[NYAPRS Enews] Police Killing of Shereese Francis Must Lead to NYC Reforms

[Harvey Rosenthal]

NYAPRS Note: The following reports in the Village Voice tell the story
of Shereese Francis, a 29 year-old African-American woman diagnosed with
schizophrenia who was needlessly and tragically killed in her home this
year by four NYPD officers who had been summoned to help her to the
hospital.  

Shereese was diagnosed at age 21 and spent many productive years working
and attending college without incident,. When Shereese became physically
aggressive with her mother for the first time one evening, the family
called for an ambulance to bring her to the hospital, only to have 4
poorly-trained police officers arrive first. Though it was apparent that
Shereese did not even understand that these 4 men were police officers,
they rushed the encounter, antagonized her, and within 5 minutes of
their arrival were chasing her through her house. 

While attempting to handcuff her face down in her mother's bed, the
police suffocated Shereese to death. 

An attempt to cover up the killing then began, with false statements
from police that Shereese had "lunged" at the officers, had regained
consciousness after being handcuffed, and had died at the hospital from
unrelated medical issues and not in her home at the hands of police.  

A lawsuit against NYPD has been brought by Shereese's family to bring
the true story of her death to light and draw attention to the lack of
NYPD mental health training and specialized services that is at the root
of this terrible tragedy. 

Despite years of advocates' efforts, New York continues to resist
adopting the Crisis Intervention Team model that is favored by a large
number of cities across our nation (http://www.citinternational.org/). 

Sheerese's avoidable heartbreaking death, the NYC police officers'
response and the outrageous cover-up that ensued represent terrible
injustices that must be promptly and decisively addressed. We call on
City officials to resume efforts to work with advocates and experts to
adopt the CIT model. And we can on New York City tabloids, which can't
provide enough coverage blaming and defaming people with psychiatric
conditions, to provide an equal amount of coverage to the police reforms
that must come.

 

The NYPD's Poor Judgement With the Mentally Ill

Shereese Francis was in mental distress. After police arrived, she was
dead.

By Nick Pinto Village Voice  August 15, 2012

 

On the evening of March 15, Shauna Francis called 311 looking for some
information. She wanted to call an ambulance for her 30-year-old sister,
Shereese, but wasn't impressed by the quality of care at Queens General,
the nearest hospital. Shauna wanted to know if she could ask the
ambulance to take Shereese to a Long Island hospital. 

 

The 311 operator told Shauna she would have to take that question up
with the EMTs when they arrived and asked Shauna about the nature of the
problem. Shauna explained that Shereese, a person with schizophrenia
whose illness was well-controlled by her medication, had been refusing
to take her meds for some time, and the family wanted doctors at a
hospital to help persuade her to resume taking them.

 

The operator transferred Shauna to a 911 dispatcher, who listened to
Shauna's story and promised to send someone over. Shauna hung up and
traveled the short distance from her home to the small, single-story
house in Rochdale where her mother lived with Shereese.

 

As she drew up to the driveway, she saw a police cruiser had already
arrived, and four officers were approaching the front door. That wasn't
unusual: On other occasions when the family had called an ambulance for
Shereese, police often arrived along with the EMTs. Assuming an
ambulance was probably on its way, Shauna led the officers into the
house, where her mother, Eleen, explained that Shereese was in her
bedroom in the basement.

 

What happened in that basement after the police went downstairs to talk
to Shereese isn't fully known. Shauna and Eleen saw and heard some of
what transpired, but not everything. Citing an ongoing internal
investigation, the police department isn't commenting.

 

Police logs record the four officers arriving at the Francis home at
10:20 that night. Shauna and Eleen saw the officers wrestle Shereese
onto a bed, all four of them piling onto her as they pressed her
facedown into the mattress and handcuffed her. Within 20 minutes of the
police arriving, Shereese Francis had stopped breathing, and Emergency
Services personnel were attempting to revive her.

