By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2024-11-20 00:14:57 | Updated at 2024-11-23 08:06:38
3 days ago
Mayor Eric Adams prodded Albany for help Tuesday in his years-long push to take mentally ill vagrants involuntarily off the street and into care — grimly casting a madman’s deadly Manhattan stabbing spree as the tragic consequence of inaction.
“Everybody said I was inhumane, that we just want to institutionalize people,” Adams said during his weekly off-topic briefing. “Well, this is the result. This is the result of not taking actions and ignoring people who need help.”
Adams said city officials will carry out an analysis to see where gaps in the mental health and criminal justice systems failed accused killer Ramon Rivera — and, ultimately, his three victims.
“We have three New Yorkers who were murdered in our city by a person who was betrayed by the health care system,” he said.
The mayor outlined steps the city has taken to take mentally ill people off the streets, including efforts to shift toward small mental health “clubhouses.”
But Adams said the city needs help from state lawmakers in Albany to bolster his controversial involuntary removal program.
The bill Adams has backed to expand the city’s authority to force troubled New Yorkers off the streets and into psychiatric care — the Supportive Interventions Act — went nowhere in Albany.
“We’ve been back and forth to Albany to say let’s codify in law and give real clarity around the authority we have of dealing with people with severe mental health illness,” he said.
Hours after the mayor’s comments, a disheveled Rivera, 51, appeared in a Manhattan courtroom for arraignment on three counts of first-degree serial murder.
Prosecutors said Rivera, a homeless man with a history of mental illness and arrests, randomly targeted and killed three New Yorkers innocently going about their daily lives Monday from the West Side to the East River.
He chillingly told cops he picked his victims because they were “alone” and “distracted,” law-enforcement sources told The Post.
