The shooting of Raul de la Cruz in the Bronx has renewed the debate over whether police officers are equipped to respond to people in emotional distress.
A desperate call for help from a father in the Bronx whose adult son struggles with his mental health ended when responding officers shot his son within 28 seconds of their arrival, saying he had brandished a knife.
The son, Raul de la Cruz, 42, remained unconscious for days after being shot Sunday morning. He was awake Thursday, his family said, and speaking a little.
But as he struggles to recover in a room at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx guarded by the police, his family is asking how a call seeking medical help ended with Mr. de la Cruz in critical condition, shot six times in the abdomen, right leg and his chest, according to his sister, Maisset de la Cruz.
The shooting is being investigated by the Police Department’s Force Investigation Division, the department said in an email.
Mr. de la Cruz’s encounter with the police once again focused attention on how the city responds to New Yorkers in emotional distress. Activists and some lawmakers say the police should not be the first on the scene when someone is in the throes of a mental health crisis, because their presence, with their uniforms, weapons and sirens, can escalate situations that are already volatile.
Last year, the police responded to about 171,000 calls about “E.D.P.s” — emotionally disturbed people — across the city, an increase from roughly 158,000 calls in 2021, according to department data.
The practice of using the police to respond to such cases has come under scrutiny nationally, with some states expanding programs that pair police officers in unmarked cars without sirens with mental health counselors. But in New York City, officers are often still the first to arrive.
The chain of events in the Bronx on Sunday began when Mr. de la Cruz’s father, Santo de la Cruz, called 311 to get medical help for his son — who is homeless and was showering at his house that morning — after they got into an argument, as first reported by Gothamist.
Ms. de la Cruz said her father had approached his son to talk about a disturbing video that the son had posted on Facebook, where he was shown yelling at police officers at a subway station.
“We knew that he had a knife,” she said. “He didn’t have the knife out. But we knew, and that’s why we were worried about him, because of the video and because of the knife.”
Mr. de la Cruz intentionally called 311 instead of 911 “because I didn’t want something bad to happen,” he told Gothamist.
However, because 311 is a nonemergency number, where calls are referred to agencies based on the circumstances, volatile situations are transferred to the police.
“Once it’s clear a customer is describing a dangerous situation, whether a mental health call or other condition, like a damaged tree that is creating a dangerous situation, we transfer to 911,” said Bill Reda, a spokesman for 311.
Just over 20 minutes after Mr. de la Cruz started the call, officers arrived outside his apartment building. When his son saw the police outside the building’s entrance, he became “agitated,” John Chell, chief of patrol with the Police Department, said at a news conference. He pulled out a kitchen knife and didn’t comply with orders to drop it, Chief Chell said.
In his call, Mr. de la Cruz “made it clear” that his son had a dangerous weapon and “asked the operator for 911 to respond,” said Jonah Allon, a spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams. For those reasons, the call was appropriately transferred to 911, he said.
The family is adamant that Mr. de la Cruz called 311 only to seek medical help for his son, not because he feared he was dangerous.
The episode on Sunday is the latest in which New Yorkers in emotional distress have been met by a show of police force.
In 2019, the police shot and killed a Bronx fitness instructor holding a kitchen knife in his apartment. Minutes before, firefighters had helped the man, Kawaski Trawick, unlock his door and get back in, as he carried a bread knife and a long stick, according to reports.
In Brooklyn, in 2018, officers shot and killed Saheed Vassell, a man known to be mentally ill, saying they believed he had pointed a gun at them. The object in his hands turned out to be a metal pipe with a knob.
The police should not respond first to mental health calls because they are not trained to de-escalate them, said Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate. The presence of a knife or other weapon doesn’t always mean a situation is dangerous and can’t be diffused, he said.
“The N.Y.P.D. has a specific function,” he said. “It’s hard to unpack that function at the moment they have to make a particular decision.”
Across mayoral administrations, there “seems to be a dedication to having police be part of the response first, and that I think it’s a problem,” Mr. Williams said.
The Police Department said in a statement that officers receive “significant training” on how to engage with individuals with mental illness.
One of the officers who responded to Mr. de la Cruz had in fact been trained by the department’s crisis intervention team program, and both officers were trained in responding to people in crisis and on voluntary and involuntary removals, the statement said.
George Alvarez, a New York State assemblyman whose district includes Mr. de la Cruz’s father’s building, noted that despite having been trained, the responding officers had used force within seconds.
“It’s clear that they failed last Sunday,” he said.
Another point of contention for Mr. de la Cruz’s family is that the officers gave him commands in English. As a native Spanish speaker, he does not understand English well, they said.
“My district heavily speaks Spanish, heavily,” Mr. Alvarez said, adding that police units that are trained in crisis intervention should try especially hard to communicate with people in their native language.
The Police Department did not respond to questions about whether the officers who responded to the call spoke Spanish.
Mr. Adams announced a push in November to remove more people from the streets and send them to hospitals if their mental illness made them a danger to themselves — even if they didn’t want to go. The plan, which can include the use of the police, followed a string of high-profile crimes involving people in crisis. But some experts in mental health, homelessness and policing are skeptical of it and of whether the police should be involved.
In 2021, the city began a pilot program called the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or B-Heard. The initiative, which sends teams of mental health professionals to certain emergencies, operates seven days a week and 16 hours a day in 25 precincts, but not where Mr. de la Cruz’s father lives.
According to the city, B-Heard teams do not handle violent calls, or calls where someone may harm themselves. Those calls are still handled by the police and emergency services. For the fiscal year that ended last June, nearly 80 percent of mental health calls in the areas covered by the program were ultimately routed to emergency responders, according to city data.
The program is “deeply flawed” and “continues the long history in New York City of criminalizing mental health,” said Marinda van Dalen, a senior staff attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, who is representing Mr. de la Cruz’s family.
Activists said calls about people in distress should first be routed to units that are trained in de-escalating mental health crises.
“Be gentle, treat me like a person,” said Christina Sparrock, a mental health advocate and crisis intervention specialist who said she herself lives with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. “Mental illness is not a crime.”
In the meantime, activists suggested that people in distress call 988, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
As Mr. de la Cruz awaited more surgeries, his family members said they were racked with guilt over having called for help at all.
“We just worried about him, because we didn’t want him to hurt anyone,” Ms. de la Cruz said. “We tried to prevent, but look what we get.”
Andy Newman contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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