 

When Shereese was finally taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center at
12:25 a.m., she was pronounced dead. Hospital staff told the family she
likely had been dead for at least 90 minutes before she arrived. The
death certificate signed by the medical examiner listed Shereese's death
as a homicide and cited the immediate cause of death as "compression of
trunk during agitated violent behavior (schizophrenia) while prone on
bed and attempted restraint by police officers."

 

Shereese's father, George Francis, is more succinct. "The bottom line
is, they come there and kill her," he says. 

 

The death of Shereese Francis has rekindled a decades-long debate over
the NYPD's treatment of the mentally ill. As the first responders to all
sorts of emergency calls, police officers are on the front line for just
about every social problem in the city, and mental illness is no
exception. The department estimates that it handles nearly 100,000 calls
for "Emotionally Disturbed Persons" every year-hundreds a day. Every few
years, one of those calls goes so badly that somebody dies.

 

Determining who bears responsibility for those deaths and whether and
how they can be prevented isn't always easy. But with a growing
international consensus on the best practices for police interactions
with the mentally ill-practices the NYPD has so far resisted
adopting-the story of how Shereese Francis died once again raises the
question of whether the NYPD is doing everything it can to train its
officers on how to do the delicate work of serving New Yorkers with
mental illness.

 

Francis Grace Day Care and Learning Center stands in a two-story white
stucco building on a stretch of Merrick Boulevard in Queens surrounded
by used-car lots, a Quick Lube, and roti restaurants. The front is
covered with gaily painted balloons, rainbows, and alphabet blocks. It's
a hot summer day when I meet the Francis family there to talk about what
happened to Shereese, and the air-conditioning isn't keeping up, so we
drive down the block in George Francis's Mercedes minivan to another
location he's renovating. It's cooler there, and settling around a
folding table, the family members begin to tell their story.

 

George Francis came to Queens in 1985 from Kingston, Jamaica, and soon
brought his family-Eleen and their two young daughters, Shauna and
Shereese-to join him. Along with other members of the family, they began
building a child care center. The enterprise was successful, and soon
they were running a small constellation of centers. In 2000, The New
York Times included their business in a trend story about 24-hour child
care centers targeted at shift workers with off-hour needs.

 

Shereese and her sister helped with the business and worked hard at
school, her parents say. After high school, Shereese spent two years at
Nassau Community College, where she studied to be a physical therapist.

"She was a very happy person, a very loving, spiritual person," her
sister says. "Everybody loved her. She was always very happy, very
concerned about everyone."

 

In college, Shereese became quieter, depressed and withdrawn. "She began
seeing things," her father says. Eventually, she was diagnosed with
schizophrenia and prescribed Risperdal, an antipsychotic.

The medication worked well. When she took it, Shereese was functional
and outgoing. She attended a Catholic Charities outpatient program that
offered psychotherapy, which helped her manage her illness. But the
Risperdal also "made her fat," in her father's words, a side effect
about which Shereese was painfully self-conscious.

 

Beginning in November, Shereese stopped taking her medication, at first
with minimal effect. "The first month was fine," Eleen remembers. But by
November, things were getting worse. Shereese spent entire days in her
bed, under the covers, refusing to talk to anybody. The family became
increasingly concerned. Social workers from Shereese's program came by a
couple of times to check on her. "She wasn't that bad at the time,"
Eleen says. "She spoke to them."

It got worse. "She stopped eating, she wasn't sleeping," Eleen says.
"She spent her days combing her hair. Combing her hair and putting on
makeup."

 

On the morning of March 15, things seemed even worse. "She hadn't slept
the night before," Eleen says. "I went down there to check on her, to
see if she wanted to sleep." Abruptly, Eleen pauses her retelling,
dissolving into silent tears. Shauna, sitting next to her, takes up the
story.

 

"I got back from school around 8, and my mother told me, 'I've never
seen her act this way,'" Shauna says. "'She accused me of taking her
makeup, and then she was pulling my hair.' Mom said, 'I think we need to
take her to the hospital before anything gets any worse.'"

