NY Gov Hochul seeks expanded involuntary commitment laws over violent crimes on subway

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is looking to expand the state’s involuntary commitment laws to allow hospitals to force more people with mental health problems into treatment.

This comes in response to a series of violent crimes in the New York City subway system.

Hochul said Friday she wants to introduce legislation during the coming legislative session to amend mental health care laws to address the recent surge of violent crimes on the subway.

“Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious untreated mental illness, the result of a failure to get treatment to people who are living on the streets and are disconnected from our mental health care system,” the governor said.

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“We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing to do is to get our fellow New Yorkers the help they need,” she continued.

Mental health experts say that most people with mental illness are not violent and are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to carry out a violent crime.

The governor did not provide details on what her legislation would change.

“Currently, hospitals are able to commit individuals whose mental illness puts themselves or others at risk of serious harm, and this legislation will expand that definition to ensure more people receive the care they need,” she said.

Hochul also said she would introduce another bill to improve the process in which courts can order people to undergo assisted outpatient treatments for mental illness and make it easier for people to voluntarily sign up for those treatments.

The governor said she is “deeply grateful” to law enforcement who every day “fight to keep our subways safe.” But she said “we can’t fully address this problem without changes to state law.”

“Public safety is my top priority and I will do everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe,” she said.

State law currently allows police to compel people to be taken to hospitals for evaluation if they appear to be suffering from mental illness and their behavior presents a risk of physical harm to themselves or others. Psychiatrists must then determine if the patients need to be involuntarily hospitalized.

New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman said requiring more people to be placed into involuntary commitment “doesn’t make us safer, it distracts us from addressing the roots of our problems, and it threatens New Yorkers’ rights and liberties.”

Hochul’s statement comes after a series of violent crimes in New York City’s subways, including an incident on New Year’s Eve when a man shoved another man onto subway tracks ahead of an incoming train, on Christmas Eve when a man slashed two people with a knife in Manhattan’s Grand Central subway station and on Dec. 22 when a suspect lit a sleeping woman on fire and burned her to death.

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The medical histories of the suspects in those three incidents were not immediately clear, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has said the man accused of the knife attack in Grand Central had a history of mental illness and the father of the suspect who shoved a man onto the tracks told The New York Times that he had become concerned about his son’s mental health in the weeks prior to the incident.

Adams has spent the past few years urging the state Legislature to expand mental health care laws and has previously supported a policy that would allow hospitals to involuntarily commit a person who is unable to meet their own basic needs for food, clothing, shelter or medical care.

“Denying a person life-saving psychiatric care because their mental illness prevents them from recognizing their desperate need for it is an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibility,” the mayor said in a statement after Hochul’s announcement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.