How do you perceive the mentally ill?

Is there sympathy? Frustration? Perhaps both? For those who barely deal with the mentally ill, frustration supersedes all emotions. That frustration lies when a sufferer’s emotions or actions defy logic and social conventions. It’s particularly misunderstood by those who barely interact with the mentally ill altogether, never taught that conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disease, are the result of an involuntary chemical imbalance that renders the sufferer helpless. It’s a disease where its symptoms are not so apparent, and where the fight for normalcy happens in the cerebral arena.

For the NYPD, confronting the mentally ill is part of the job, a near everyday occurrence to officers who don the uniform. They avert crises, and in many cases have spared the lives of sufferers and the heartache of thousands of families.

It’s because of that training that the shooting of Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old Bronx resident living in Castle Hill, has struck the minds of so many. Danner, who was unarmed, was shot twice in the chest by Sgt. Hugh Barry, one of the officers responding to a 911 call.

It’s a case that bore similarities to the 1984 fatal shooting of another Bronx resident, Eleanor Bumpurs, by an NYPD officer. In both cases, the victims were senior citizens who suffered from mental illness. In both cases, the victims were handling weapons (Bumpurs a pair of scissors, Danner a pair of scissors and later a bat) the NYPD officers felt endangered their lives.

But driving a wedge between the cases is the new training NYPD officers receive when encountering the mentally ill, training Sgt. Barry, an eight-year veteran, hadn’t received. Encountering the mentally ill is not always easy, though the NYPD has protocols in place to assuage the mentally ill, protocols that were apparently ignored in the Danner case. That lapse in judgment unfairly cost Danner her life. She was well aware of her lifelong battle against a disease so unmanageable, it caused her to wonder whether anyone can really handle it.

“Even the smartest people/persons in the world could not function in the realm of normalcy with that monkey on their backs,” she wrote in 2012 in an essay entitled “Living With Schizophrenia.”

The incident also cast a dark shadow on Sgt. Barry, who erred after opting for his police-issued gun over the Taser he was also carrying, a decision that underscores the permissible gun culture pervading the Police Department.

NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said it best when he told reporters less than 24 hours after the shooting that the NYPD failed Danner. His comments could cost him politically, though they encapsulate the feeling the general public thinks of the incident. After reflection should come action. And in that action the NYPD should consider real reform that’s not knee-jerk. This includes the immediate re-training of officers encountering the mentally ill and a psychologist brought to the scene of an incident involving a mentally ill person. With psychiatric centers closing across the state, it’s more and more likely the NYPD will face sufferers who lash out.

The only person who will truly know why Danner was killed is Sgt. Barry. Did he think his life was in danger? Was he only attempting to subdue her? Or did he just not know how to deal with the mentally ill?

Sgt. Barry’s history is checkered. He’s been sued twice for police brutality; once for pepper spraying a Manhattan resident standing at his stoop and another after he was caught on video violently pummeling a Manhattan man told to clear the street during crowd control. The first incident was settled out of court, while the other was dismissed. Either way, it proves embarrassing that the NYPD has allowed this officer to have continued to represent the department in the streets.

He should have been tasked to desk duty. Instead, he responded to a 911 call at Jamie Towers Housing where he encountered Danner. In the essay she wrote six years before she was shot, Danner wondered how the illness would ultimately shape her life.

“What if my medication fails me? I ask myself. Will I know if it does? Will the illness overpower its effectiveness? When? Where?” she asked.