Three days after a four-hour standoff ended with police shooting violence interventionist Najee Seabrooks, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh didn’t answer any questions about the shooting when he appeared at an unrelated event Monday morning.
Members of the St. Joseph’s Hospital-based Paterson Healing Collective, PHC, an organization for which Seabrooks worked as a high-risk interventionist, were at the scene on Friday but were not allowed access to Seabrooks, who was facing a mental health crisis of unknown origin.
The Paterson Healing Collective and similar organizations have been fighting a sometimes frustrating battle in a city that has seen record levels of violence exacerbated by well-documented police misconduct that has ended in the discipline of officers and several civil suits against the city. Police claim Seabrooks lunged at them with a knife.
“We know that the reason why the violence interruption groups exist is because the police aren’t equipped to handle these situations of crisis and the police shouldn’t be the only solution to handling crisis,” said Zellie Thomas of Black Lives Matter Paterson.
