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Alliance Alert: Daniel Prude’s death was a preventable tragedy that exposed deep flaws in ����������’s mental health crisis response system. Five years later, while some progress has been made, too many gaps remain—and too many people in crisis are still falling through them.

That’s why ���������� must fund and implement Daniel’s Law responder teams to phase in peer- and health-led mental health crisis response across the state. These teams are trained to respond with compassion and care, not criminalization. They provide a critical alternative in situations where police are not needed, and effective support is what’s needed.

Fixing our mental health system also means strengthening the entire continuum of mental health services. We need to expand access to voluntary, community-based services, improve coordination across systems like housing, health care, and mental health, and build real accountability into how services are delivered. That includes mandatory incident review panels to investigate what went wrong in tragic cases like Daniel Prude’s, so we can learn from them and prevent them from happening again.

Alliance Executive Seminar offers 50% Rate Reduction to $99
Features Presentations on Improving Mental Health Services

The Alliance for Rights and Recovery upcoming Executive Seminar will have multiple panels on improving mental health services, including creating effective crisis service continuums in your community, innovative approaches to outreach and engagement, taking on the mental health crisis in our state, and best practices in peer service delivery. We invite advocates, providers, policymakers, and people with lived experience to join us in pushing for solutions that are rooted in dignity, safety, and justice. See below for more information, including how to register for the seminar and get hotel accommodations.

Taking on the Mental Health Crisis in ���������� State and ���������� City
Featuring state and city leaders including Moira Tashjian (NYS Office of Mental Health), Dr. H Jean Wright II (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene), Lara Kassel (Medicaid Matters NY), Ruth Lowenkron (NY Lawyers for the Public Interest), Jihoon Kim (InUnity Alliance) and Alliance VP of Public Policy Luke Sikinyi.

Transforming Your Community’s Mental Health Crisis System: Is Everyone at the Table?
Shannon Higbee, Alliance for Rights and Recovery, Cherene Carraco, CEO, Promise Resource Network, Sarah Bonk, LMSW, Commissioner of Mental Health, Erie County, Jane Mogavero, ESQ., Executive Director, Patrick P. Lee Foundation, Jennifer Levesque, MA, LMHC, Chief Executive Officer, Recovery Options Made Easy.

National Best Practices in Peer Services Delivery and Financing
Dana Foglesong, MSW, NCPS, CRPS, National Senior Director of Recovery and Resiliency Services, Magellan Healthcare, Patrick Hendry, Vice President of Peer Services, Firsthand; Wendy White Tiegreen, MSW, Partner, Lexicon Strategies; Cherene Caraco, CEO, Promise Resource Network; Harvey Rosenthal, moderator.

Building out the Continuum: Best Practices in Outreach, Engagement, Recovery and Re-Entry
Melissa Wettengel, CEO, Hands Across Long Island: Nadjete Natchaba, Services for the Underserved, Steve Miccio, CEO, People USA Taina Laing, CEO, Baltic Street Wellness Solutions and Blaise Sackett, Hudson Valley Clubhouse. Moderator: Shannon Higbee, Chief Strategy Office, Alliance for Rights and Recovery

Register for the conference here and for the Marriott Hotel .

See below for more information on progress on implementing Daniel’s Law.

Five Years Since Daniel Prude’s Death, Namesake Bill Inches Closer to Law
By Tandy Lau | ���������� Amsterdam News | April 10, 2025

This past March 23 marked five years since the police killing of Daniel Prude during a mental health crisis response in Rochester. The deadly encounter sparked local reforms and bolstered national movements like the 2020 summer protests for George Floyd, who was murdered by officer Derek Chauvin about two months later.

In 2021, then-rookie State Senator Samra Brouk introduced Daniel’s Law with permission from Prude’s family. The bill would ostensibly limit local law enforcement’s role in responding to mental health crises. Many municipalities already have civilian mobile units to deploy instead of police to mental health calls, such as the Person in Crisis team in Rochester and B-HEARD in ���������� City. Daniel’s Law would connect them to state funding and more uniform protocols.