 

Shauna went back to her own house, nearby, had her conversation with the
311 operator and the 911 dispatcher, and returned to her mother's house,
where the police were just arriving. After explaining the situation,
Shauna and Eleen followed the police down into the basement. Shereese
was in her bedroom, but the police spoke to her through the closed door.

 

"They were basically telling her, 'We're going to take you to the
hospital,'" Shauna says. Shereese wasn't having it. "She was arguing
with them," Shauna says. "She was like: 'What are you doing here? You're
not taking me anywhere!'"

It wasn't clear that Shereese actually understood the situation. "It
didn't seem like she knew they were the police," Shauna says. "She was
saying, 'I'm going to arrest you,' just all kinds of crazy things to
them."

 

After a few minutes, Shereese opened the door and tried to push through
the crowd, down the basement hallway, and up the stairs.

"The police officers say, 'Do not let her go,'" Shauna says. "That's
when all the tackling began."

Police managed to keep Shereese from making it to the stairs and instead
pushed her into another bedroom that opened off the hallway.

 

"One of the officers initially said, 'Why don't you just use the
Taser?'" Shauna says. "I said, but they didn't hear me, 'That isn't
necessary.'" As the police piled into the bedroom, Shauna got a partial
glimpse of the struggle. She thought she saw one of the officers making
hand movements as though he might have been hitting Shereese, but she
couldn't be sure.

 

"Then they got her onto the bed," she says. "All four of them were on
top of her. They were trying to get handcuffs on her."

 

Shauna heard one of the police officers cursing at Shereese. "'Give me
your effing hand! Give me your effing hand!' I was like, 'What kind of
police officers are these?'"

 

Shereese managed to resist for a while, Shauna says. "At first, she was
fighting them off, fighting them off, fighting them off. But then I
didn't hear her anymore, and she wasn't moving."

 

Recognizing that something wasn't right, the police took the handcuffs
off and moved Shereese to the floor, Shauna says.

 

Sixteen or 17 minutes after the police showed up, the EMTs arrived and
rushed downstairs. The police were keeping the family out, and the
basement door was locked.

 

Eleen, back upstairs at this point, heard one of the EMTs run upstairs
and talk into the radio, and mention something about arrest. "She
thought that meant they wanted to arrest her," Shauna says. "Later, we
realized they were talking about cardiac arrest."

 

Shauna's mother-in-law, who had now arrived, tried to poke her head in
and see what was going on. "She looked at her and said, 'She looks like
she's dead!' They said: 'Oh, no, no. Get outside.'" Eleen and Shauna's
mother-in-law circled around and tried to peer in a window but were
again shooed away. For what felt like a long time-more than 45 minutes,
they estimate-the family, worrying and making phone calls, waited
anxiously on the lawn while the police and EMTs worked on Shereese in
the basement.

 

"I didn't know what to think," Shauna says. "I was just wondering, why
is she down there so long? What's going on?"

At one point, a sergeant came upstairs with what seemed like good news.
"He said: 'We've got a pulse! But there are no guarantees,'" Shauna
remembers. It was still a "long time after that" before she saw Shereese
being taken out of the basement on a stretcher. The ambulance was parked
across the street, but for some reason, the police and EMTs took her out
a stairway that led to the backyard.

 

"I think maybe they wanted to avoid us," Eleen says. The family asked to
ride with Shereese in the ambulance, something they'd done on previous
occasions, but were told they couldn't. Shauna and Eleen got ready to
drive to the hospital themselves, but as they were heading out the door,
more recently arrived police, detectives in plainclothes, said they
wanted to take recorded statements on what had happened. The women gave
short statements and explained what had happened, trying to reconstruct
the timeline. Finally, they were allowed to follow Shereese to the
hospital. When they arrived, a nurse directed them into a room.

 

"They told us she was dead, and there was nothing they could have done,"
Shauna says. Nurses showed her mother-in-law the readout from Shereese's
EKG from the time she arrived at the hospital. It was flat from the
beginning.

 

In the following days, the family's shock and grief began to settle into
anger. Shereese didn't have to die that night.

