The editorial board of the New York Times is lamenting the NYPD shooting death of Deborah Danner. The 66-year-old black woman was shot by Sergeant Hugh Barry on Oct. 19. Barry responded to a call of a woman acting erratically. According to police, Danner approached Barry with a pair of scissors but he was able to talk her into dropping them; she then came at him with a bat and he shot her twice in the upper torso. The investigation into Danner’s shooting will look at police protocols for dealing with the mentally ill—protocols that both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill say were not followed. The Times, in making its statement on the death of Danner, quotes from a letter Danner wrote four years ago on the topic of living with a mental illness:
Ms. Danner, 66, now joins a tragic group of people whose mental illness leads them into a dangerous, often fatal, collision with the police. She would have been another cipher, another mental-health casualty, her inner struggles known only to her family and friends, but for a remarkable essay she wrote four years ago, “Living With Schizophrenia,” which her lawyer shared with The Times.
To read its six shattering pages is to come face-to-face with the isolation, self-doubt and crushing misery of mental illness. “Even the smartest people/persons in the world could not function in the realm of normalcy with that monkey on their backs,” she wrote. She told of the constant unease of not knowing where her sickness would take her: “What if my medication fails me? I ask myself, will I know if it does? Will the illness overpower its effectiveness? When? Where?” [...]
“Is that a delusion, I ask myself, my belief that I am worthy of respect and a ‘normal’ happy life?”
Of course she was worthy of respect and happiness. The police had been called to Ms. Danner’s apartment before. Her family and neighbors knew of her torment. It is hard to see how a group of officers with Tasers could have ended up using lethal force against a sick woman. Hard to see, and yet entirely predictable.
As reported in March of this year, half of police shootings nationally are of persons with disabilities. Most of those shootings end the way that Deborah Danner’s ended. Predictably.