Jefferson Siegel
Hawa Bah (center with daughter Oumou Bah and lawyer Randolph McLaughlin, far left) is suing the NYPD and the city to get changes in the way cops handle the emotionally disturbed. Bah’s son, Mohamed, was killed by cops in 2012.
The NYPD must change how cops deal with the mentally ill, the family of a 28-year-old Harlem man killed by cops last year charged in a lawsuit filed Monday.
The suit by the family of African immigrant Mohamed Bah also seeks unspecified damages in addition to new NYPD “crisis intervention teams,” based on a program pioneered years ago in Memphis.
Police shot Bah on Sept. 25, 2012 in his apartment after his mother phoned 911. Hawa Bah claims she wanted an ambulance for her son because he seemed depressed.
But the NYPD said the cab driver and Borough of Manhattan Community College student lunged at the cops with a knife before they gunned him down.
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“I called 911 because I was thinking about medical help,” Hawa Bah said Monday outside the courthouse. “I need justice for my son. He never did nothing wrong.”
The lawsuit claims the cops frightened Bah by refusing to leave him alone and barring his mother from speaking with him to calm him down.
The suit comes as the Bah family continues to pressure Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to seek the indictment of the cops who killed Bah.
“They kicked on his door, yelled and screamed at him, forced their way into his apartment, broke the door down, and tasered, bean-bagged and killed him,” Bah family lawyer Randolph McLaughlin said Monday.
Jefferson Siegel
Here, the dead man’s mom has to turn away from the cameras to compose herself.
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The civil rights lawsuit claims the NYPD has “failed to adopt adequate procedures to safeguard emotionally disturbed persons.”
The NYPD handles 100,000 such calls per year, the suit claims, and they “often result in unwarranted arrest, emotional and physical abuse and even the death of those in crisis.”
McLaughlin said various police departments in more than 40 states have adopted versions of the Memphis model, which deploys the “intervention teams” to deal with calls related to mental illness.
The teams include cops trained for more than 40 hours on techniques for dealing with emotionally disturbed persons, McLaughlin said, claiming the model has dramatically reduced adverse outcomes in Memphis and elsewhere.
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“When you send out the emergency service units these are SWAT teams, not mental health professionals … they use force,” he said. “That’s what they’re trained to do.”
The lawsuit names the city and 50 police officers, identified only as “John Does.”
Bah’s death was certainly not the first or the last time cops have been involved in killing the mentally ill — and the lawsuit cites some prior examples, such as the 1984 police killing of 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs, the death of 35-year-old Iman Morales in 2008, and the shooting in Times Square this Sept. 14 in which cops accidentally wounded two bystanders while attempting to subdue 35-year-old Glen Broadnax.
The city’s Law Department and the NYPD had no immediate comment.
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=14376
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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