NYAPRS Note: Earlier this year, Donald Ivy, Jr. – an unarmed, 39 year-old, African-American Albany man diagnosed with schizophrenia – died in police custody after being shocked repeatedly with a taser. In reaction, Albany County DA David Soares recently suggested that a voluntary mental health database be developed to improve law enforcement response.
There’s no question that law enforcement should be better able to recognize individuals in crisis and have the tools to de-escalate situations in an effort to offer alternatives to avoidable arrests. But we fear that a mental health database runs the risk of targeting our community. As it stands, we are already unfairly targeted as violent, and a mental health database, voluntary or not, could give credence to that notion. The burden should not be on consumers to self-identify in order to avoid being harmed at the hands of police – it should be on law enforcement to be better trained to recognize the signs of crisis and respond accordingly.
Death Spurs Talk Of Registry
Soares Suggests Mental Health Database; Demonstrators Call For DA’s Resignation
By Brendan J. Lyons and Jordan Carleo-Evangelist Albany Times Union November 3, 2015
District Attorney David Soares on Monday said law enforcement leaders should examine whether a voluntary mental health registry would help police officers when they encounter an individual with a history of mental illness.
Soares, in an afternoon meeting with the Times Union editorial board, said family members and other caretakers of people with mental illness could help provide information on their condition, which could become part of the same database that police use for warrants and criminal histories.
The Albany County prosecutor’s remarks came hours before scores of angry demonstrators briefly shut down an Albany Common Council meeting to protest Soares’ failure to secure the criminal indictment of the city police officers who scuffled with Donald Ivy Jr., an unarmed mentally ill black man, who later died in custody.
The demonstrators, including several members of Ivy’s family, thronged the council chamber chanting “fire those cops,” demanding that Soares resign and that the department fire the officers who struck Ivy with batons and shocked him repeatedly with a Taser.
The officers later told investigators that they were unaware that Ivy suffered from schizophrenia, an illness family members have said made the 39-year-old anxious around crowds and especially when touched.
“We should be having those discussions right now so that officers, in addition to the training they’ve had for mental health, will be assisted by the additional information,” Soares said. “That will change the interaction significantly.”
Demonstrators, however, said the problem wasn’t Ivy’s mental illness but the fact that officers violated his rights when they questioned him as he walked down Lark Street just after 12:30 a.m. April 2.
Ivy had committed no crime when two police officers assigned to an anti-gun detail stopped him because they believed he could be carrying a gun as he walked through Arbor Hill.
Last week Soares announced that four officers would not face criminal charges in connection with the April 2 death of Ivy, who died of a heart attack after scuffling with police.
Police Chief Brendan Cox said the department’s officers undergo thorough training in dealing with emotionally disturbed people and that he would want to know more about the plan envisioned by Soares before endorsing it. He said that whether someone has a mental illness may not change the way officers would handle a situation.
“I’m certainly not going to say that information is a bad thing,” the chief said. “I also think about what’s in that database, where does it come from, who gives it to us and what does it include.”
In some instances, Cox said, mental health professionals call 911 when they have a mentally ill person they cannot control.
“We don’t have a ‘911’ to call, so at the end of that day if there were that registry … that doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility as police officers,” Cox said. Still, he acknowledged, “the more information we have the better … One little factor could change the whole situation.”
Cox said that the officers who questioned and detained Ivy “still had an obligation to make sure that he does not have a weapon” even if they had known of his mental illness.
There also are federal efforts to reform federal mental health programs and treatment, including a measure that would allow health care providers to give details of a mentally ill person’s condition and treatment to their family members or other caretakers. Currently, medical privacy laws are so strict that in some instances family members are not given that information.
U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., a co-sponsor of the bill, said people with mental illness are often treated differently than someone who may have another type of brain disease.
“What we’ve been doing for decades is going down the wrong path, and we need to have effective, accountable, compassionate care,” Murphy said. “It’s a sad story up there (the Ivy case), but unfortunately it imitates itself every few seconds in America.”
One of the key factors that led police officers to detain and ask to frisk Ivy on the night he died was that they said he denied having an arrest record. According to his family members, Ivy had a brush with city police officers more than 10 years ago when his mental illness triggered a domestic incident involving the mother of his son. The officers said because Ivy allegedly “lied” they grew more suspicious about whether he may be concealing a weapon.
Soares said that, in general, thousands of people in Albany’s minority communities may be tethered to criminal histories that date back years and create a “glass ceiling” in their ability to get good jobs or “move forward with their lives.”
His office, he said, is working on an initiative that would form a committee of police officials, social workers and other community leaders who would make recommendations on individuals whose criminal cases should be reopened so that earlier convictions could be vacated.
During Monday night’s protest, Ivy’s family maintained that there are surveillance camera views of Ivy’s fatal encounter with police that are more complete than those released Friday by the department.
“There are videos that are clearer … and that display more of the atrocities that were inflicted upon Dontay,” family spokesman the Rev. Tre’ Staton said.
But a department spokesman, Officer Steven Smith, disputed that, saying the three recordings released Friday were “all the video we have.”
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Death-spurs-talk-of-registry-6606578.php