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NYC’s Involuntary Removal of Mentally Ill Homeless People Raises Questions

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NYC’s Involuntary Removal of Mentally Ill Homeless People Raises 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.”

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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.

“There’s a question in front of all of us,” said Sandy Nurse, a member of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus who represents East New York. “What does it mean to forcibly remove people when you’re not sure that they have a mental health issue?” Implicit in that question is the absence of consensus about how mental health issues present when the observable behavior is not unmistakably wild or erratic.

“Field workers, outreach workers — they don’t believe that removal is appropriate for someone who is just homeless,” Ms. Nurse said. And they are the ones making the initial judgments. The woman Mr. Brannan was concerned about was suffering, in his view. But in the opinion of those who approached her, she seemed resilient and sane despite the choices she made.

Proposed legislation in Albany that is being promoted right now by both the Adams administration and Gov. Kathy Hochul would make it easier to conduct removals in cases of extreme self-neglect, when people might not even recognize the threat they pose to their own well-being. Though removals are often conducted by police officers, they are by no means arrests. Between 2023 and 2024, the city conducted more than 7,000, most of them — 70 percent — originating in private houses and shelters after someone made a call on behalf of a relative or client in distress.

The system is hampered by a shortage of psychiatric beds in public hospitals as well as a shortage of psychiatrists. But the attention paid to violent crimes at the hands of mentally disturbed homeless people has obscured some of the progress the city has made. Since the beginning of the Adams administration, 1,500 “low-barrier beds” have been added to the system. These are quieter alternatives to congregate shelters, which many homeless people reject because they find them terrifying.

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Close to 700 more of these beds are expected to become available by the end of this year. Last year, roughly 1,200 people who had been living on the street were moved into permanent housing, Molly Wasow Park, the city’s social services commissioner, told me. At the same time, it is hard to make gains: During the same period, 1,100 people were discharged from state psychiatric hospitals — a revolving door that Ms. Park said she found “infuriating.”

Last May, Ms. Park appeared at a City Council budget hearing at which Mr. Brannan talked about the woman in his district. Mr. Brannan, who is chairman of the finance committee and is running for city comptroller, asked about involuntary removals. A year and a half later, the woman was still in her same perch, a situation he called heartbreaking and inhumane. He argued for involuntary removal on compassionate grounds.

“How many times does an outreach worker have to engage with someone before it would inherently trigger an involuntary removal?” he wanted to know. “If we are visiting a client 20, 30, 40, 50 times, how long before you say, ‘This person clearly needs help’?” Ms. Park answered that sometimes it could take a hundred encounters to get people to come inside.

Was this sustainable? “I don’t know who this is for,” Mr. Brannan told me recently. “Who is benefiting from this exercise of going out there and saying: ‘Hey, do you need anything? No?’ OK. Check a box.” It certainly struck him as inefficient. “This is money that would probably be better spent toward supportive housing than going out there 70 times and offering someone a shower.”

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Read the Ruling on the Judgment Against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll Case

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Read the Ruling on the Judgment Against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll Case

Case: 24-644, 09/08/2025, DktEntry: 134.1, Page 28 of 70

statements at issue in this case were made three years earlier than the statement

in Carroll II, the statements were identical in material respects because both

accused Carroll of fabricating the sexual assault allegations for improper
purposes. Compare supra pp. 6-8 (June 2019 statements), with supra pp. 13-14 (October 2022 statement). 14
The truth or falsity of Trump’s statements in both 2019 and 2022
turned on whether Carroll was lying, that is, whether Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in 1996, irrespective of the specific sexual act committed. 15 The jury in

14



For example, in the 2022 statement which the Carroll II jury determined to be false — Trump stated, among other things: “I have no idea who [E. Jean Carroll] is.” Carroll, 690 F. Supp. 3d at 401. In the June 21, 2019 statement at issue here, Trump said: “I’ve never met this person in my life.” App’x at 1887. Moreover, in the 2022 statement, Trump said: “She completely made up a story that I met her . . . and, within minutes, ‘swooned’ her. It is a Hoax and a lie,” “it never happened,” and “for the record, E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a woman who I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and would have no interest in knowing her if I ever had the chance.” Supp. App’x at 108. In the June 21, 2019 statement, Trump said: “Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves,” “I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming that they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened,” and “[f]alse accusations diminish the severity of real assault.” App’x at 1887.

