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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here are two related New York City stories in the last day. Let's see if they make sense together. The Adams administration released the number for total major felonies committed in the subway system last month and this year. The annual figure was almost exactly the same as the years before the pandemic when people said they felt safe. About 2,000 such crimes each year in 2016 through 2019, major felonies in the subway, and again, this year.

The problem is that since a third fewer people are riding the subways, the chances of being a victim are technically a little higher, but it's still only 6 crimes a day out of 3 million rides per day. Other things are much more risky. Nevertheless, we know that people feel less safe and the number of subway crimes is up from last year. Specifically, people think it's more likely than before that a mentally ill person will come out of nowhere and push them to the tracks or something of that kind.

Yesterday, Mayor Adams made a major policy announcement. Here's the second story, the headline on the city's official website, "Mayor Adams Announces Plan to Provide Care for Individuals Suffering From Untreated Severe Mental Illness Across New York City." Sounds benign and like we're here to help. The headlines in news organizations about the plan are a little different. The New York Post headline says, "New York City to Involuntarily Commit More Mentally Unstable People."

The Gothamist headline says, "Mayor Adams Directs NYPD First Responders to Involuntarily Take Mentally Ill People to Hospitals." The New York Times headline says, "New York City To Remove Mentally Ill People From Streets Against Their Will." The city is framing it as providing care, the flashpoint that everyone else is keying on, it's a more involuntary commitment program, involuntary commitment against people's will. Here's the Mayor giving examples yesterday of who he's talking about.

Mayor Adams: The man standing all day on the street across from the building he was evicted from 25 years ago waiting to be let in. The shadow boxer on the street corner in Midtown mumbling to himself as he jabs at an invisible adversary. The unresponsive man unable to get off the train at the end of the line without his assistance from our mobile crisis team. These New Yorkers and hundreds of others like them are in urgent need of treatment, yet often refuse it when offered. The very nature of their illnesses keeps them from realizing they need intervention and support.

Brian Lehrer: "They need intervention and support." Mr. Mayor, how's this going to work?

Mayor Adams: This directive lays out an expedited step-by-step process for involuntarily transporting a person experiencing a mental health crisis to a hospital for evaluation. It explicitly states that it is appropriate to use this process when a person refuses voluntary assistance and it appears that they are suffering from mental illness and are a danger to themselves due to an inability to meet their basic needs. We believe this is the first time that a mayoral administration has given this direction on the basic needs standard and official guidance.

Brian Lehrer: "The basic needs standard," the Mayor said there, for a danger to themselves. Nowhere in the speech did the Mayor mention crime. I did a word search on the transcript, nowhere did he mention crime, but all the news stories do. With me now, Andy Newman, who writes about poverty and social services for The New York Times. It's his article that I read the headline from, New York City to Remove Mentally Ill People From the Streets Against Their Will. Andy, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Andy Newman: Thanks very much, Brian. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: The lead line of your article says, the Mayor was acting to address a string of high-profile crimes involving homeless people, but the Mayor never mentioned crime, only the threat of people he was describing to themselves. Where's the disconnect?

Andy Newman: I'm not sure it's really a disconnect. The Mayor has spoken plenty about subway crime. Last month he was talking about how most crime in the subway is driven by, he said, "People with mental illness." He has been trying to get ahead of the perception that's out there that is partly true and partly maybe inflated by a lot of media reports that the subways are a place where there is more chaos, there are more unstable people, menacing people. There is more violence, but a big part of that is that there is more news coverage of the violence, and so there's this narrative that's building.

Brian Lehrer: I realize you're a poverty and social services reporter, not a criminal justice reporter, but how do you see the subway crime stats that they also just released but that the Mayor didn't allude to in his announcement? Big improvement in November compared to last November, back to pre-pandemic levels, but still up for the year, but even that up for the year is about the same number of subway crimes as pre-pandemic, just on fewer riders. People are trying to figure out if the subways are more dangerous than before really or if they're being gaslit by The New York Post and Lee Zeldin and maybe the Mayor to make them think they're more dangerous when they're the same.

Andy Newman: I don't know. That's a very, very hard question to answer it. It is undeniably the case that people think that the subways are more dangerous. A lot of people since the pandemic have not gone back to the subway because either they've read a lot about crime in the subway or they have been in the subway and been confronted by someone who seemed like they're going to be-- My own wife has had several run-ins during the pandemic when she was in the subway with people who seem to be menacing and stalking her. That's not an imaginary thing, that's a real thing.

