MANHATTAN — The city "failed" an emotionally disturbed woman when a sergeant shot an emotionally disturbed woman dead in her own apartment in Castle Hill Tuesday night, the mayor and NYPD commissioner said.
Police Commissioner James O'Neill spoke to reporters Wednesday, the morning after an NYPD sergeant shot Deborah Danner, 66, who police said was coming toward him with a baseball bat.
.@NYPDONeill on fatal Bx police-involved: "What is clear in this one instance, we failed. I want to know why it happened."
— Trevor Kapp (@tkapp20) October 19, 2016
The sergeant, Hugh Barry, has been placed on modified duty and stripped of his gun and badge, officials said.
"That's not how it's supposed to go. It's not how we train," O'Neill said.
"Instances like what happened last night in The Bronx certainly don't make it better. They just increase the tension."
The mayor agreed with the commissioner's assessment of the deadly shooting.
"Our police commissioner came forward and told the city exactly what happened and exactly how wrong it was," the mayor said.
"We did fail and we need to say it out loud and the people deserve to hear it," he added.
Union leaders disagreed with O'Neill's assessment of the shooting, saying the department is ultimately responsible for the actions of individual officers.
"If he feels we failed, then he should have had policies in place so that we didn't fail," said Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins.
"In the end, the buck stops with him. Maybe he should apologize for his role."
Read more about this incident here.
