DAILY NEWS ATTACKS NEWMAN FERRARA

The Daily News needlessly bashed us in this editorial released on Saturday, October 26, 2013.

(Our response follows.)

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Legal derangement syndrome

Another lawsuit in search of a monitor

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Bryan Smith/for New York Daily News

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.

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Newman Ferrara responds:

This editorial -- "Legal Derangement Syndrome" -- sends a dangerous, divisive and disrespectful message to the very people you purport to have concern for – police officers and the people suffering a mental health crisis they must often respond to.

Mohamed Bah was not a "deranged individual" "sent out on the streets" by the mental health system. He was a young man whose mother called 911 for assistance because she was concerned about his psychological state and wanted help getting him to the hospital for evaluation and treatment. Instead of providing that help, or calling on mental health professionals who could, the police broke down his door and fatally shot him inside his own home.

The Bah family filed their lawsuit to seek changes in how police and the 911 system respond to calls such as theirs in the future. The New York City police department should be encouraged to work collaboratively with mental health professionals to come up with a better approach and to lobby together for a reallocation of resources so that the needs of those in crisis can be met without unnecessary tragedy. So far the NYPD has refused to do so.

A federal monitor is one way to make sure this needed dialogue takes place.

Debra S. Cohen, Esq. & Randolph M. McLaughlin, Esq.

Co-chairs, Civil Rights Practice Group

Newman Ferrara LLP