"They cut short the girl's life," George Francis says. "She had a lot to
live for. She had a schizophrenic problem, but if she took her
medication, she come right back, you know?"

 

"These police officers weren't trained to handle this," Shauna says.
"Who restrains someone on a soft surface, facedown? Who would do that?"

 

Eleen agrees.

"Usually, when you talk to her, it may take a long time, but if you keep
talking to her, she'll listen," she says. "The police officers in the
past, they all talked to her. It seemed like they knew what they were
doing."

 

In the days afterward, police investigators kept calling, wanting to
talk more about what had happened, but George Francis was tired of
talking to police without a lawyer. The family hired Steve Vaccaro, a
lawyer with experience suing the NYPD.

 

"We need justice for Shereese," says George Francis, his Jamaican
phrasing becoming more pronounced as he becomes more upset. "New York
City got to pay for all our pain and suffering and compensate for our
loss of life. Money won't bring her back, but at least it would serve
justice. That mean somebody got to pay. Somebody got to be accountable."

 

Shereese Francis was hardly the first person with mental illness killed
by police in New York City. Throughout the decades, there have been
numerous such incidents, each provoking-to greater and lesser
degrees-flurries of media attention, public dismay, and calls to
reevaluate the NYPD's approach to such encounters.

 

The first landmark incident came in 1984. Police broke down the door of
66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs in an effort to evict her from public
housing and hospitalize her for what a psychiatrist sent by the city
deemed to be psychosis. Inside the apartment was Bumpurs, 275 pounds,
naked, holding a 10-inch kitchen knife. Carrying shields and a Y-shaped
restraining bar, police attempted to subdue Bumpurs, but in the scuffle,
one of the officers was knocked to the ground. As Bumpurs stood over him
with the knife, Officer Stephen Sullivan fired two shots from his
12-gauge shotgun. The first struck her hand. The second went into her
chest and killed her.

Following the incident, Sullivan was indicted on manslaughter charges
and acquitted. The city ultimately paid the Bumpurs family $200,000 to
settle a civil suit, and the NYPD changed its guidelines to require a
senior officer to be on hand before police confront an emotionally
disturbed person. Police also began to carry less lethal weapons,
including Tasers.

 

In 1998, Kevin Cerbelli, a 30-year-old who had been in and out of mental
institutions, walked into the 110th Precinct in Queens carrying a
screwdriver and a knife and attempted to stab an officer in the back.
Police surrounded him and attempted to subdue Cerbelli with a Taser but
were unsuccessful, and after he continued to lunge at officers, he was
shot seven times.

 

In 1999, Gidone Busch, a bipolar 31-year-old who lived in Borough Park,
was shot to death by police responding to a complaint that he was
threatening a local boy with a hammer. Busch, an observant Jew, was in
his apartment when six police officers confronted him, but he backed out
onto the sidewalk, where police used pepper spray on him. Police
accounts afterward differed on whether Busch had first struck them with
the hammer, a religious item used in prayer, but there's no disagreement
that after the pepper spray, Busch became more upset, striking out with
the hammer. Four officers fired their guns, killing Busch.

 

In the space of a week in 2007, police officers shot and killed two
emotionally disturbed men in Brooklyn. Khiel Coppin, 18, was holding a
hairbrush under his shirt like a gun when police killed him in
Bedford-Stuyvesant. David Kostovski, 29, was brandishing a broken bottle
at police when he was shot in East New York.

 

In 2008, when police responded to a call from the mother of 35-year-old
Iman Morales, who wasn't answering his front door. When police arrived
at the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, Morales, naked, retreated out the
window and onto a ledge 10 feet above the sidewalk. Police called for an
inflatable air bag to place on the sidewalk under Morales but didn't
wait for it to arrive before shooting him with a Taser. Morales went
stiff, fell headfirst onto the sidewalk, and died. The entire episode
was captured on video and prompted another round of public debate over
the use of Tasers and police protocols in dealing with emotionally
disturbed people.

