As part of a broad effort to change how police confront civilians with mental illness, a group of attorneys has sued the New York City Police Department to obtain raw body camera footage from the fatal shooting last year of a man suffering from an apparent mental health crisis. New York Lawyers for the Public Interest has teamed up with attorneys from Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy to file an Article 78 challenge to the NYPD's refusal to release unredacted body cam footage from the fatal shooting in September of Miguel Richards in his apartment in the Bronx. The effort to push the NYPD to release additional footage from the shooting is one front in a larger campaign to get the department to change its approach to dealing with subjects with mental health issues, said Ruth Lowenkron of the NYLPI, which should include better training for officers and rethinking procedures when police arrive to a scene. Richards' death is one of 10 in the last two years in which officers shot and killed someone who appeared to be mentally disturbed, Lowenkron said. It was also the first fatal shooting by police captured on body-worn cameras after the April 2017 launch of a court-ordered program to equip officers with cameras. “My office is working hard to deal with the huge number of people with mental health crises who are shot and killed by police,” Lowenkron said. According to the suit, filed on Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court, officers were dispatched to Richards' apartment after his landlord contacted police out of concern that he hadn't seen or heard from Richards, a college exchange student from Jamaica, for several days, and that his knocks on Richards' door were going unanswered. The landlord let officers into Richards' apartment, the complaint said, and Richards was found apparently in the throes of a mental health episode: he was wearing sunglasses, standing motionless against his bedroom wall and, officers said, holding a knife in one hand and what appeared to be a firearm—but what later turned out to be a toy gun—in the other. A 15-minute standoff ensued, the complaint said, with Richards continuing to stand motionless and officers, with weapons drawn, repeatedly telling Richards to drop the knife. The officers were also shouting statements that, Lowenkron said, didn't appear to do much to de-escalate the situation—“This isn't going to end well,” officers could be heard saying on a tape of the incident, as well as asking Richards, “Do you want to die?” The incident ended with officers shooting Richards 16 times. A week after the shooting, the NYPD released a compilation of body cam footage from four of the eight officers at the scene. But NYLPI alleges that the videos released to the public didn't include footage taken from some of the officers there released no footage of the aftermath of the shooting. NYLPI filed a request under the Freedom of Information Law to obtain unredacted footage of the shooting, but the NYPD provided “heavily redacted” footage in response to the request, with portions muted and blurred, citing FOIL exemptions for unwanted invasions of privacy and endangering lives and safety, as well as a public records exemption under the controversial Civil Rights Law 50-a. Under the 50-a exemption, which allows police to keep disciplinary records secret, the NYLPI said the NYPD had argued in a separate suit filed by a police union that 50-a doesn't apply to body-cam footage. The department reversed its position on the 50-a exemption and released two additional videos, the suit alleges, but has stuck with the remaining FOIL exemptions. NYLPI attorney Stuart Parker and Milbank attorneys Jed Schwartz, Benjamin Reed and Marion Burke also appear on the complaint. A Law Department spokesman said the department would review the complaint and “respond accordingly.”