New York Gov. Hochul is pushing to expand involuntary commitment laws for violent subway crimes
Governor of New York Kathy HochulDemocrat, seeks to expand the state’s involuntary stay laws to allow hospitals to force more people with mental health problems into treatment.
This comes in response to a spate of violent crimes in the New York subway system.
Hochul said Friday she wants to introduce legislation during the upcoming legislative session to amend mental health laws to address the recent increase violent crimes in the metro.
“Many of these horrific incidents involved people with serious untreated mental illness, the result of untreated people living on the streets and excluded from our mental health care system,” the governor said.
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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to expand the state’s involuntary stay laws to allow hospitals to force more people with mental health problems into treatment. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)
“We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing we can do is get our fellow New Yorkers the help they need,” she continued.
Mental health experts say most people with mental illness are not violent and are much more likely to be victims of a violent crime than to commit a violent crime.
The governor did not provide specifics on what her legislation would change.
“Currently, hospitals can admit individuals whose mental illness puts themselves or others at risk of serious harm, and this bill will expand that definition to ensure more people get the care they need,” she said.
Hochul also said she would introduce another bill to improve the process by which courts can order people to undergo assisted outpatient treatment for mental illness and to make it easier for people to volunteer for those treatments.
Police officers patrol the F train platform at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station, Thursday, Dec. 26, 2024, in New York. (AP)
The governor said she is “deeply grateful” to the police who “fight to keep our subways safe” every day. But she said “we can’t fully solve this problem without changing 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 a mental illness and their behavior poses a risk of physical harm to themselves or others. Psychiatrists must then decide whether patients should be involuntarily hospitalized.
New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said requiring more people to be incarcerated “doesn’t make us safer, distracts us from addressing the root of our problems and threatens the rights and liberties of New Yorkers.”
Hochul’s statement comes after a series of violent crimes on the New York City subway, including an incident on New Year’s Eve when a man pushed another man onto the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train, on Christmas Eve when a man stabbed two people in Manhattan’s Grand Central subway station and on the 22nd. December when the suspect set fire to a sleeping woman and burned her to death.
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Police investigate at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn after a woman was set on fire and died in a subway car in New York, the United States, on December 22, 2024. (Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The medical histories of the suspects in the three incidents were not immediately clear, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said the man accused in the Grand Central stabbing had a history of mental illness and that the father of the suspect who pushed the man onto the tracks told the The New York Times that he became concerned about his son’s mental health in the weeks before the incident.
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Adams has spent the last few years encouraging state legislature expand mental health laws and has previously supported policies that would allow hospitals to involuntarily admit a person who is unable to meet their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter or medical care.
“Denying life-saving psychiatric care to a person 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 following Hochul’s announcement.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
