Meanwhile, tonight, we have new details about the woman who was fatally shot by police in Fort Lee just over a week ago.

The attorney general's office identified the victim as 26 year old Victoria G. Lee.

The woman's brother called police in the early hours of July 28, reporting that Lee was having a mental health crisis and had a knife in her hand.

She was shot and killed by police at some point after officers arrived.

But in a statement, the Lee family today told Northjersey.com Victoria was not holding the knife when officers entered the apartment, saying, quote, The unnecessarily aggressive approach taken by police led to her death.

Lee's death is raising new questions about why mental health services weren't used in this crisis situation.

Social justice reporter Taylor Jung and mental health writer Bobby Brier teamed up to look into it and join me now with their reporting.

Bobby, I want to start with you.

And you did some digging into the arrive together program and whether or not that would have been helpful in this situation in Fort Lee or whether it would have been enough.

What did you find?

Yeah, Briana, from what I had seen, the Arrive Together program is available in a number of different towns surrounding Fort Lee with those police departments, respectively.

It has not yet been in and implemented in the arrive together, excuse me, in Fort Lee's police department.

Yet.

With that being said, though, I had heard recently from the attorney general's office that the Fort Lee Police Department, as well as Teaneck, are in the final stages of rolling that program out with CARE.

Plus, New Jersey, that's a nonprofit based in Paramus that really specializes in behavioral health.

The attorney general's office did not give an exact timeline of when that would come to the Fort Lee Police Department, but they did say they were in the final negotiation stages.

This really comes as we've seen incidents like this occurring in the past and more and more people calling for a program like arrive together to be in these kind of situations.

But Taylor, I'm wondering, is there too much emphasis or pressure even being put on the successes of arrive together, especially when you're in a crisis like this one?

As it was reported through the police reports that we got where the 26 year old woman was evidently wielding a knife and her brother called police.

It seems we've heard over the years from activists that they they really want a community first, not a police first program.

And what did they tell you?

Right, Bri.

I think that the idea there is that they want the community in charge of its own public safety.

The community knows itself best in knows how to take care of itself.

They're also saying that police tend to escalate situations and not really help individuals when they're in mental health crises.

And the idea there as well is that the AG's office has created a list of guidelines to sort of make use of force and deadly use of force.

The last resort there, it's not really clear whether or not any of the officers involved in the Fort Lee case had actually tried to de-escalate the situation.

All we know is that the woman was holding a knife.

Officers asked her to open the door and they did not comply.

And then when the door was opened, the the gun was shot.

So beyond that, I think advocates have also been really clear that they would like more police accountability in lock step with not just arrive together, not just these community led programs, but also making sure that police are held accountable for these instances when misconduct does take place.

And we should note that there are a number of instances that have been recorded where use of force was not used, where these tactics were deployed successfully.

But is the legislature or the governor stepping in to make any of that possible?

These ideas that have come from community based groups or accountability.

Legislative Black Caucus has really been at the forefront with all of this police reform legislation, as well as making sure there's funding for community led violence intervention programs.

However, I will say over the last several years, it feels like those initiatives have fallen upon deaf ears.

This caucus has continuously reintroduced police accountability measures, whether that's to ban chokeholds or to create more civilian oversight when there's instances of police conduct misconduct.

Those bills have either minimally move forward or not really moved forward at all.

So I think the not just the caucus, but advocates are calling on the governor and the AG's office and the rest of the legislature to do more here.

Bobby, are they steering the direction of the conversation in the right direction?

Because we know tackling a mental health crises like these, it's not easy and even if you have a member of law enforcement and a trained member, a social worker, psychologist, what have you.

There's still no script for how to handle this.

That's right, Briana.

And to Taylor's point, it really remains to be seen how law enforcement and community led groups would interact or if they do interact in situations like this.

What we do know is that they're in addition to arrive and in addition to the community led responses, there are at least two other emergency crisis response programs that are either in development or already established in the state.

The first is that 1988 Mobile crisis response suicide hotline number.

But the other one and this is the one that a lot of criminal justice advocates that I spoke to had had pointed to was whether the county Psychiatric Emergency screening service was called in this situation.

If not, why not?

These are really kind of some of those outstanding questions that we're waiting to see more from the attorney general's investigation in the coming days and weeks ahead.

Bobby Brier, Taylor Jung, thanks so much for your reporting on this.

Thank you.