New York City’s involuntary removal policy was supposed to make it easier to help mentally ill homeless people get the care they need. In practice, it has raised impossible questions.
New York City’s involuntary removal policy was supposed to make it easier to help mentally ill homeless people get the care they need. In practice, it has raised impossible questions.
New York City’s involuntary removal policy was supposed to make it easier to help mentally ill homeless people get the care they need. In practice, it has raised impossible questions.
In November 2022, Justin Brannan, a city councilman who represents a big patch of South Brooklyn, was worrying about a woman who had been living in the same spot on the street in his district for so long — at least since he took office in 2018 — that she had been immortalized on Google Maps. Appearing to be in her 70s and missing many teeth, she had resisted services in the past, but now the councilman had reason to hope she would get the help she needed.
At the time, Mayor Eric Adams was rolling out a controversial directive known as involuntary removal. It explicitly authorized outreach teams, police officers, nurses, emergency medical workers and others to get people with mental illness severe enough that they could not meet “their own basic human needs” off the streets whether they consented or not, if they posed a threat to themselves that seemed close at hand.
But how were these decisions being made? Mr. Brannan felt that the woman who had been living on a sidewalk in Bensonhurst behind “a fortress of cardboard boxes,” as he put it to the city, fit the criteria. Surely, she was a danger to herself if not necessarily in immediate terms. So he was baffled to receive an email from City Hall indicating that the outreach team who approached her had reasoned that she was fine. The team noted in its assessment that she had been fixated on getting a dental appointment, which seemed to be the basis of its determination of her stability, along with the fact that she “was also inquiring about getting a metro card!”
The back-and-forth with city agencies went on for months, with Mr. Brannan asking that the woman be taken into shelter and connected with housing. Administrators explained that she had repeatedly refused help and that she could not be made to accept it, which seemed to contravene the mayor’s policy.
“I’m not sure how we can say she can care for herself,” Mr. Brannan wrote at one point, “if she has been living outside a shuttered fruit store for four years.”
The entwined crises around homelessness and mental health are among the central issues of the mayoral campaign; how they are resolved, or not, may well define what New York becomes. The attendant issues are ethical as much as they are political: At what point is overriding personal choice justified for the benefit of both the individual and the civic whole? Advocates for civil liberties have been saying the same thing since the Koch administration: never.
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