Page 18 - Saheed Vassell News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Print In case after case, it took only a split second for an officer to pull the trigger. Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old in Chicago, had tossed away a handgun and begun raising his hands. Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, lunged with a knife at another teenager. Tyrell Wilson, a 33-year-old mentally ill homeless man in Danville, California, had a knife in hand when he shouted “Kill me” at an approaching deputy sheriff. All three were among more than 100 people shot and killed by police over the previous six weeks. The officers’ justification for the use of lethal force ...

SHARE: When officers from the Rochester Police Department arrived on the scene of a family dispute involving a 9-year-old girl in emotional distress in January, a brand-new tool was at the city’s disposal: Rochester’s new Person in Crisis team. Launched earlier that month, the PIC team was created as an alternative response to mental health, substance abuse and other emergency calls that would normally involve police or paramedics. Instead of police officers being the first responders to these calls – and risking the potential that the encounter could escalate into a violent one, as wa...

Our children, Mohamed Bah and Saheed Vassell, were killed by the NYPD and failed by New York City’s mental health system.

A rash of awful unprovoked attacks by people with histories of serious mental illness, and a string of tragic deaths at the hands of police of people experiencing emotional disturbances, has awakened New Yorkers to the shambolic state of our mental health system. The awakening is welcome, but elected officials are nowhere close to designing pragmatic solutions to the problem.

For All the Names Impacted by Mental Illness and Police Violence Violette Kay © The Mighty A collage of BIPOC people killed by the police There’s a line in Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s “Sound of the Beast” that I think about all the time: “I’m with them, whoever they are.” I’m with the old man yelling at the air in the waiting room of my psychiatrist’s office. I’m with the manic mother facing a judge to challenge her court-ordered hospital stay. I’m with every patient who has been punished for a behavior caused by the very illness they are receiving tr...