 

Most recently, police officers fired 12 shots at Darrius Kennedy and
killed him in the middle of Times Square last Saturday. Police first
stopped Kennedy for smoking a joint, but he slipped free and began
brandishing a large kitchen knife. Police pepper sprayed Kennedy four
times, to little effect. When he lunged at police attempting to cut off
his retreat down Seventh Avenue, officers opened fire.

Kennedy, 51, had been sent to Bellevue for a mental evaluation in 2008,
but it isn't known if he was diagnosed. Still, Mayor Bloomberg,
defending the officers' actions, said Kennedy "must have been mentally
deranged" since "taking a knife and going after other people,
particularly police officers, isn't something that a sane person would
do."

 

New York isn't unique for its steady stream of violent and fatal
encounters between the police and what law enforcement calls
"emotionally disturbed persons," or EDPs. In their role of keeping the
peace and handling situations beyond the capability of ordinary
citizens, police have always been called upon to interact with people
whose mental illness or emotional breakdowns are causing them to put
themselves or others at risk.

 

That complicated responsibility has only become more difficult in the
past half-century, as the institutions that once warehoused the mentally
ill have closed in favor of a public health model that relies much more
on outpatient treatment, home care, and integration.

 

In this new era, an increasing share of the responsibility for the
mentally ill has fallen on the criminal-justice system. Police are often
more likely to be called for help than a health professional. And in
many places, poorly integrated services have left officers with few
options once they arrive at an EDP call besides doing nothing and making
an arrest. The result, research shows, is that prisons have become the
new asylums, as more and more mentally ill people find themselves
incarcerated.

 

Cities across the country have their own versions of stories like those
of Bumpurs and Cerbelli, stories that show how, in the wrong
circumstances, a person with mental illness can be dangerous, forcing
police to make split-second decisions about how to protect themselves.  

 

It happened in Memphis in 1987, when a Memphis Police Department officer
shot and killed a mentally ill person. In the outpouring of community
dismay that followed, the MPD decided to revisit its policies for
handling EDP calls and to reach out to mental-health professionals and
to the mentally ill themselves and their families to craft a new
strategy.

 

The result, soon termed the "Memphis Model," was a revolution in
policing. It relied heavily on Crisis Intervention Teams, or CITs,
composed of police officers who had volunteered to undergo between 40
and 80 hours of extra training in responding to EDP calls. Enough
Memphis officers were trained that when an EDP call came through, at any
hour and in any part of the city, dispatchers could refer the call to a
Crisis Intervention Team.

 

"The CITs aren't specialized units in the sense that they only respond
to one kind of situation," says Major Sam Cochran, who helped develop
and implement the model and has since become its chief evangelist.
"They're just part of the regular uniform patrol division. They're the
first responders, be it a domestic dispute, a bank robbery, or anything
else."

The difference is CIT officers have been trained in de-escalation. They
know that shouting at people in mental distress doesn't help, that
surrounding them, threatening them, and rushing them is almost
invariably counterproductive. More than their tactical expertise,
Cochran says, CIT officers bring a level of understanding to their
policing that makes a critical difference.

 

"Because they've volunteered and because their training has helped them
to see things from the perspective of the someone on the other end of
the situation, they've got an empathy that changes the whole situation,"
Cochran says.

The results of implementing the CIT program in Memphis were dramatic. In
the three years before CIT was instituted, mental-health-related calls
led to injuries 35 times out of 100,000. In the three years after CIT
was in place, that rate dropped to seven injuries in 100,000 calls.

 

The CIT model was a hit. Over the past 25 years, versions of the program
have been adopted by police departments around the world and in almost
every state in the nation, from small-town departments to big-city
forces including those in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Houston, and
Chicago. It has won plaudits from Amnesty International, the National
Alliance on Mental Illness, the U.S. Justice Department, and the
International Association of Chiefs of Police. The Council of State
Governments has been advocating for the adoption of CIT-like programs
across the country.

