There’s an old saying that when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So it is with civil rights lawyers and the federal monitor who’s been appointed to oversee the NYPD’s stop, question and frisk program.
A new lawsuit alleges there is a need to reform how police respond to calls involving deranged individuals — emotionally disturbed persons, known as “EDPs.” The case cites the fatal shooting of Mohamed Bah, a Harlem man whose mother called 911 asking for an ambulance.
Whether or not the cops handled the Bah situation appropriately, the suit overreaches in seeking a remedy and has the entirely wrong target.
The police get 100,000 EDP calls every year, a number of them involving dangerously disturbed people who have fallen through the cracks of the mental health system.
Frequently, they have gone off medications prescribed to maintain their stability.
Lawyers Randolph McLaughlin and Debra Cohen of Manhattan firm Newman Ferrara should aim their legal papers not at the police — responders of last resort — but instead at a mental-health system that repeatedly sends deeply troubled people out onto the streets, there to hurt themselves or others and too often forcing the cops into tragic confrontations.
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=16392
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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