“The entire point of Daniel’s Law is that every ����������er should be able to count on a safe mental health response when they need it, and right now that’s not the case,” said Brouk over the phone. “Even within certain cities, it’s a patchwork system. In addition to this patchwork system of the state, and the entire point of having Daniel’s Law passed and be fully funded, is that we say goodbye to a patchwork of response plans and hello to a consistent, uniform response so that everyone is safe,no matter where they are in ���������� State.”

Brouk reintroduced the bill this year with amendments, including the creation of a statewide Behavioral Health Technical Assistance Center. The legislation passed the ���������� Senate’s Mental Health Committee with bipartisan support and the State Senate Majority’s One-House budget resolution includes $20 million to enact the first phase of Daniel’s Law and $2 million to create an assistance center.

Phase one would fund six to eight pilot programs across ���������� State, from urban to suburban to rural communities. While Daniel’s Law intends to provide more structure and consistency for non-police mental health call responses, Brouk said the legislation also acknowledges regional and geographic differences.

“Notably, [Daniel’s Law] is coming with dollars,” said Brouk. “The biggest piece here is that not only is the state saying this is something that’s important to do and it’s the right thing to do, and it’s going to help alleviate our mental health crisis, but we also are putting money behind that to aid in it.”

Advocates in the Daniel’s Law coalition such as Ruth Lowenkron, director of the Disability Justice Program for the ���������� Lawyers for Public Interest, feel the recent push is optimistic.

“We are very excited, or certainly cautiously optimistic, about the push for Daniel’s Law that is coming very, very strongly from the chairs of the Mental Health Committee,” Lowenkron said. “We are seeing some movement that Daniel’s Law is definitely making and has made an appearance in both One-House budgets. More or less, the [State Assembly and Senate] are thinking of it the same way, and we’ve been advocating very much with the legislature [and] with the governor to say now is the time.”

Daniel’s Law draws significant inspiration from the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program in Eugene, Ore., which dates back to 1989 without a single serious injury or death during a response. The mobile service usually sends just two people — a medical worker like a nurse or EMT and a crisis worker trained in behavioral health — to respond to mental health calls. In 2021, just 301 of the 16,479 requests required police backup.

However, the City of Eugene discontinued CAHOOTS services this past week because the parent organization White Bird “does not have the financial capacity to provide a full-service mobile crisis service.” The program will continue to operate in Springfield, Ore.

Here in ���������� City, the NYPD runs the B-HEARD pilot, which only covers a portion of the city, mainly in Black- and Brown-majority neighborhoods, and not every call will be eligible or guarantee a non-police response. The city still deploys the NYPD to mental health responses with “increased risk of harm,” including situations on subway tracks or when a crime is in progress. The pilot also only operates 16 hours a day.

This , 14,951 of the 20,451 qualifying mental health dispatches were diverted to B-HEARD; 7,417 led to patient contact and 3,691 mental health assessments. Another 30,878 mental health-related calls did not qualify for B-HEARD.

Recently, the Richmond Hill community held a vigil for Win Rozario, a Bangladeshi teenager killed by police while responding to his 911 call for help during a mental health crisis.

While proponents await Daniel’s Law to actually become law, the state previously established a Daniel’s Law task force in the budget to determine how the legislation would look like in practice if passed. They met most recently this past December.

5 Years Later, Would Daniel Prude Get Better Mental Health Crisis Care In NY?
  USA Today’s ���������� State Team April 6, 2025

���������� lawmakers are locked in debates over plans to fundamentally alter how authorities and hospitals treat people in a mental health crisis, clashing over systemic issues involved in the death of Daniel Prude five year ago. Gov. Kathy Hochul has pushed to make it easier for authorities to  and harder for hospitals to discharge them back onto the street without a treatment action plan.

