NY's homeless deserve better than Eric Adams' and Kathy Hochul's mismanagement
Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams have been busy serving up the latest in their piecemeal plans to address street-bound homeless New Yorkers with severe mental illness.Their single focus on conflating homelessness with public safety offers little more than compassionate window dressing while trying to look tough on crime.
Neither is working.Hochul’s newest plan will put hundreds of NYPD officers—all costing the city overtime pay —to man every overnight subway train.By her own admission, this is only “a six-month strategy.” It’s her third round of high-profile initiatives aimed to distract from the unpredictable, vicious crime that has left the city on edge.
In the past two years she’s beefed up patrols twice (including sending in the National Guard).And in 2022, her Office of Mental Health (OMH) chief issued the “Mental Health Involuntary Removals” (MHIR) directive, authorizing NYPD and other frontline workers to remove a person by force and transport him or her for psychiatric evaluation, if the person appears unable to meet their basic living needs “even when no dangerous act (or threat to act) has been observed.”This may sound innovative, but Hochul and Adams are merely amplifying existing New York state mental health mandates that have been on the books for years. The most important question is: Why has nothing changed since the governor’s 2022 directive? For one thing, sending in the National Guard or assigning officers on trains does not miraculously produce the long-term hospital beds people in crisis need.
Indeed, severely mentally-ill New Yorkers who willingly seek out help are routinely turned away at the front end of our hospital system.We’ve hemorrhaged thousands of long-term psychiatric beds over the past several years and are in desperate need of inpatient beds.But it’s also critical to understand this: A hospital bed is not a plan.
It is merely a part of a plan.Once every patient is stabilized, they need to be transitio...