Issuing a “moral obligation” call to action, New York Mayor Eric Adams argued that “it is not acceptable that we see someone who clearly needs help and walk right by.”
Based on this philosophy, which not a few describe as covert “cleaning”, Adams announced his plan to get homeless people with mental illnesses off the streets of the city and the subway.
If this is already complicated, largely due to the insufficient health infrastructure available for these cases (psychiatric beds are scarce), the matter provoked controversy by including that these people are taken off the street against their will if it is thought that they are a danger, even if they are not a risk to other citizens.
But who makes the opinion? This is the question. The initiative clears “a gray area where political and legal responsibility has not been clear,” said the mayor. So, under this initiative, any professional without medical knowledge, such as the police, can proceed to issue a judgment and order the transfer to a hospital. Then it will be the doctors who will decide. Until now, people with severe mental illnesses are taken to health centers, where they are discharged when their condition improves.
But Adams said the City will order hospitals to keep them on until they are clearly stabilized, and they will be released only when there is a viable project connecting those patients to ongoing care.
He did not specify anything about the cost of this operation. Yes, Governor Kathy Hochul promised an endowment of 50 new psychiatric beds and that there will be “one for everyone who needs it.” Seriously mentally ill who are not institutionalized in shelters number in the hundreds. Some 3,400 people sleep on the streets of the Big Apple, according to recent official data. The vast majority of these homeless suffer from psychiatric illnesses.
Other states are dealing with this situation, but apparently not so radically. California Gov. Gavin Newson signed a law to force treatment of homeless people with disorders like schizophrenia. In other states, such as Washington, judges must decide if they are a danger after medical examinations.
The Adams plan, which comes at a time of national debate over rising crime and the role of police, drew immediate praise from Republicans and conservative Democrats. But progressives lamented that all this smacks of blaming these people for security problems. “The homeless tend to be more the victims than the perpetrators of crimes,” said Jacquelyn Simone, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless. These voices qualified that deploying the police as social workers will cause more harm than good.
“We need to change that culture and clarify our expectations,” Adams insisted. “We have to focus on action, care and compassion. We will make an effort to help those who suffer from mental illness, ”she qualified.
Criticism immediately arose as to whether this directive is practical, appropriate, or legally permissible. Donna Lieberman, of the New York Civil Liberties Union, recalled in a statement that federal laws and the Constitution establish limits to the government’s ability to detain people with diseases. For Lieberman, Adams’s plan reminded him of the playbook of former Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose tenure left many notches for his intolerance of the poor and use of racial profiling.
There were more complaints, like that of Norman Siegel, co-founder of a program that works with the homeless in New York. “Just because a person smells bad because they can’t shower, wears disheveled clothes, or is murmuring, doesn’t mean they’re a danger,” he stressed.
