In his attempt to become mayor, Andrew Mr. Cuomo described New York as being in crisis mode and said that his absolute priority if she was elected safe.
To do this, Mr. Cuomo, the former New York governor, said that the city must do more to eliminate people with a serious mental illness from the street and to alleviate fears of large-scale attacks involving homeless.
Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo will publish a detailed 36 -page plan on how he would do this, in particular by expanding involuntary hospitalizations and demanding that people who are returned to public hospitals and prisons be projected for compulsory ambulatory treatment.
The plan includes more than a dozen proposals to respond to what he calls the city’s “mental health crisis”. Mr. Cuomo will call to add more support housing and psychiatric beds in hospitals and to improve access to preventive mental health services. Its main objective is to withdraw people who are a danger to themselves and the public.
“The truth is that, while Cuomo was hiding for years, the mayor Adams was busy putting his security plan in a metro,” she said, noting that there had been 750 involuntary transport by the metro clinicians to hospitals in the past year.
Mr. Cuomo’s plan Spend around 2.6 billion dollars in capital funding over five years to build at least 600 additional units of support housing – deeply subsidized apartments with social services offered on site – each year. He also calls for the expansion of the use of judicial orders under Kendra’s law, a state law which allows courts to impose ambulatory treatment.
Mr. Cuomo wants to demand a “universal screening” when people are returned to public hospitals and the prison complex of Rikers Island, to see if they should be subjected to a Kendra law order. He would also work with heads of state to demand private hospitals to do the same.
The opponents of Mr. Cuomo, including the mayor, argued that he deserved the blame The Mental Health System worse By supervising a reduction in psychiatric beds as a governor. From 2011 to 2021, the number of beds in New York State psychiatric hospitals dropped by 28%.
The loss of beds, which has also occurred in private hospitals in response to the drop in Medicaid reimbursement rates, accelerated in the wake of the pandemic. A shortage of psychiatric beds is cited as one of the main reasons why hospitals rush to release psychiatric patients, often before being entirely stabilized.
Brad Lander, the city controller who presents himself for the mayor, said in a statement that Mr. Cuomo had “emptied our mental health services”.
“Andrew Cuomo who publishes a plan to repair our mental health crisis is like an incendiary fire saying that he will put a fire,” said Lander.
Steven Banks, the former Social Services Commissioner of Mayor Bill de Blasio, said that the next mayor should move quickly to put more than 2,000 vacant support units available for people who need it.
“To be effective on day 1, anyone who is mayor must move the sky and the earth to make the vacant units usable so that it is not only a renewal door of hospitalization, discharge in the streets, hospitalization,” he said.
Mr. Cuomo, who leads in polls before Primary Democrat mayor in Junedefended his file in the plan and in the interview. The plan has suggested that hospital circles “are often ineffective and ineffective places to provide care” and that the reduction of psychiatric beds of the hospital state was more than compensated by the increase in beds in support housing and other residences for people who did not need care for hospitalized patients.
The plan also provides for the city’s health and hospital system to add between 100 and 200 new psychiatric beds for patients hospitalized for those involved in the criminal justice system at a cost of $ 125 to 250 million. Mr. Cuomo’s campaign said that the establishment of more people under Kendra’s legal orders would require more social workers, which could cost an additional $ 40 million.
Under Mr. Cuomo, the state has also greatly reduced the part it paid for the cost of accommodation in New York, Move the burden on the city.
Zohran Mamdani, a state legislator who is second in the ballot boxes, wants to create a new municipal agency called the Ministry of Community Security to move away from many mental health problems of the police. Another candidate, Brad Lander, the city controller, has focused on a “housing first” approachWho moves people directly from the streets in the apartments, not in shelters, and does not require drug screening.
Mr. Cuomo’s plan said that the first housing model is a “precious strategy” but “not a miracle solution”, in part because it is not enough to guarantee that unstable people, who can “disrupt what is already a fragile ecosystem”, accept services.
The plan argues that more people should be referred to the treatment under Kendra’s law, which was approved in 1999 and named after Kendra Webdale, a woman who was killed that year when she was pushed before a metro train.
But the system is already overloaded and allows people to fall through the meshes of the net. A 2023 New York Times investigation have found that people under the legal order of Kendra had been accused of more than 380 violent acts in the past five years.
Cuomo said there were no sufficient sanctions for non-compliance. If someone refuses to follow their treatment plan, the only consequence is that it can be taken to the hospital for evaluation, which often leads to their release after 72 hours.
Improving the mental health system was a central problem in state budgetary negotiations this year. Ms. Hochul and state legislators agreed last week To devote existing guidelines to the law of the State which expand the criteria to take people in psychiatric crisis to the hospital against their will.
Mr. Adams, who withdrew from the Democratic primary to appear in the independent elections of the general elections in November, called for more involuntary hospitalizations. In January, he announced his own Plan of $ 650 million to approach the street homeless and a serious mental illness.
Cuomo said that Mr. Adams should do more to make sure that city health officials involuntarily hospitalize people who cannot meet their basic needs.
“We do not apply the legal standard, we really help anyone and we endanger the public,” he said.