By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-25 11:37:04 | Updated at 2025-01-27 05:43:52
1 day ago
Public fury over dangerous mentally ill people plaguing the streets and subways has Gov. Hochul, Mayor Adams and mayoral wannabes calling for change — but tweaks to current laws and institutions won’t do it: New York needs seamless, reliable ways to get seriously mentally ill folks off the streets and ensure they stay off.
Recent, horrific high-profile incidents include a triple stabbing maniac, the F train K2-addled fire starter who torched a sleeping woman, the Manhattan 1 train shover and the unprovoked fatal stabbing of a 14-year-old Bronx boy.
Yet we’ve passed the third anniversary of the subway shoving death of Michelle Go with no real change.
Enough with politics as usual — no more jargon, buzz words or half-measures: It’s time for serious remedies.
Mayor Adams’ new plan to build “Bridge to Home,” a special facility to house homeless mentally ill NYers, and add 900 “Safe Haven” beds across the city by 2027 is a good start, because it targets the persons responsible for much of the public disorder and violent crime.
Missing from Adams’ plan, however, are psychiatric triage centers where cops and outreach teams can take individuals for evaluation and placement.
Some “Emotionally Disturbed Persons” will need detox because many self-medicate with booze, weed and street drugs like K2/spice, a notorious synthetic marijuana.
Hochul can help by demanding that the Supportive Intervention Act, which broadens the criteria for involuntary commitment and redefines the now-lame “danger to self” standard, pass along with this year’s state budget.
Other legislation should prevent anyone found mentally unfit to stand trial from being immediately released without treatment — a reform that even Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg favors, since the system now sends such people back out onto the streets all the time.
If someone criminally charged is unfit to stand trial, he or she is a clear public danger and merits inpatient treatment plus mandatory followup outpatient care.
And make Kendra’s Law permanent and stronger, so that it’s easier to require Assisted Outpatient Treatment — and for families to get AOT ordered for a loved one. Indeed, anyone released from mental-health inpatient care needs to get screened for mandatory outpatient treatment.
And both cops and social workers of all kinds need to be onboard with enforcing AOT mandates: Non-compliant patients likely need re-hospitalization.
Due process is necessary, but a system that leaves so many dangerous people wandering the streets and subways is plainly relying on dysfunctional processes.
And the idea that voluntary community care works for the severely mentally ill has been nothing but a feel-good myth ever since deinstitutionalization became state policy.
The proper goal is to get every unhoused, ill-clothed lunatic haunting the subway and streets into an inpatient psychiatric bed, to be released only when prepared to comply with mandatory outpatient followup care.
State lawmakers will have to overcome their reluctance to restrict the civil liberties and autonomy of mentally ill people and their aversion to inpatient settings for people suffering serious mental illness.
Ignore the professional “advocates” who pretend that the best place for lost souls is on the streets.
Get real before more innocent New Yorkers become victims to these walking time bombs.
