On January 26, family members of 22-year-old Jabez Chakraborty called 911 when he started behaving erratically inside their Queens home. When police arrived, they said Chakraborty brandished a knife and advanced toward them, at which point they shot and wounded him.

Chakraborty’s family was distraught and livid. They said they called 911 expecting a first responder trained in mental health, not the police, to attend to their schizophrenic son. In an initial statement after the shooting, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he was “grateful to the first responders who put themselves on the line each day to keep our communities safe.” Mamdani’s expression of gratitude for the police drew a furious rebuke from Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM), one of the very first activist groups that backed his mayoral campaign. The Chakraborty family, through a statement released by the South Asian activist organization, said they “saw Mayor Mamdani’s statement applauding the NYPD officers that shot our son, threatened and lied to us, and kept us from seeing our son for over 24 hours. Why is the Mayor applauding officers who recklessly almost killed our son in front of us?”

Police body-cam footage released on Tuesday shows Chakraborty helping his family in the kitchen when officers are let into his home. When he sees the officers, he picks up a knife and moves toward them, ignoring calls from his family to stop. A family member attempts to block Chakraborty, but he evades her and continues moving toward the police, who start shouting commands to drop the........

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