Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing the Legislature to address the terror and mayhem from random violence by the mentally ill — but will she fight hard enough to get it done?
She means to use the coming session to 1) finally bring sanity to New York’s rules for involuntary commitment (including to inpatient treatment, that is mandatory hospitalization) and 2) make it easier to petition for mental-health treatment under Kendra’s Law.
Hochul says she’ll specify new legislation for both in her executive budget; we look forward to seeing the details and hope they’ll prove ambitious enough.
She’d be wise to also address some obvious, related fixes, such as making Kendra’s Law, now set to sunset in 2027, permanent — as well as at last amending the no-bail law to include a “dangerousness” standard similar to 49 other states’.
Hochul has tried before to move the Legislature on confronting mental illness — and failed.
Maybe recent horrors like the latest subway shoving will inspire enough lawmakers to finally bend.
More to her credit, she’s made some progress where she can: The state Office of Mental Health recently published new regulations requiring comprehensive outpatient-discharge plans so poeple who are committed for mental-health reasons don’t just cycle through the system.
She’s also working on a plan to help let doctors keep people in psychiatric care longer, so they don’t end up back on the street.
More, she created the SCOUT program (which has helped 750 New Yorkers get off the streets and into psychiatric care, and about 600 into stable housing), opened over 700 total inpatient psych beds with another 300 in the pipeline, and increased reimbursement rates for inpatient psych care so hospitals aren’t as eager to reduce the number of those beds.
She’s also funded new court-based mental-health navigators, increased transitional housing and funded supportive housing for people with severe mental illness and criminal histories.
But getting lawmakers to move will require pushing back hard against the lies of the “advocacy community,” driven as it is by the idea that forcing people to accept help is fundamentally wrong — no matter how clearly they’re on track to become a menace to the public and themselves.
Bolstering Kendra’s Law, while important, won’t do much about the raging madmen who slash or shove subway riders into the path of oncoming trains, or those who erupt into violence above ground: It’s mainly about providing assisted outpatient treatment, or AOT.
Yet the “advocates” resist even that, and have swayed all too many district attorneys and judges into gumming up even the existing process for requiring AOT.
They’ll fight even harder when it comes to mandatory inpatient help for the troubled souls who haven’t yet descended all the way to killing or maiming others.
To leverage commonsense changes into the mental-health laws, the gov will have to push hard — and get support.
That is, other Democrats who agree with her on the need for action now need join in calling out the recalcitrant Dems in the Assembly and state Senate who resist.
Unless enough of their members get on board, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins will offer only cosmetic changes, as they’ve done on so many other fronts in the past.
The Legislature these days is dominated by its radical minority; the gov’s right that this makes any reform an uphill battle.
But Hochul is the GOVERNOR, with a wide range of screws and sticks at her disposal.
If she wants to get this done, she’d better start channeling her inner gangster.
