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���������� Note: In recent days we’ve distributed several reports highlighting recent studies that demonstrate the disastrous outcomes that can occur when individuals with mental health challenges interact with law enforcement.�� In this context, we are especially grateful to the NY legislature that has allocated resources to develop Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs across the state (in both last year’s and this year’s state budget).�� We are also thankful to various groups that joined our advocacy efforts or led consistent efforts to make this possible – including NAMI-NYS, MHANYS, and Community Access.��

Our friend and colleague Don Kamin is directing The Institute for Police, Mental Health & Community Collaboration that is responsible for working with localities to develop CIT programs across the state.�� The second edition of “” – a newsletter devoted to NYS CIT issues- was recently distributed by the Institute.����Subscribe directly to the newsletter (in the upper left hand corner) and/or contact Dr. Kamin directly at dkamin@nyscit.org if you have questions or comments.

Independent of the Institute’s work, the ���������� Police Department has recently embarked on a pilot program involving CIT training in three precincts in collaboration with the . We look forward to bringing more information about these trainings, and hope that they begin to address the impact of systemic policies that criminalize behaviors (as mentioned below) consistent with diagnoses and homelessness.

Capital ����������; Laura Nahmias, 7/15/15

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The homeless man whose picture has��on the��because of his habit of urinating in public is a schizophrenic whose symptoms are being exacerbated by all the media attention, police commissioner Bill Bratton said Wednesday.

In recent days, the Post’s coverage of the homeless man, identified as 49-year-old John Tucker, has sparked widespread criticism on Twitter and elsewhere from other media outlets and reporters, who say the paper’s coverage is excessive and gratuitously cruel.��

Bratton said the man is well known to police and that an officer “has been working for months with him trying to deal with his issues.”

“He’s an extremely emotionally disturbed individual—schizophrenic—and so all the attention is actually exacerbating his condition,” Bratton said during an appearance with Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Pursuing him for 30 or 40 blocks throughout the city is certainly doing nothing to calm him down. Rather, it’s agitating him.”

A spokeswoman for the Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.��

Asked how he felt about a City Council initiative that seeks to decriminalize public urination, Bratton said he opposes it and called the measure a “Pandora’s Box” that could roll back advances in quality-of-life measures.

But in a lengthy aside, Bratton said that when it comes to dealing with the city’s homeless population, he wanted to make clear the distinction between criminal acts and homelessness itself, which is not a crime.

“On the issue of homelessness … we police behavior, not the condition,” he said. “It is unfortunate that so many people, through circumstances oftentimes beyond their control, find themselves homeless, find themselves on the street. There is nothing that we, the police, will do about that condition. But we will do something about behavior using the tools available to us, whether it be the criminal law or other alternatives that might be more advantageous.”

, the de Blasio administration announced a $130 million, four-year initiative aimed at changing the way the city manages its mentally ill and incarcerated populations.

The initiative included a measure to provide additional training for police officers to help them recognize the signs of substance abuse and mental illness and be able to de-escalate scenarios that could lead to arrest or violence.

Bratton said at Wednesday event in the Bronx that he had just come from a meeting to discuss the NYPD’s plans to train more than 4,000 officers in dealing with the mentally ill.

Bratton said that while a small subset of the city’s homeless population occasionally engages in violence or illegal behavior, many don’t and pose no threat to the city’s population.

“The fear is now spreading to the total homeless population, the vast majority of whom are not engaging in illegal behavior, not engaging in violence, but are now being seen by the public as somebody to fear,” Bratton said.

“That’s unfortunate, because the vast majority of them, they’re there, they might be sitting in a park somewhere, you might not want to be sitting beside them, but they have every bit as much right to be in that park as you or I to sit on that bench.”

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