The Mayor is trying to do several things at the same time. He knows there is this very, very consistent call from many, many, many New Yorkers who really want to not have this unpredictable situation where someone seems like they're crazy and that they might hurt you or push you to the tracks at any second. There are plenty of people who are harmless but who a lot of New Yorkers don't want to see, and there's some optics to what the Mayor is trying to do, that is one of the things that he's getting some criticism for.

Brian Lehrer: This is one of those segments where even before I give out the phone number, all our lines, but one in this case, are full. For someone who wants to get in on the one remaining open line, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer, no limit of lines there, but obviously, people have strong feelings on various sides of this. Listeners, be patient, we'll get to your calls in a minute. I want to get through a little more of the material with Andy.

In one of the clips we played, the Mayor said, "It is appropriate to use this process when a person refuses voluntary assistance and it appears that they are suffering from mental illness and are a danger to themselves due to an inability to meet their basic needs." Did he get more specific about how they will determine inability to meet their basic needs? Because the examples the Mayor gave in the first clip really raised the question? He said, "A man mumbling to himself while he shadowboxes an imaginary opponent."

Is that grounds for taking somebody into custody against their will and putting them in a psychiatric bed? "The man standing all day on the street across from the building he was evicted from 25 years ago waiting to be let in." That was also from that clip of the Mayor. Those are sad scenes, but they don't by themselves say the person can't meet their basic needs. Did he get more specific about how they'll determine that?

Andy Newman: This is a fantastic question. This is the devil's in the details thing. How do you determine if someone is unable to meet their basic needs? A lawyer for the Mayor said that the police and the first responders and other people would be assessing to see whether people can provide basic needs such as food, shelter, and healthcare for themselves. If someone has enough of a mental illness that they're unable to do that, then it sounds like they could be brought in. The word shelter in there makes it sound like if someone is, A, mentally ill, and B, living on the street, then almost by definition they would be subject to being rounded up this way.

This this very broad interpretation is something that is probably quite possible. I don't know that probably that this is going to be legally challenged. The state law on involuntary hospitalization in these situations talks about somebody who, I'm quoting from it, "Appears to be mentally ill and is conducting himself or herself in a manner which is likely to result in serious harm to the person or others." Serious harm is vague, but it sounds like a very, very high threshold.

Brian Lehrer: Let me go one step deeper on that with you, because you're citing the standard that he mentioned of serious harm, the threat of serious harm to himself or others. The Mayor also made the point of saying they have to not only take people in when they are an imminent threat. They're broadening the circle of people who can be involuntarily committed from imminent threat to serious threat, and that's where the devil is in the details. Is that an accurate way to look at it?

Andy Newman: It's more than that. Serious threat is what is in the law. You're correct that the way the law is worded, it makes it sound like right now that person's behavior is likely to result in serious harm to themselves or to others, but there is a difference. At least some people say there's a difference between behavior that is likely to result in serious harm and behavior that indicates, and this is Adams' wording, I think, behavior that indicates that the person is "unable to meet their basic survival needs."

As far as specifics on this, the directive from the city says that among the evidence that someone is so mentally ill that they're unable to meet their basic survival needs includes, and this is going to sound like word salad, but I'm going to read it to you anyway, unawareness or delusional misapprehension of surroundings or unawareness or delusional misapprehension of physical condition or health. This to me is sounding a lot more broad than imminent danger to the person or to other people.

Norman Siegel, who is the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and is now actually leading a volunteer homeless outreach effort that has been endorsed by the Mayor, he has been on the same side as the Mayor on a lot of this stuff. He yesterday was very upset about it because he said, basically, what's in the law says serious harm and what the Mayor is talking about is something much broader than that. In fact, the city has this whole legislative wish list.

One of the things in that legislative wish list is that the state pass a new law broadening the definition to allow a much wider net to be cast. He doesn't have the legal authority to do this yet because there is no such state law yet. There's going to be a lot of back and forth and a lot of pushback against this.

Brian Lehrer: Since you mentioned Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, some of our listeners may have heard him this morning on Morning Edition. Our host Michael Hill interviewed him. Here's a clip of Norman Siegel from that that I think is relevant to what you were just saying.

Michael Hill: The US Supreme Court has clearly said that civil commitment is a massive curtailment of liberty, and therefore, currently under the law, you can bring somebody in for evaluation based on the fact that they're unable to meet basic survival needs, but currently, you can't keep someone against their will in a hospital based on their basic survival needs.

Brian Lehrer: You can't keep somebody in the hospital based on their basic survival needs. I actually want to play another clip of the Mayor right now that's dramatic to my ear and really about that because he did address the question of how long people involuntarily committed will be held before being deemed to be safe to leave. Here's the Mayor on that.

