NYPD Must Fire Officers Who Unnecessarily Shot Jabez Chakraborty, Probed Immigration Status, Seized Phones by Threat

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

MEDIA CONTACTS: 

Tess Weiner, tess@justicecommittee.org, 224.213.5495

NYPD Must Fire Officers Who Unnecessarily Shot Jabez Chakraborty, Probed Immigration Status, Seized Phones by Threat

Partial NYPD bodycam footage proves cops must be fully removed from mental health response

Yesterday, the NYPD released partial bodyworn camera footage of Officer Tyree White shooting Jabez Chakraborty. In spite of the fact that the less than 2 minutes of edited footage is accompanied by 5 minutes of biased NYPD narration, the video shows clearly why the NYPD is the wrong agency to respond to mental health calls, a reality Mayor Mamdani recognized in his campaign platform to remove NYPD from mental health. Once again, we see a New Yorker who needed care and was safe in their home gunned down within minutes of officers arriving, just like Win Rozario, Mohamed Bah, and too many others. 

The presence of armed officers is frightening to most of us and is all too often terrifying for New Yorkers who are already in distress. In this case, Jabez was clearly calm before he saw that Officer White had entered his home. Rather than make any attempt to de-escalate, White barked orders and immediately reached for his gun. When Jabez was safe behind a door, rather than holding the door closed, White chose to open it, claimed he feared for his life, and shot the young man multiple times.

What we don’t see in the short clip the NYPD selected to release, but have learned from Jabez’s family, is that immediately following the shooting, officers demanded family members’ phones and threatened them into compliance. NYPD officers also asked invasive immigration-related questions in violation of NYPD protocol and local law and created barriers to them visiting Jabez in the hospital. Even in their most vulnerable moments, Jabez and his loved ones were treated as suspects, not a family seeking care. 

The fact that Mayor Mamdani was either unwilling or unable to get the NYPD to grant the Jabez’s family’s request to view the unedited footage with their support team prior to its public release calls into question the Mayor’s accountability to New Yorkers and understanding of his power over the NYPD. We demand that the Chakraborty family and their support team be allowed to view the full, unedited body camera footage and other any other video evidence collected by the NYPD, for the cuffs to be removed from Jabez while he recovers from multiple gunshot wounds, and for Queens District Attorney Katz not to seek charges against Jabez. Further, we call on the Mayor and NYPD to fire Officer White for needlessly choosing to shoot Jabez and to fire the other NYPD officers who violated the Chakrabortys’ rights by taking their phones by threat and asking immigration-related questions. 

Mayor Mamdani’s immediate response to this incident was a dangerous continuation of his predecessors' pattern of excusing and even applauding officers who harm New Yorkers. Days later, Mamdani’s follow-up statement expressed a vision for a mental health system in which officers do not respond to “such crises alone”: an apparent endorsement of NYPD co-response, a misguided approach that will continue to send police to respond to and further criminalize and kill New Yorkers who need medical or mental health care. Without careful planning in consultation with a range of stakeholders, including those directly impacted by police violence and their loved ones as well as advocates and mental health experts, and without state legislative changes, Mamdani’s Department of Community Safety (DCS) can only reduce NYPD interaction, not stop their involvement. As it stands, the DCS runs the risk of entrenching the NYPD as default responders and continuing to unnecessarily threaten and take New Yorkers’ lives. 

If the Mayor is serious about removing NYPD from mental health, as he campaigned for, he must stop defending police-led and co-response models, and instead invest in community-based, non-police crisis response and preventative and post-crisis care.