Citing safety, NYC is moving mentally ill people out of subway
NEW YORK
Inside a subway station in lower Manhattan, a group of police officers slowly followed a disheveled man in a soiled gray sweatshirt who was stammering and thrashing his arms wildly.
“Please, leave me alone,” he shouted. He struck his chest with an open palm and then, growing exasperated, sat down on a staircase. “What did I do wrong?”
Mucus had crusted in his beard. A pair of stained pants hung off his slender frame.
“Come on,” one officer, Heather Cicinnati, said as the man stumbled forward, disoriented and agitated. “We’ve got to leave the station.”
The police officers were part of a team led by a medical worker whose job is to move — by force, if needed — mentally ill people, who are often homeless, out of New York
City’s transit system. On that brisk March morning, the team handcuffed him and dragged him out of the subway station. Then, they placed a white spit hood over his head.
The intervention teams are part of an expansive effort to make the subway safer after a string of shocking crimes. Part of the plan involves finding solutions to one of the transit system’s most frustrating problems: people experiencing mental health issues and homelessness living on trains and in stations.
Officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, said they were doing what was necessary to help troubled people while keeping them away from passengers.
In survey after survey, riders have said they would use mass transit more often if they saw fewer people behaving erratically and more police officers.
But some advocates for mentally ill people believe the teams use heavy-handed tactics that do more harm than good. Ruth Lowenkron, director of the disability justice program for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, expressed dismay over the team’s use of a spit hood and called it “an anachronistic tool.”
“This is not who we want to be as a society,” Lowenkron said. “There’s no reason to do this. And it is not going to make people safer.”
In defense of the method, MTA officials said that the agency’s police officers must sometimes restrain people who are suffering from severe psychiatric distress in order to provide them with critical medical care.
Launched last fall, the program, called Subway Co-Response Outreach, or
SCOUT, has removed at least 113 people from the subway. Most go willingly to shelters, or to hospitals for medical treatment, according to transit officials.
Among the people removed from the subway, 16 have been sent to the hospital against their will for psychiatric assessments. Most involuntary detainees were admitted as patients.
There is no data to suggest that people with mental illness are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. But some New Yorkers were put on edge by a series of highprofile attacks carried out by mentally ill homeless people in recent months. Crime rates also surged in the transit system early this year before easing.