From the death of George Floyd to the killing of Breonna Taylor, tragic instances of policing gone wrong continue to make headlines and capture the nation’s attention. Now, add Daniel Prude’s name to the list.
The Rochester man died in March in a botched police interaction. His story went viral on Wednesday after video of the incident was released.
The manner of Prude’s death shows one of the key reasons policing sometimes goes astray: We simply ask far too much of our police officers, and in doing so, set them up to fail. They are expected to serve as traffic cops, emergency medics, investigators, mediators, and heroes, among other functions. Yet we also expect law enforcement to handle complex mental health crises competently, and even more than the other areas, this unreasonable expectation is disastrous for everyone involved.
It’s almost impossible to conclude anything else from what happened to Prude.
On March 23, Prude’s brother called 911 to request help for his sibling, who had recently been hospitalized for mental health treatment and was behaving erratically. Police arrived to find Prude in an obvious state of distress. Prude did not physically attack police, but he did yell at officers, including saying, “Give me that gun.” He also spat at them and claimed he had COVID-19.
A group of at least four police officers put a “spit hood” over Prude’s head and pinned him to the ground for roughly two to three minutes. Afterward, when they rolled him over, officers realized Prude wasn’t breathing — too late. They performed CPR, and he was loaded into an ambulance. But Prude was later declared brain dead and then taken off life support a week later.
GROWING OUTRAGE: Newly released police footage of Daniel Prude, a Black man who stopped breathing as officers restrained him during a March arrest in Rochester, N.Y., and later died, has led to questions, protests and calls for justice. @janai reports. https://t.co/wIixdvTF1Y pic.twitter.com/cTvmbnjuju
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) September 3, 2020
According to the Monroe County medical examiner, Prude’s cause of death was “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint,” with the influence of the drug PCP in his system as a contributing factor.
Without jumping to blame anyone or retreating to tribal impulses, we all ought to acknowledge that this is a tragic situation where a man needlessly died. Prude didn’t hurt anyone or do anything even remotely close to justifying the loss of his life. At the same time, police were in a very difficult situation, and there’s no evidence they acted with malice or intended to kill anyone.
It’s absurd to expect the police to handle a man having a total mental breakdown perfectly, difficult even for trained mental health professionals. And it only further complicates matters that officers were unsure how to handle Prude potentially infecting them with COVID-19 amid the beginning of an unprecedented pandemic.
Yes, a group of officers should have been able to constrain Prude without killing him. But we have to admit they were in a very difficult situation.
Imagine an alternative scenario.
Because the 911 call reported mental health distress but not a violent situation, imagine EMTs and social workers are dispatched to the scene instead of police. They deescalate the situation, the kind that mental health professionals deal with frequently and are trained to handle, and bring Prude to the hospital for mental health and drug-related treatment. The whole time, police officers are available for backup if the situation gets out of hand.
Prude would be alive right now, and these officers wouldn’t be having their careers and lives turned upside down. What’s more, our country wouldn’t be, once again, at each others’ throats.
This isn’t just some hypothetical. The city of Eugene, Oregon, has tried something just like this with some success.
It has teams of social workers that respond to mental health calls in lieu of police through a program called “Cahoots.” According to Minnesota Public Radio, “Cahoots responded to 24,000 calls [in 2019], which amounted to roughly 20 percent of all calls that went to the police. In less than 1 percent of those, Cahoots called the police for backup.”
Alternative approaches can work. So, when it comes to the death of Prude, clearly neither side is really getting it right.
Some conservatives aren’t willing to admit there’s any problem with our policing at all. Prude’s death and others like it make that position untenable. But on the other hand, no, we absolutely don’t need to “defund the police.” We need to stop asking them to do the impossible and then getting outraged when they fail.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a freelance journalist and Washington Examiner contributor.
