Helping the Homeless
Ex-Gov. David Paterson has it right: Mayor Adams’ plan to force far more psych evaluations of street homeless who seem seriously mentally ill “not only will help to keep [dangerous] individuals off the streets, it’s going to help the individuals themselves.”
Yes, the plan is a work in progress: The city will need more psychiatric-hospital beds to execute it at scale, for example. But, as Adams say, “The starting point was for us to say, ‘We’re not accepting this anymore.’ ”
The usual suspects rushed to call it “criminalization of mental illness,” since cops will sometimes need to force people in for professional evaluation. But they’re not arresting these folks, let alone sending them to Rikers.
A half-century of deinstitutionalization has left street madmen and -women experiencing psychotic episodes in public. It’s obscene to leave them free but unable to meet their basic needs — food, shelter and clothing — with the illness itself preventing them from realizing they need help.
The homeless man just found stabbed to death at the West 4th Street station is just one example of how heartless the self-appointed “homeless advocates” truly are.
As Columbia prof Paul Appelbaum told City & State, the policy can prevent “further criminalization of people with mental illness.” How is it humane to leave them untreated until they do something that does send them to Rikers?
NYPD brass just ordered officers to start implementing the new policy. Yes, cops will get more training in how to do it, but they’ve gotten round after round of training in handling “emotionally distressed persons” in recent years, and knowing they now have the power to get homeless evaluated even if they don’t pose a clear immediate threat to others is the biggest single step.
The state and ideally the feds should step up by, among other things, adding psychiatric beds (Gov. Hochul’s already started reversing her predecessors’ policy of eliminating them).
Instead of throwing rocks, homeless advocates should work with City Hall to close the loopholes in Kendra’s Law that make it hard for families to get treatment for loved ones, and amending HIPAA so family aren’t shut out of treatment, care and case-management.
Living on the street or in jails and prisons is a rotten substitute for mental-health treatment. As Paterson also said, Adams’ initiative is “what we should’ve been doing the last 15 or 20 years.” Indeed.