Mayor Adams Tours Subway Stations at Night, Calls for Involuntary Commitment

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is making a media push this week by taking reporters on a tour of the city’s subway system and the outreach efforts to the homeless people living there.

With The Post tagging along, the mayor and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch joined a crew from a city multi-agency outreach effort at the 34th Street/Herald Square station, with staffers coming upon a total of 96 troubled drifters — many of them struggling with mental health issues.

But the late-night outreach teams face an uphill battle — only 16 of the vagrants offered help accepted it, including a shoeless man taken to a shelter and a woman who was hospitalized…

“We did a disservice years ago when we closed our psychiatric wards,” Adams said. “We have excellent homeless outreach, and if we don’t address this it’s going to elevate and it’s just going to get worse.

“In a minute this could turn violent,” he added.

Crime on the subways is down this year but with the Daniel Penny trial ending days ago, the possibility that a deranged homeless person could kill someone on a platform or on a train seems very real to a lot of people. In fact, the very thing that Daniel Penny was worried would happen that day on the train did happened just last month when a homeless man with a knife wandered through the city’s streets, stabbing three different people at random. Two of them died from their injuries.

What Mayor Adams wants is new legislation from the state that would make it easier to involuntarily commit the homeless people who routinely refuse help. Jordan Neely is one of the people who needed to be taken out of circulation whether he wanted it or not. This is something Adams has been talking about since he came into office and he started pushing for it again after the November stabbing incident.

“We’ve been back and forth to Albany to say, let’s codify [the standard] in law and give real clarity around the authority we have of dealing with people with severe mental health illness,” Adams told reporters following the Nov. 18 attack.

He added: “We’re getting ready to go up to a new legislative session in Albany. We have to take those who can’t take care of themselves off our street and give them the humane care that they deserve.”…

The bill touted by Adams is known as the Supportive Interventions Act. It would codify guidance on involuntary commitments that the state Office of Mental Health provided in a 2022 memo. That memo states that a person can be forcibly transported and admitted to the hospital for psychiatric care if they are unable to meet their own basic needs — not only if they pose an imminent threat of physical harm to themselves or others.

After years of watching the homeless deteriorate on the streets and occasionally harm other people, this seems like a no brainer. But the ACLU is against it, claiming it would stigmatize the homeless.

 …critics continue to push back on Adams’ focus on expanding involuntary mental health interventions.

“It’s all directed at how you sweep people out of the public domain to make everybody feel fine and feel safe, but it doesn’t address the underlying issue,” said Beth Haroules, a staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYCLU argues that Adams’ involuntary hospital transport policy risks infringing on people’s individual rights under state and federal law and exacerbates bias against homeless people and those with mental illnesses.

But as he toured the subway with the media, Mayor Adams rejected that view as “philosophical” rather than practical.

“The critics are so far removed from what everyday New Yorkers want, you know, they are being philosophical. And everyday New Yorkers, they are saying this should not happen,” Adams said…

[Reporter] N.J. Burkett showed Adams a video of a man in the Fulton Street station, “This is a guy, he’s got a Skittles box on his head.”

“He’s unkempt, he’s soiled himself. This is a picture perfect example of why we should not be saying he has a right to be out there. He doesn’t know he needs help. We have to give him that,” Adams said.

More involuntary commitment is something that needs to happen in cities on both coasts. It hasn’t so far because progressives that dominate those places seem convinced it’s more in keeping with liberal values to let deranged, addicted people wander the streets if they want to than to force anyone to get help. Here’s ABC7’s report on the subway tour.