NYC aims to tackle mental illness issues on subway
New York City is spending $20 million on a program aimed at addressing mental health issues in the subway system, after a spate of violent crimes, including murder, shook public confidence in the transit system.
The city’s SCOUT program, created in October, is being championed as one way that it is connecting people with untreated severe mental illness on the subways to mental health treatment and care.
“The first step is often the hardest: connecting a person with medical care that they may not recognize they need,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said in a statement late last month.
Consisting of a clinician and two Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officers in a team, SCOUT teams have removed 90 individuals from the subway system and into care in the program’s first three months of operation, the city said.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said more clinicians would be hired to increase the total number of SCOUT teams to 10 by the end of next year, with money pledged by New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
The joint state and city effort to treat those with mental health problems came after the New York Police Department, or NYPD, said there were four homicides in the system this year, compared with just one in the same period last year.
Scared commuters
One recent crime over others left commuters rattled last month.
Carlton McPherson, 24, a mentally ill man from the Bronx, was arrested and charged with murder for allegedly shoving Jason Volz, 54, into a train at East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue station on March 25.
McPherson’s brother Daquan said his family had repeatedly tried to ensure he remained in psychiatric care, but he was released just two weeks before the incident with Volz.
“The city is failing all mentally ill people,” Daquan told the New York Post. “He just got out of the hospital two weeks ago. We begged them to keep him, but they said he wasn’t a threat to himself or others so they couldn’t keep him, and they let him go.”
Under New York’s Mental Hygiene Law, a person experiencing a mental health episode can be admitted to a psychiatric center voluntarily or involuntarily.
In the weeks before his arrest, the city had put McPherson into a specialized shelter system for people with mental disorders. But Roe Dewayne, who was staying alongside McPherson at one shelter in Brooklyn, saw him acting erratically and attacking a security guard, making it obvious that he “needed more help”, he told The New York Times.