Mayor Adam: All too often a persons enters a hospital in crisis and gets discharged prematurely because their current behavior's no longer as alarming as it was when they were admitted. The law shall require hospitals evaluators to consider not just how the person is acting at the moment of evaluation, but also their treatment history, recent behavior in the community, and whether they're ready to adhere to outpatient treatment.

Brian Lehrer: Andy, that could sound pretty hardcore or it could sound like ending a meaningless and ineffective revolving door that isn't even in the interest of the patient. Any more details about that standard or anything else you want to say about the Norman Siegel clip?

Andy Newman: I think something that's important to understand here is that it's obvious that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the streets of New York who are mentally ill and are not really doing themselves any favors and may need help in a pre-major way, but what the Mayor is proposing and what actually can be pulled off may be two very different things. The Mayor's saying, "Let's make the hospitals keep people until they're all better and stable and ready to be released to a completely stable environment," whatever that is, but the hospitals don't have room already.

The reason that the hospitals are revolving dooring people in and out is because they need the beds. There's a shortage of psychiatric beds in the city. The Mayor said, "We'll find a bed for everybody," and then as evidence of that, he talked about how the governor is going to make 50 psych beds available. There's a tremendous shortage of resources.

Brian Lehrer: 50 meaning just like 50, are you kidding me? 50? That's nothing, right?

Andy Newman: Well, 50. That was what he mentioned yesterday. There are other efforts by the state to get hospitals who closed their psych beds during COVID, a lot of psych beds were taken offline and converted into COVID beds, and because psych beds are not a profit center for hospitals, a lot of the hospitals used that COVID situation to permanently demobilize psych beds. There needs to be a lot of resources in the hospital. There needs to be more beds, there needs to be more doctors.

Something that is also really important that the Mayor talked about a little bit is what's called discharge planning, which is when you release someone from the hospital, you need to coordinate with whoever it is who's taking care of that person on the outside, whether it's a shelter for mentally ill people, or street teams of clinicians, or or family or whoever it is. There needs to be a plan in place. Otherwise, that person when they leave the hospital is just going to cycle right back in.

All the advocates for homeless people and for people with mental illness talk about the importance of housing and how there is already a tremendous shortage of what's called supportive housing, which has these kinds of social services in place there. The system is already failing in a bunch of ways, and just simply scooping up a bunch of people doesn't really fix all those problems.

The Mayor's aware of this. He said this is going to take a long time, but it's really going to require a phenomenal amount of coordination between law enforcement, hospitals, supportive housing operators, shelters for the mentally ill. This is something that sounds very impressive, and we made a big deal of it and put it on the front page, but what is actually, and God knows, Brian, there have been so many efforts like this over the years, and every time someone gets pushed in front of a train, there's this whole-- people throw up their hands and say, "We need to help these people, we need to help these people." There are efforts made.

I'm sorry if I'm going on too much about this, but Bill de Blasio, Mr. Adams's predecessor, had a list of of people who were considered a menace and who could not be released from the hospital without approval from the mayor's office. This whole thing and for various legal reasons, they were blocked from doing that. This is an enormous, enormous undertaking that the Mayor is now committed to doing and it'll be very interesting to see in the months to come how it's actually going to shake out.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HDNA in New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3. Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are a New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org with Andy Newman for another few minutes who writes about poverty and social services for The New York Times. We're talking about Mayor Adams plan announced yesterday to involuntarily commit many more people with apparent serious mental disorders than have been committed before. Let me get some listener voices on here. David in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, David. Thank you for calling in.

David: Hi, Brian. Thanks for always being willing to talk about things that a lot of New Yorkers aren't willing to talk about. I definitely have a specific question. I just wanted to respond, and Andy said it's a tremendous undertaking. It is, and it will be very interesting to see how it turns out. Just because things are incredibly difficult and will require interagency cooperation like we've never seen before, it's, in my mind, not a reason not to do it because we've tried lots of things that have failed.

I'm not a particular fan of Mayor Adams and particularly didn't vote for him and wasn't particularly happy, but he's trying something and coupled with starting a program for housing without qualification for homeless folks. In other words, you don't have to get clean and then get the housing, you don't have to have a job and then get the housing. I know that's worked in a lot of other cities.

Being a Harlem resident, I've noticed a great increase in people with mental illness in and around the subway stations near 125th Street in Harlem. I think that's largely due to the over-saturation of clinics up there. They've been dumping Methadone in other clinics up in Harlem for a while because no one noticed. Hopefully that'll change. My question is, is there a specific time period that people can be held in the hospital? I personally don't want them held for a long time, but maybe there's a small amount of people that actually will respond and say, "Yes, I do want some treatment that you're offering me." Is it a 24-hour hold? How long is it?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, David. Andy.

