A Special Folly
Blas & Co. bring mentally ill inmates to your door
WALLS riddled with bullet holes. Blood and empty casings on the streets. Syringes and open-air shooting galleries. Addicts walking around in a daze. Emboldened criminals menacing frightened residents. These are the results of the reckless anti-law-and-order policies enacted by many of my colleagues and our mayor.
Compounding these crises are a pair of related issues: an epidemic of untreated serious mental illness and the emptying of the correctional facility on Rikers, which brings untreated inmates to your doorstep.
New Yorkers struggling with mental-health issues are people with problems, not problem people. They are a vulnerable group in need of compassion and treatment. Simply moving them around doesn’t help anything. When officials don’t properly care for the mentally ill, they only increase public animosity against them. And other vulnerable groups — especially seniors and children — pay a price, too.
A CVS and a Walgreens store in my district have been robbed repeatedly since the city opened a homeless shelter in Glendale. Homeless, often mentally ill people stand around these and other local businesses and harass customers, demanding money with threats. Seniors are afraid to go to their pharmacies and grocery stores.
There are delivery services available, yes, but not every senior can afford the added cost or understand how to use the online systems. It’s already too hard for our seniors to get the medication they need because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of drugs and insurance issues. They now also worry about getting harassed or attacked by untreated substance abusers and/or repeat violent offenders.
Seniors, who have spent their lives paying taxes, raising families and contributing to our city, shouldn’t have to live in fear.
Nor should children. A man in my district was reported to the police and to my office for masturbating in public for two hours, in plain view of children. Men have been seen washing themselves nude in the park. A stairwell near the shelter has frequently been reported as a favorite place for untreated drug users to shoot up. Substance abuse is a devastating and common form of mental illness that often leads to homelessness and crime. Repeat offenders are let back out, rather than being treated in a secure facility — like the one on Rikers Island.
Despite the huge price tag and smoke-andmirrors p.r. of Co-Mayor Chirlane McCray’s ThriveNYC, we are failing our mentally ill, and it’s destroying our city. The billion-dollar price tag for Thrive might be justified if there were a single metric that suggested it worked. As I found out when I repeatedly asked, there isn’t.
There is nothing compassionate about withholding the treatment they need from the mentally ill. But releasing mentally ill inmates onto the street without making sure they’re treated takes a special form of folly.
Despite attempts to dismiss protests against jails, halfway houses and shelters in our neighborhoods as mere “NIMBY” syndrome or even racism, the truth is that everything the protesters feared has come to pass: crime, harassment, public drug use, indecent exposure and a degraded quality of life. Our community boards have been ignored, while policy is dictated only by slogans that fit on lefty agitprop posters.
The rush to empty out Rikers needs a rethink, stat. Rikers Island inmates were often treated for their afflictions in the island’s modern Program to Accelerate Clinical Effectiveness units. These can be made more effective with more funding that would still be a drop in the fiscal bucket compared to the construction and operation of neighborhood jails — not to mention the Thrive boondoggle.
The mayor supported increased funding for these units in his executive budget before “Close Rikers” became a socialjustice-warrior battle cry.
That’s why my bill in the City Council would establish a task force to study the cost of renovating Rikers Island, compared to projected cost of building neighborhood jails and other such outof-Rikers programs.
Rebuilding the island’s facilities and instituting new programs for inmates could potentially save the city billions of dollars, as well as provide mentalhealth treatment, instead of putting them on the streets untreated. I see no benefits to closing Rikers Island and no harm in considering the cost of improving it.
Let’s start by examining and improving the mental-health facilities on Rikers Island.
Our communities clearly oppose new community jails and similar facilities. Rikers Island already exists. Effective mentalhealth care can unite the city and make us all safer.