Mayor Defends Plan To Commit More Mentally Ill As Legal Challenge Hits

NEW YORK CITY — As Mayor Eric Adams pushed back on criticism over his plan to involuntarily send more mentally ill people to hospitals, a group of advocates mounted the first legal challenge against it.

A court filing Thursday in a pre-existing case urges a federal judge to temporarily halt Adams and city officials from carrying out the plan.

Adams' plan not only continues already-illegal involuntary detention of people with mental disabilities, but dangerously puts NYPD officers at the forefront of such decisions, said Marinda van Dalen, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), one of the groups behind the filing.

“New York City’s reliance on the police as first responders when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis has already resulted in police killings of too many people, the majority of whom are Black or other people of color,” she said in a statement.

A city Law Department spokesperson disputed the arguments in the filing.

“Mayor Adams’ compassionate plan to connect New Yorkers with severe mental illness to support and care fully complies with federal and state law, and we look forward to making our case before the court," the spokesperson said.

City Hall officials, including Adams, have spent the days since the mayor's announcement pushing back against what they argued are misconceptions about the plan.

The plan isn't much different than the current practice, in terms of police manpower, said Brian Stettin, the city's senior adviser for severe mental illness, in an interview this week.

"There's nothing in the directive that has gone out from the mayor that suggests that we are going to be creating this new ambitious or aggressive sweep where we're going to have lots more cops out there looking for lots more people and finding more reasons to hospitalize them," he said. "I think it's really unfortunate that it's been characterized that way."

Stettin and other officials have repeatedly argued that the major change will be the city's full sweep of responders — from police to FDNY to mobile crisis teams — can not only send violent or suicidal people with apparent mental illness to the hospital, but also those whose condition keeps them from taking care of their basic needs.

"This is about compassion and care and recognizing that somebody in that particular moment in time needs help, and we have an obligation to figure out how we're going to give it to them," Stettin said.

Many advocates, including those who filed the legal challenge, see otherwise. The plan likely will put more police officers in the position to make judgment calls on matters on which they have no specialty, they argued.

"An officer need only decide, based upon the scantest of information, that an individual is unable to meet their 'basic needs,' is 'unaware' of their surroundings, or is exhibiting signs of 'delusion' — without any indication that they had committed or will commit a dangerous act—before NYPD officers can forcefully detain and hospitalize them against their will," the filing states.