9/3/2020
"Defund the police" was an unfortunate rallying cry, not only because it misrepresented its own goals, but because its shock value made it a byword for opposition to the "radical left."
The case of Daniel Prude shows what Defund the Police really means: it means adding social workers and other crisis counselors to deal with 911 calls that aren't necessarily about crimes.
In March 2020, Daniel Prude died in police custody in Rochester, NY -- the same police department whose members knocked over an elderly activist earlier this year and then reacted to criticism by complaining that they were being demonized.
Prude, 41, was Black, was part of a family and was a father. He was wracked with psychiatric troubles. The day he died, he had been to a hospital with suicide on his mind, but the hospital released him after a medical evaluation.
By the time Prude's brother had phoned the police to get help for Daniel, he had PCP in his system and had taken off all his clothes in a light snowfall. It was 3:15 in the morning. The police who arrived handcuffed him and put a hood called a spit sock over his head. Then an officer held his face to the ground with both hands while another put a knee in Prude's back and a third held his legs. Prude spent three minutes restrained, and before he was let up, he had stopped breathing.
After a week in the hospital, Prude died. His death was from asphyxiation while under restraint, with complications from PCP and "excited delirium." The death was called a homicide.
The Rochester police chief told Mayor Lovely Warren that Prude died of an overdose.
In April, New York Attorney General Leticia James opened an investigation. In Rochester itself, the dust settled on the case. Mayor Warren says she saw the video on August 4 and relayed her disappointment to the police chief.
It's not clear how Prude's family released the body-camera footage, but once it became public in the first days of September, protests began immediately. On September 3rd, Warren suspended seven police officers pending an investigation into their conduct.
Prude's brother said, "I called to get help for my brother, not to get him lynched."
After another outrage in which officers used too much force against a Black man, another city has erupted in conflict. It's possible that a mental-health specialist could have defused the situation, but we'll never know.
We'll see what happens next.
Do you think police are at fault in Prude's death? Do you know of any incidents in which a "civilian" was able to keep police violence at bay? Do you think the police chief lied deliberately to the mayor to hold off scrutiny into the incident?
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