NYPD Vs. EDPs, Again

You'll likely be hearing a lot more in coming weeks about the death of Iman Morales , especially since the police captain who gave the order that led to his death, evidently deeply distraught, has tragically taken his own life.
The events that led to these two men's deaths began on Sept. 24 when a mentally ill Morales, naked and brandishing a long fluorescent light bulb, climbed onto a fire escape and later atop a storefront gate. Lt. Michael Pigott, an Emergency Services Unit acting commander, eventually ordered another officer to fire a Taser at Morales, causing him to freeze up and fall to his death, head-first. What the cops involved thought would happen to Morales, precariously perched 10 feet up, as 5,00o volts surged through his body is anyone's guess.
The case brings to mind two other cases involving emotionally disturbed persons (EDPs) that ended fatally. In 1984, Eleanor Bumpurs, a woman facing eviction from her Bronx apartment, brandished a kitchen knife and threatened to throw lye at housing workers. In a struggle with police, she was shot to death with a 12-guage shotgun.
Fifteen years later, Gidone Busch faced more than a half-dozen cops outside his apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, after neighbors complained that he was walking around naked and acting strangely. The cops barged into his apartment, then pepper sprayed him, and when he charged outside angrily, gunned him down as he brandished a small household hammer.
In the Bumpurs case one officer was tried and acquitted of manslaughter and the city eventually paid her family $200,000 in a civil settlement. In the Busch case, no criminal charges were brought and four officers were found not liable in a civil action in 2003. However, a judge later threw out that verdict, saying the cops' testimony was suspect. There has yet to be a settlement or a motion for a new trial.
What all three cases have in common is their unnecessary outcome. In all cases, no one but the EDP was threatened (the cops' argument that they felt endangered by Busch's hammer was given short shrift by the trial judge, Sterling Johnson.)
The NYPD always promises to review procedures to avoid repetition of these kind of incidents. But one thing should be painfully obvious even to those of us with no police training or intensive knowledge of procedure: Cops who respond to EDP incidents need to know how best to cool these situations down rather than exacerbate them.
"All they had to do was leave my brother alone," Glenn Busch, Gidone's brother told me during the trial. "He wasn't threatening anyone." NYPD instructional videos shown during the trial clearly showed that the cops involved disregarded their own training by failing to contain the situation while waiting for more experienced personnel to arrive.
Morales' deaths suggests the NYPD has learned nothing in the nine years since.