 

One consistent exception to the spread of the CIT model has been the New
York Police Department. Mental-health advocates have repeatedly pressed
the NYPD to consider adopting a similar model, but the NYPD hasn't been
interested. 

 

The NYPD didn't respond to requests for comment for this story, but
mental-health advocates say they're often told by NYPD leadership that
the CIT model wouldn't work here.

 

"They say New York is too big," says Jennifer Parish, director of
criminal-justice advocacy at the Urban Justice Center's Mental Health
Project. "They say the force is so large that training the proportion of
officers necessary to make CIT work would be too unwieldy."

 

Instead, the NYPD points to its Emergency Services Unit, an elite
division of the force that receives extra training on interacting with
people in psychiatric distress.

The problem with relying on the ESUs, mental-health advocates say, is
twofold. "The ESU is used for lots of different things, from terrorist
attacks to missing persons to people in psychiatric distress," Parish
says. "Skills that might make someone effective for the ESU might not be
the same skills that would serve well on an EDP call."

 

More fundamentally, as specialized units, ESU teams are rarely the first
police at an EDP call. That means the officers on the scene in the
critical first five minutes of contact with a person in emotional
distress often haven't received any specialized training at all beyond
what they got at the academy.

 

To the NYPD's credit, it recently overhauled that training, tapping
mental-health advocate Fred Levine to help rewrite Chapter 23 of the
recruit's guide in the mid 2000s. Levine, who's a believer in the
policing principles of the Memphis Model, incorporated many of its basic
tactical guidelines in his rewrite. He cautioned against sudden actions,
threats, and rushing the situation.

"Officers should take great care to assure that they do not restrain or
confine EDP's in ways that may hurt-or even kill-them," the police
student's guide reads. "Never confine EDP's-or anybody else-in facedown,
prone positions for longer than it takes to handcuff them."

 

But while some of the training materials have been updated, advocates
say changing the textbook isn't enough. NYPD recruits only get 18 hours
of training on mental-health issues. Follow-up in-service
tactical-refresher trainings offered to veteran police are also
relatively short and are often tacked onto the end of a shift.

 

Even the best training in the world won't help if officers don't feel
they have the time to talk through a situation with someone in
psychiatric crisis.

 

"It takes oversight," Parish says. "A commander in a precinct who
expects every call to be responded to very quickly and then get back out
on the street, that doesn't give officers much time for empathy."

 

After a spate of Daily News stories and pressure from the City Council
turned up the pressure on the NYPD to re-examine its mental-health
policies in 2008, it revived the Link Committee, a group of
mental-health professionals and advocates who had been consulting with
the police on policy issues before a lack of departmental interest led
the committee to founder for years.

 

Parish and Levine attended the first meetings of the revived committee
with optimism but were soon frustrated by the messages they were getting
from the department.

 

"They wanted to limit the scope of the conversation to reviewing the
training," Parish says. "Anything beyond that, they weren't really
interested."

 

Ultimately, the Link Committee stopped meeting, without releasing any
reports or recommendations, leaving members pessimistic about the
prospects for change.

 

"At this point, I think getting change may require a new mayor and a new
police commissioner who may be more open to listening," Parish says.

 

Experts on law enforcement and mental health agree that it's unfair to
put all the blame on police when an encounter with a mentally ill person
goes wrong. "This is an issue that goes all the way through our
society," says Cochran of the Memphis police. "Everyone has a stake in
how we treat each other, it takes all of our involvement to change those
relationships, and when something goes wrong like that, it reflects
something being wrong all across the board. This isn't just about fixing
the training. Getting it right requires dedication and cooperation and
conversation from the whole community."

 

But by refusing to take part in the kind of wider discussion that could
bring reforms, Levine says, the NYPD is becoming an obstacle to broader
civic solutions.

 

"The NYPD shouldn't bear sole responsibility for every single tragedy as
if they had the magic to prevent it," he says. "But their failure to
aggressively participate-within their department, across agency lines,
and outside the city where expertise clearly exists-that's something
I'll always blame them for until they change. And I'll blame them for
the next tragedy because of that failure."