Andy Newman: I don't actually know what the law on that is. In the state law itself that authorizes removal, it does not talk about-- Hopefully some doctor will call in and straighten this out, I believe it's usually something like 72 hours. That's the minimum when people are brought into the hospital now under these involuntary removal laws, but obviously, what the Mayor is talking about is expanding that tremendously in saying the hospitals are going to need to keep people until they're stable, which can take a while.

Brian Lehrer: Lance in Nassau County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lance. I see you're a psychiatric nurse.

Lance: Yes. Thank you for taking my call, and I can answer Mr. Newman's question. It's not a minimum of 72 hours, it's a maximum of 72 hours, and that's only at certain sites that are called CPEPs, which is stands for Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation Program. Jacobi is one, Queens Hospital Center is another. We have a program already in place for involuntarily picking up patients who the courts have deemed dangerous. It's called AOT or Kendra's Law and it was just renewed for another five years.

I see this as very problematic because it's like refurbishing a lobby when the building is dilapidated. With no place to admit patients to because there's a dearth of inpatient beds, you're just going to clog up your emergency rooms. From the community hospitals, if there are people who are treatment refractory, you need state hospital beds, and none of this was put into place before the Mayor's directive.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Amplifying on the point that you made about the number of hospital beds, Andy. Let's go on to Jim in the South Bronx. Jim, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jim: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I want to respond to the issue you raised beginning of this segment regarding crime statistics and the fact that these statistics are not very different from what they were in the recent past. That seems to be true, but what I would point out is that the nature of much of the crime we are hearing about now is very different.

There's a big difference between random crime, irrational crime, and people being pushed off of subway platforms, people being slashed for no reasons. Unprovoked racist attacks against Asians. This irrational unpredictable crime is very different from the crime of earlier years. Now, I live in the South Bronx. When I first moved here 25 years ago, crime was very high. I was never never afraid because much of that crime was associated with war of a drug turf and that thing. If you're not involved with that, I felt no reason to worry about it, but this irrational stuff in which people from out the blue, they're not robbed, they're not pick pocketed, they're not that thing, it's random balance that has no apparent reason to it.

Quite frankly, I think this game of play with statistics is really partly so-called progressives attempt to [unintelligible 00:26:55] the issue of crime because it might interfere with their criminal justice reform agenda. I think the crime we have now is very different and that difference is important and needs to be talked about.

Brian Lehrer: Jim, thank you for raising it. Andy, I didn't see, to Jim's point, that the NYPD breaks out statistics on subway crime in those categories that Jim was delineating, which are important, like random crimes against people just standing on a platform versus, let's say, turf war crimes between gangs, which if you're not involved in the turf war, it's not a danger to you, as he was describing. Do you know if they break it out that way? Again, I realize you're a social services reporter, not criminal justice, but that would be an interesting stat to see.

Andy Newman: I have done some reporting on crimes stats and I have never-- It's possible that the police break that out. There are some statistics where the police release an annual homicide breakdown that describes the relationship, if any, between the victim and the suspect in every single homicide. I have never seen anything like that that's more general that's about assaults or other kinds of violent felonies.

I think what Jim is saying, it's absolutely right that there's a big difference between crime occurring between people who know each other and have some beef and crime that's random and irrational. It's the same thing as why people are so freaked out by mass shootings, even though mass shootings account for only a very tiny percentage of homicides, because it could happen to you even if you're a good person who lives on the right side of the law and is not doing anything bad. It is what creates a climate of fear.

To your point, I don't know if there really is an increase in random irrational crime in the subway. It certainly seems like there is, and a lot of that is just the amount of news coverage. I've read analyses that compared the number of news stories about mayhem and the actual crime statistics. It is clear that there has been a big increase in the number of stories per act of mayhem compared to a few years ago and that's a lot of what's driving this discussion.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. Individual crimes get so much more ink than they did a few years ago and that drives a perception, which is not to say what Jim said isn't true, but it's so hard to sometimes disentangle our perception from what statistics tell us is actually true. We're going to have to end on this. There's more that I wanted to do with you on how the police and the clinicians are going to be paired up in this policy and stuff, but we'll have to do more segments.

Out of the conversation that we were having in Jim's call, one of the tragedies here and a dilemma for policy-makers is a psychiatric crisis might present as an individual situation, but the prevalence of how many we have these days is really a social situation. Individuals will lose their freedom because of a failure of society. Maybe it's the politicians who should be locked up against their will until they solve the problem with better policies, but I guess there's no mechanism to do that.

Andy Newman: Not yet.

Brian Lehrer: There we end it with Andy Newman who covers poverty and social services for The New York Times. Andy, thanks so much.

Andy Newman: Thank you so much, Brian.

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