The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a statement of interest toward Baerga v. City of New York, a lawsuit accusing the deployment of NYPD officers in mental health crises as discrimination against people with disabilities.
“Congress enacted the ADA in 1990 ‘to provide a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities,’” the filing reads. “It found that ‘discrimination against individuals with disabilities continue[s] to be a serious and pervasive social problem’ which persists in several critical areas, including access to public services. Such discrimination takes several forms, including ‘outright intentional exclusion,’ ‘overprotective rules and policies,’ failure to make modifications to existing practices, and ‘relegation to lesser services, programs, activities, benefits, jobs, or other opportunities.’
“To combat these varied forms of exclusion, Congress broadly prohibited discrimination against individuals with disabilities by public entities.”
Trained medical staff show up when a physical medical emergency occurs. Baerga challenges why NYPD officers, rather than similarly qualified professionals, typically respond to mental health calls. The DOJ — which enforces the American Disabilities Act through litigation — now adds weight to the case through such a filing.
The lawsuit stems from a broader campaign to remove police from mental health responses given the track record of deadly violence — including NYPD officers fatally shooting 19-year-old Win Rozario earlier this year after he called 911 seeking help for a mental health crisis. Marinda van Dalen, director of litigation at New York Lawyers for Public Interest and one of the organizers in the campaign, says the movement started largely due to the dehumanization of people seeking emergency services for mental health crises.
“The first impulse was to fix the training that police officers got and that’s always going to be part of the solution,” van Dalen said. “But what slowly became evident was the cops simply needed to be removed. They’re not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem.
“When police officers show up on the scene, they’re police officers, and that’s not going to change. They are there to restore order and enforce the laws and doing that with a uniform and guns and potentially sirens blaring and lights flashing just makes these situations worse.”
She says the DOJ weighing in serves as a “wake-up call” for the city to preemptively apply such reforms given the arduous nature of lawsuits and court orders.
“The City’s practices with respect to mental health-related calls to 911 are consistent with the requirements of the constitution and federal and state law,” said an NYC Law Department spokesperson.
911 pilot B-HEARD currently exists to remove police responses from mental health calls, specifically operating in mostly Black and Brown neighborhoods (including Harlem) where the aforementioned issues are exacerbated by a history of over-policing. But the initiative remains limited and deployment of mental health professionals over cops is far from guaranteed. “[B-HEARD] refutes the city’s position that police need to be the first responders when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis,” said van Dalen. “In this litigation, the city is saying that the police need to be present for public safety, and we know that that simply is not true, and the fact that the city has B-HEARD up and running, albeit in only a very limited number of cases, demonstrates that that’s simply not true [and indeed,] disingenuous.
“Now B-HEARD is profoundly imperfect. It needs to be changed in fundamental ways, but it shows that there is an alternative to police response, and that is so critical to this issue.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.