Photo: Wikipedia

After an emotionally disturbed, African-American woman was shot and killed by a white officer, the city’s top cop says that proper protocols were not followed. “We do have policies and procedures for emotionally disturbed people and it appears those procedures weren’t followed,” said Commissioner James O’Neill about the death of Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old Bronx resident with schizophrenia. “That’s not how it’s supposed to go,” he said. “Our policy is isolate and contain.”

The NYPD says cops were responding to a 9/11 complaint from a neighbor about a “female who was acting in an irrational manner,” at a building in the Bronx. About nine minutes after the call, uniformed Sergeant Hugh Barry — “an eight-year veteran” according to the Daily News — entered Danner’s apartment and encountered her in her bedroom “armed with a pair of scissors.” Police say he persuaded her to drop them, but then she “grabbed a baseball bat” and swung it at the officer, who fired two shots into her torso. She was pronounced deadly shortly after at Jacobi Hospital, prompting lots of outrage and questions over the officer’s lethal use of force, like: Couldn’t he have easily disarmed the elderly woman? Or why didn’t he use a taser?

NBC reports that cops have responded to the address in the past, with one resident saying that police “brought her out in a straitjacket, she was hollering and screaming.”

Bronx Borough Ruben Diaz Jr. condemned the shooting. “This elderly woman was known to the police department, yet the officer involved in this shooting failed to use discretion to either talk her down from her episode or, barring that, to use his stun gun,” wrote Diaz in an official statement.

On Danner’s Twitter profile, she described herself a “a work in progress, I am a gem in the rough. I’ll smooth out soon.” She was moderately active on social media and posted several tweets in support of Black Lives Matter” and Second Amendment reforms, writing:

Point of the Conversation: How’d U like to move about w/a TARGET on you because of the color of your skin? BLACK LIVES MATTER!

— Deborah Danner (@DeborahDanner01) July 8, 2016

With so much GUN VIOLENCE around us innocents, would someone PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE sponsor AMENDING THE 2ND AMENDMENT to reflect the 21s…

— Deborah Danner (@DeborahDanner01) July 8, 2016

Then there was this update two weeks ago.

Who’s getting old? Not me; between NOW and DEATH I have a lot to do…..

— Deborah Danner (@DeborahDanner01) October 5, 2016

The NYPD stripped the officer of his badge and his gun pending an investigation.