At the same time, the  urged removing police from mental health emergency calls — unless violence is threatened — and replacing them with trained mental health professionals.

Taken together, the proposed measures aim to address key threads in the complex web of law enforcement and mental health care failures involved in Prude’s fateful encounter with Rochester police in March 2020.

Some advocates and civil rights groups, however, asserted ���������� is failing to close gaps in mental health resources. They also called on officials to address more social and economic factors, such as housing shortages and racial disparities, that contribute to violent and deadly incidents tied to untreated mental illness.

Put simply, ���������� Civil Liberties Union Senior Attorney Beth Haroules said, “The solution is to create the services people need.”

What did investigations of Daniel Prude’s psychiatric care at Strong Memorial find?

Prude, 41, was suffering from an acute mental-health crisis involving illicit drug use when he was taken to Strong Memorial Hospital on . He spent four hours there, about half of that time in the hospital’s specialized psychiatric emergency department, before being discharged.

Prude left his brother’s home four hours after being discharged by Strong, prompting the brother to call 911 for help. Rochester police located Prude — unclothed, bleeding and raving — on Jefferson Avenue in cold conditions and placed him into handcuffs. When Prude tried to get to his feet, officers knocked him to the pavement and restrained him forcefully enough that he stopped breathing and suffered irreversible brain damage. He died a week later.

Prude’s brother, Joe Prude, was critical in 2020 of Strong, saying they should have held Daniel for days instead of hours until they could be certain his erratic behavior had ended.

Since then, four investigations by state agencies and the Joint Commission, a national organization that accredits health care facilities, determined Prude’s treatment at Strong “met or exceeded all standards of care, with no deficiencies in clinical practices or policies,” the hospital said in a statement recently.

But details of Prude’s care at Strong — and the investigations of it — remained unavailable to the public due to privacy laws.

In a statement to USA TODAY Network, the state Justice Center noted it sent three letters to Strong Memorial Hospital identifying areas of concern stemming from death assessments from 2019 to 2024. The state agency withheld specific findings due to privacy law, but it noted the issues in these letters often include guidance for proper medication and care administration, opportunities for staff training or re-training, and updates to procedures to better comply with state guidelines.

In 2022, the City of Rochester agreed to pay $12 million to settle a wrongful death suit filed by Daniel Prude’s family. It was the largest civil rights settlement in Rochester’s history and did not involve Strong Memorial.

State government is now trying to catch up with a mental health crisis that unfolded over the past decade in ����������.

Hochul’s $1 billion plan enacted last year is funneling new state taxpayer-supported funding to a range of mental health needs.

That included reopening more inpatient psychiatric beds closed during the pandemic and creating new  that provide people with transitional housing and other services for their post-care return to the community.

The Democratic governor’s proposals to increase involuntary commitments and expand  came as violent ���������� subway incidents involving mental health issues have  in recent months, including several people being pushed onto tracks.

But Haroules, the civil rights lawyer, described the proposals as inadequate. “It is an unfortunate use of really horrific events to advance political solutions that really are Band-aids,” she said.

State lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly have also pushed back against Hochul’s plan, rejecting her proposed changes to involuntary commitment and Kendra’s Law in the Legislature’s budget proposals, with debate continuing until the state budget gets finalized in April.

In response to questions from USA TODAY Network, Strong Memorial in a statement noted “the death of Daniel Prude was a tragedy for his family and our community.” That tragedy prompted the hospital and other health care providers, law enforcement agencies, local governments, and the community “to analyze policies and procedures for dealing with people in crisis, and working collaboratively to do better,” the statement added. UR Medicine, the hospital’s health system, since 2020 has also opened several new mental health facilities and renovated existing space to provide a range of expanded behavioral health and mental health crisis services, Strong officials said.

David Robinson is a veteran health reporter for the USA TODAY Network’s ���������� State Team. Reach him at Drobinson@lohud.com.