 

It's a sentiment shared by the Francis family. Since Shereese died, they
say, many people have told them stories of similar-if less
fatal-episodes in which the police mishandled a person in emotional
distress.

 

"That's why it's necessary for this to be out there," George Francis
says. "So that they put a new system in place to prevent this from
happening to other people. They will be more careful when they know that
they will be brought to account."

 

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-08-15/news/NYPD-mental-illness-Shereese
-Francis/

 

Family Sues To Learn Why Shereese Francis Was Suffocated In Her Home By
Police

By Nick Pinto <http://blogs.villagevoice.com/author.php?author_id=1812>
Village Voice June 26, 2012 



On March 15, Shereese Francis had a fight with her mother and became
increasingly emotionally distraught. Francis, 30, lived at home in
Queens, wasn't taking the medication prescribed for her schizophrenia.
Her sister called 311, hoping to get Shereese to a hospital.

Before an ambulance arrived, four police officers responded to the call,
arriving at 10:20. They chased Francis through the house, ultimately
cornering her in a basement bedroom, forcing her face-down on the bed
and applying pressure while they cuffed her. 

Within 20 minutes of police arriving, Francis had stopped breathing. A
few hours later she was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where she was
pronounced dead.

The Francis family says the police officers did exactly what you
shouldn't do with an agitated and emotionally disturbed person: they
escalated the situation. In an affidavit, Shereese's sister said she saw
all four officers pushing down on Shereese, and one of them apparently
repeatedly punching her. 

Mental health advocates <http://rippd.org/justice/>  have long warned
that the NYPD's training with respect to handling mentally ill people is
woefully lacking -- they want New York to join more than 100 other
cities in adopting a stronger training program that teaches officers how
to de-escalate encounters with the mentally ill.

Before any of those questions can be addressed, though, the Francis
family wants a complete accounting of what actually happened on March
15. 

But that's proving more difficult than they anticipated. Six days after
Shereese's death, they filed a Freedom of Information request with the
NYPD for relevant police records. The police responded, saying it would
take 20 business days to determine whether the Francises' request would
be granted. The Francises appealed the decision, but the NYPD denied
their appeal, arguing that the information they were asking for would
interfere with an ongoing Internal Affairs Bureau investigation.

That didn't make any sense to the Francis family, because some of the
information they were being told was too sensitive for them to see had
already been leaked to the press by the police.

On April 2, the a Wall Street Journal
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527023038165045773202330034225
06.html> , ran a story on the Francis case, which consisted almost
entirely of statements by an unnamed police source, pooh-poohing any
suggestion that the police might be responsible for Francis's death. In
some passages, the anonymous police source invokes NYPD reports that the
Francis family hasn't been allowed to see:

"Neither Ms. Francis's mother or sister, the only two witnesses to the
incident, are recorded in police reports as having told investigators
they saw Ms. Francis being punched or struck, the law-enforcement
official said."

The article also included statements supposedly made by paramedics
interviewed with police officials and reported the unnamed police source
"said a doctor who treated Ms. Francis reported finding no visible signs
of trauma."

None of that information, not even the confidential medical information
the police were sharing with the media, was made available to the
Francis family. Eventually, they managed to get a copy of the death
certificate -- not form the police, but from a funeral home. That
document found that Francis died from "Compression of Trunk."

"This is part of a larger pattern we're seeing with the NYPD," says the
Francises' lawyer, Steve Vaccaro, who has also brought a Freedom of
Information lawsuit against the NYPD on behalf of the family of slain
bicyclist Mathieu Lefevre
<http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/04/as_the_mother_o.php>
. "The police leak self-serving information to the press at the same
time that they stonewall access to that same information for the
families of victims."

This month, the Francis family formally appealed the NYPD's Freedom of
Information denial in state court. Here's their petition:

Shereese Francis - Article 78 Petition
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/98219880/Shereese-Francis-Article-78-Petition
> 

 

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/06/family_sues_to.php)

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