advocates. Ruth Lowenkron, director of disability justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, said “it’s really distressing that the response to Win Rozario’s death would be to go backwards.”
“We have invested in training police officers,” Lowenkron said. “That doesn’t help if police officers are the wrong people to respond.”
Amanda D'Ambrosio , 2024-05-10 11:33:05
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