A New York police sergeant responding to a call about an "emotionally disturbed person" fatally shot a 66-year-old woman wielding a baseball bat, authorities said. 

Police said they were investigating the shooting, including why the officer who responded in the Bronx on Tuesday night fired his gun rather than a Taser.

"The sergeant was armed with a Taser, it was not deployed, and the reason it was not deployed will be part of the investigation and review," Assistant Police Chief Larry W. Nikunen, commanding officer of Patrol Borough Bronx, said during a news conference Tuesday night.

On Wednesday morning, James O'Neill, the New York police commissioner, spoke bluntly about the shooting, telling reporters "we failed" and that he wanted to know why.

"Every life to me is precious," O'Neill said during a briefing. "I think that we've been in this business a very long time, we've established procedures and protocols for handling emotionally disturbed people. That's to keep everybody safe, that's to keep the cops safe, the community safe and the person that we're dealing with safe."

O'Neill pledged that police and prosecutors would investigate this to "figure out what went wrong."

Officers responding to a neighbor's 911 call about the woman shortly after 6 p.m. headed up to her seventh-floor apartment on Pugsley Avenue, Nikunen said. This woman was known to police after "several incidents" involving similar calls about her, he said.

When the uniformed sergeant went inside at about 6:15 p.m., the woman was holding scissors, Nikunen said. The sergeant talked with her and persuaded her to put the scissors down, he said.

"After putting down the scissors the female subject approached the sergeant and grabbed a baseball bat," Nikunen read from prepared remarks during a news conference late Tuesday. "As she attempted to strike the sergeant, he fired two shots from his service revolver, striking her in the torso."

She was taken to Jacobi Hospital and pronounced dead. Police did not immediately identify the sergeant involved or the woman who was killed, but local news reports said her name was Deborah Danner.

While Nikunen began reading his remarks, a voice in the crowd yelled out, "Black lives matter."

During his remarks Wednesday, O'Neill said that the sergeant, like other officers, attended training in 2014 that focused on de-escalating situations.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz called the shooting an "outrage" and said the Bronx district attorney and New York state attorney general to investigate.

"While I certainly understand the hard work that our police officers undertake to keep the streets of our city safe every single day, I also know what excessive force looks like," Diaz said in a statement late Tuesday. "This elderly woman was known to the police department, yet the officer involved in this shooting failed to use discretion to either talk her down from her episode or, barring that, to use his stun gun. That is totally unacceptable."

Diaz compared the shooting to the death of Eleanor Bumpurs, a mentally ill grandmother in the Bronx shot and killed by police in 1984. The police officer who fired the fatal shotgun blasts that killed Bumpurs was later acquitted.

"Hasn't anything changed over the last 32 years?" he said.

The Bronx woman was at least the 771st person fatally shot by a police officer this year, according to a Washington Post database tracking such shootings.

About a quarter of these shootings involved people who were reported to be mentally ill or suffering an emotional crisis, The Washington Post's database shows, a similar share to what was found last year.

Experts say these kinds of shootings highlight an issue involving just how often police are called to respond to someone suffering from either a mental or emotional crisis and whether officers are properly trained to handle such calls.

In most cases last year involving people with mental illness fatally shot by officers, authorities were responding after a relative or bystander called because they were worried about the person's erratic behavior.

Just two days before the Bronx shooting, police in Texas fatally shot a woman whose husband had called 911 seeking a mental health officer and warning that his wife had picked up a gun.

Authorities said that Micah Dsheigh Jester, the Austin woman, pointed a weapon at officers saying, "Shoot me. Shoot me. Kill me," and that she kept approaching them, prompting two officers to shoot her.

She fell to the sidewalk, injured but alive, still asking the officers to shoot her and not putting down her weapon, police said. They fired again and she was pronounced dead not long after. It later turned out her weapon was a replica BB gun, which can often appear real to police officers.

A shooting in El Cajon, Calif., last month also prompted anger after officers fatally shot Alfred Olango, whose sister had called authorities worried about his erratic behavior.

On Monday, a day before the Bronx shooting, police in El Cajon said they arrested eight people who had gathered and were angry a memorial for Olango had been removed. Authorities said some officers had been assaulted, and police said one person at the scene had pulled out a handgun before being tackled by demonstrators.