Mayor de Blasio finally admits it: The city has a serious problem with the seriously mentally ill. Too bad his solution isn’t serious.
Hizzoner rolled out his latest mental-illness plans Monday, following a 30-day review triggered by the murder of four homeless men, allegedly by a seriously mentally sick individual.
Under his new initiative, the city will shell out $21 million “to reach the narrow population of New Yorkers with untreated mental illness who may pose a danger to themselves or others.”
Which sounds good — even if it took so long in coming. Yet part of the initiative will be overseen by ThriveNYC, the $1 billion mental-health program he launched in 2015 that’s run by his wife and has been unable to show any results since then.
Why expect Thrive to do much good now?
Plus, to a large degree, his reforms are just (a bit) more of the same — more outreach teams and greater use of Kendra’s Law to obtain mandatory Assisted Outpatient Treatment orders from courts.
The Sheriff’s Office is also supposed to follow up on AOT warrants for persons who skip court-ordered treatment. And police brass will work out details for transporting such people to hospitals but cops won’t make arrests.
So it’s not yet clear what’ll happen if a dangerously sick person refuses treatment, despite court orders. Or if, say, someone reports a threatening family member who hasn’t yet been ordered to get help.
Two months ago, Kwesi Ashun, a bipolar Brooklyn street vendor with a history of violence toward police, struck a cop with a chair, nearly killing him. Yet just 11 days earlier, he was evaluated by a city Health Department mobile-crisis team that determined he wasn’t a threat.
His sister had desperately tried to get help but was advised to call 911 if and when her brother became violent. That, clearly, was too late — and the wrong way to handle such a situation, in any case. Yet even with the mayor’s new initiative, it’s far from clear the situation would go much differently if the same thing happened again.
Fact is, City Hall’s latest reforms focus heavily on “outreach,” yet New Yorkers need to be assured that the city can — and will — remove dangerous people from the streets and subways.
No wonder mental-health expert DJ Jaffe is unimpressed. He says de Blasio’s new proposals regarding Kendra’s Law, in particular, are “impossibly vague.”
True, Gov. Cuomo and the state also have a role here. They can toughen Kendra’s Law and make it permanent. They can pass reforms to make it easier to move folks into facilities where they can get help, even if they’re too sick to agree they need it.
And they can ensure that there are enough hospital beds to meet demand.
But de Blasio and Thrive have been a big part of the problem because they’ve largely ignored the seriously mentally ill in favor of less critical mental-health goals, like spreading awareness. Horror stories, like the murder of the four homeless men, finally got de Blasio to respond. Alas, even now, his response offers little hope of a cure.
