Gov. Kathy Hochul is reiterating her efforts to make it easier to involuntarily commit and treat people with severe mental illness in the wake of a spate of violence in the subway.
In a statement Friday ahead of the new legislative session, Hochul decried a recent parade of “horrific incidents” in the transit system and repeated a playbook she has pushed for years to boost psychiatric hospitalization and court-ordered treatment. Her executive budget will include changes along those lines when it is released in the coming weeks, she said, without providing specifics.
But some experts say the focus on adding more legal fixes hides a lack of accountability and coordination among existing programs meant to reach people living on the streets. And some of the efforts Hochul lauded, like a push to create more psychiatric beds, have yet to come to fruition.
Crime in the subway was up in December compared to the previous year, punctuated by several heinous and apparently unprovoked attacks: a woman was burned to death on a train car in Coney Island, a man was shoved in front of a moving subway on New Year’s Eve and multiple people were stabbed or slashed in separate events over the last week. The NYPD recorded 49 felony assaults in the transit system during four weeks in December, a 40% increase over the same period in 2023.
Hochul claimed recent attacks involved people with untreated mental illness and blamed them on a failure to reach homeless residents. The claim echoes several violent episodes in the past, in which perpetrators were previously known to law enforcement and mental health workers. But neither the governor’s office nor spokespeople for Mayor Eric Adams, who issued his own statement of support for Hochul’s latest call to action, have provided evidence that the most recent high-profile incidents involved people with a history of mental illness.
In her statement Friday, Hochul touted the steps she has taken to improve mental health services and flood the transit system with police and National Guardsmen. That included a $1 billion commitment to outreach and community-based services, supportive housing and psychiatric beds. But despite directives to remove more people by force from the subways, she said changes to state law were needed to make it easier for hospitals to commit people at risk of harming themselves. She also said state lawmakers should expand Kendra’s Law, a 1999 measure that allows court-mandated mental health treatment in the community.
That assertion is being challenged by a growing chorus of politicians and advocates both for and against more involuntary hospitalization. City Councilman Robert Holden, a conservative Democrat from Maspeth, Queens, accused Hochul of “moving the goalposts” in response to her statement Friday.
“Governor Hochul is gaslighting the public by punting the mental health crisis to the State Legislature under the guise of needing changes to Kendra’s Law,” he said in a statement. “The truth is that Kendra’s Law works when properly enforced, but city and state agencies have failed to follow through, and the Governor has failed to allocate the necessary resources to make it effective.”
Harvey Rosenthal, CEO of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, a mental health advocacy group that opposes efforts to increase involuntary treatment, said a lack of accountability by providers and policymakers has allowed people like Jordan Neely, who was strangled to death on the subway after cycling through outreach programs, to fall through the cracks. “Despite accessing a variety of services, our systems failed to provide him with the level of persistent engagement and well-coordinated and accountable follow up he deserved,” Rosenthal said.
Many of the legislative changes Hochul has championed are already in practice through regulation, including a 2022 directive from state Mental Health Commissioner Ann Marie Sullivan that clarified the criteria for involuntary commitment to include people who fail to meet their own basic needs. The Adams administration has backed a piece of state legislation known as the Supportive Interventions Act, that would increase the number of practitioners able to issue orders of involuntary treatment, a tool the mayor has said would relieve logjams in hospitals but which some advocates for the homeless say could be prone to abuse.
Hochul also hailed her administration’s efforts to restore psychiatric beds that were taken offline during the height of the pandemic “so individuals who need care have a place to go.” But she falsely claimed that the state was “close to reaching our goal” to restore the more than 1,000 shuttered beds; in November, the Office of Mental Health reported that just 517 beds had been brought back, a number that had not moved in a year.
