Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

2. Policing Madness: People with Mental Illness and the NYPD

2 Policing Madness People with Mental Illness and the NYPD Heather Barr James James1 grew up in Brooklyn in a middle-class family where he was the oldest of three children. He was a junior in college studying engineering when he was hospitalized for the first time and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia . He has been in and out of hospitals dozens of times since then. His family took care of him for years, but eventually his parents died and his siblings left the city. Today, James is homeless. He sleeps in a park, eats out of garbage cans, panhandles, and drinks malt liquor to help him cope with the voices he hears in his head. He does not see a psychiatrist; he has neither benefits nor insurance. James hears things other people do not. He hears agents from the FBI planning to capture him, kidnap him, and hurt him. He often talks back to the voices he hears. One day, James is standing on a busy corner arguing loudly with the voices in his head and waving his arms for emphasis. He is blocking pedestrian traffic and a police officer tells him to move along. James looks at the police officer and sees one of the FBI agents coming to get him. He flails his arms, hitting the officer and knocking him down. James is arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest. Assaulting an officer is a felony. James spends several hours at the nearby precinct, several more hours at Central Booking, several more hours in a pen below the courthouse, several more hours in a pen be50 hind the courtroom, and finally, about 30 hours after hitting the police officer, James meets his lawyer. The lawyer knows immediately that there is something wrong with James. Thirty hours of moving from one cage to another have not helped James collect himself. He is disheveled and smelly and detoxing from alcohol; he is barefoot, talking loudly to himself, and there is a cut and a bruise on his face where another prisoner punched him for being too noisy. At arraignment, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case is amenable to lowering the charges. She has reviewed the paperwork and agrees with the defense attorney that James probably did not mean to hit the police of- ficer. She, like the defense attorney, can tell just by looking at James that he has psychiatric problems. James is offered the opportunity to plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and receive a sentence of 10 days of community service. The defense attorney tells James it’s a good deal and he should take it. James pulls himself together enough to get through the procedure of pleading guilty. His defense attorney tells him where and when to go for the community service and, as an afterthought , suggests that James see a doctor and get some medicine. James agrees to everything and walks out of the courtroom barefoot into a cold rainy night. He still has no benefits or insurance or any idea where he might find a doctor, if he wanted one. He loses the piece of paper with the information about community service almost immediately. He goes back to the park where he usually sleeps. He does not show up for community service. Three weeks later, James is found sleeping in the entrance foyer of a building on a snowy night. He is arrested for trespassing, and the judge wants to send him to jail because he didn’t do his community service last time. Gidone (Gary) Busch Gidone (Gary) Busch grew up on Long Island in a loving family. He completed college and enrolled in the prestigious Mount Sinai Medical School before symptoms of psychiatric illness began to trouble him. He left medical school and spent several years in Israel, where he became increasingly involved in the study and practice of Judaism. During his time in Israel, he was also hospitalized several times and treated for schizophrenia. When he returned to New York, Busch settled in Borough Park, a section of Brooklyn that is home to a community that is predominantly made up of Hasidic Jews. There, Busch pursued his religious studies with several of the community ’s rabbis, wrote poetry, and earned a reputation in the community as a POLICING MADNESS 51 person who lived to help...