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Governor of the State of New York Kathy HachulDemocrat, seeks to expand the state’s involuntary commitment laws to allow hospitals to commit more people with mental health problems to treatment.
It was in response to a series of violent crimes in the New York City subway.
Hachul said Friday that she wants to introduce legislation in the upcoming legislative session to amend mental health laws to address the recent surge violent crimes on the subway.
“Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious, untreated mental illnesses that are the result of the denial of treatment to people living on the streets and disconnected from our mental health system,” the governor said.
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New York Gov. Cathy Hatchul wants to expand the state’s involuntary prescription 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 to do is to 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 far more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit violent crime.
The governor did not provide details on what her legislation would change.
“Currently, hospitals can commit people whose mental illness puts themselves or others at risk of serious harm, and this legislation broadens that definition so more people can get the help they need,” she said.
Hachul also said she would introduce another bill to improve the process by which courts can order people to receive outpatient treatment for mental illness and make it easier for people to voluntarily sign up for that treatment.
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 law enforcement agencies that “fight to keep our metro safe” every day. But she said “we can’t fully address 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 a hospital 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 determine whether patients need involuntary hospitalization.
New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said the demand to incarcerate more people “doesn’t make us safer, it distracts us from addressing the root of our problems and threatens the rights and liberties of New Yorkers.”
Hochula’s announcement comes after a series of violent crimes on the New York subway, including an incident on New Year’s Eve when a man pushed another man onto the subway tracks in front of a moving train and on Christmas Eve when a man stabbed two people. Grand Central subway station in Manhattan and on Dec. 22 when a suspect set fire to a sleeping woman and burned her to death.
Police investigate at the Coney Island Stilwell Avenue station in Brooklyn after a woman was set on fire and killed 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 available, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said the man accused in the Grand Central stabbing had mental illness and was the father of the suspect who pushed the man onto the tracks, The New York Times that in the weeks before the incident, he was concerned about his son’s mental health.
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Adams has spent the last few years calling state legislature to expand mental health laws and previously supported a policy that would have allowed a person to be involuntarily committed to a hospital if they could not meet their basic needs for food, clothing, housing or medical care.
“To deny a person life-saving psychiatric care because his mental illness prevents him from realizing his desperate need for it is an unacceptable abdication of our moral responsibility,” the mayor said in a statement after Hochula’s announcement.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