15

In other words, the application of issue preclusion to the falsity element is proper because Trump’s 2019 and 2022 statements did not turn on the specific sexual act he committed. He did not deny, for example, digital penetration specifically. In all statements, he denied any sexual assault, full stop. The Carroll II jury found Trump’s 2022 statement to be false because it found that he sexually abused Carroll. See Tannerite Sports, LLC v. NBCUniversal News Grp., a division of NBCUniversal Media, LLC, 864 F.3d 236, 242 (2d Cir. 2017) (Under New York law, “to satisfy the falsity element of a

28

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13 Off Broadway Shows to See in September

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13 Off Broadway Shows to See in September

Henrik Ibsen’s searing dissections of bourgeois hypocrisies appear to be in sync with our angry times. The Norwegian playwright is even getting high-profile movie adaptations, with the Tessa Thompson-starring “Hedda” dropping in October. In New York, Simon Godwin’s production of this semi-obscure effort from 1884, about a family’s secrets coming to light, follows recent revivals of “An Enemy of the People,” “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts.” (Through Sept. 28, Theater for a New Audience)

In their hip-hop musical, Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada portray an enslaved man and the sharecropper-turned-soldier he meets at the Rio Grande. The story looks at a different kind of Underground Railroad while also connecting to our current turbulence with an era-transcending message of solidarity. David Mendizábal directs the two-man show, which is part of Audible Theater’s series. (Sept. 9-Oct. 11, Minetta Lane Theater)

Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee’s lovely “The Voices in Your Head” was staged for about 20 people at a time in a storefront church last year. McEntee’s “Slanted Floors” goes even smaller: The actors Kyle Beltran and Adam Chanler-Berat portray a couple living out their domesticity under the watch of five audience members in a Brooklyn apartment. (Sept. 9-Oct. 10, Slanted Floors Play).

A collaboration between Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”) and the collective The Pack, co-directed by Jung and Dustin Wills, “Last Call, a Play with Cocktails” takes place in various New York City apartments, so the audience size varies depending on where the show lands on any given day. One constant: There will be drinks. (Sept. 19-Oct. 13, En Garde Arts)

Alec Duffy’s original staging of “Family,” an early work by the playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song, took place in a Brooklyn apartment for audiences of about 30. The production — outré, operatically gothic, near-feral at times — is returning for an encore run, but in a more traditional theatrical space. Let’s see how Duffy recalibrates the show. (Sept. 12-28, La MaMa)

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“Can you be Black and not perform?” Such is the question driving Eisa Davis’s new piece, in which she leads a cast of four. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her haunting play “Bulrusher” and the co-creator of the concept album “Warriors” with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Davis remains a frustratingly underrecognized writer and performer with a lyrical, fiercely poetic voice all her own. Here is an opportunity to watch her confront and subvert the expectations placed on Black artists. (Sept. 10-28; Here Arts Center)

John Leguizamo’s stage career is paved with solo shows, sometimes autobiographical, in which he brings to life a gallery of characters. At first glance it looks as if his latest piece might be more of the same since it involves a Colombian American New Yorker, like the writer-performer himself. But while Leguizamo does play that central character, Nelson, he is far from alone onstage: “The Other Americans,” directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, is a family drama with an actual cast — it’ll be exciting to watch Leguizamo jostle with costars. (Sept. 11-Oct. 19, Public Theater)

Chloë Grace Moretz was only 17 when she starred in Scott Z. Burns’s “The Library” at the Public Theater, in 2014, but her screen career was already buzzing. Still, few expected that it would take over a decade for Moretz to return to the New York stage. At long last here she is again, under the direction of the ever-reliable David Cromer (whose recent credits include “Dead Outlaw” and “Good Night, and Good Luck”). The three characters in Preston Max Allen’s new play are all members of one family, with Moretz in the middle as the daughter of the character played by Amy Landecker (“Transparent”) and the mother of young Caroline (River Lipe-Smith). (Sept. 12-Oct. 19, MCC Theater)

After its successful country musical “Music City” last year, the Bedlam company returns to one of its foundational authors: Jane Austen (Kate Hamill’s adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” was an early Bedlam hit in 2014). Now Emily Breeze’s new take on “Pride and Prejudice” looks like it’s going to have fun with the Regency superstar’s best-seller: “I haven’t reread the source material since I skimmed it in high school,” Breeze claims. (Sept. 14-Oct. 19, West End Theater)

After dedicating a decade to his “Rhinebeck Panorama” project, which includes the Apple, Gabriel and Michael family cycles, the writer-director Richard Nelson set out for war-torn Kyiv to work with the local Theater on Podil on a staging of his 2008 play “Conversations in Tusculum.” So inspired was he by the experience that he wrote the company this piece, about Ukrainian actors performing “Macbeth” in 1920. The resulting production (in Ukrainian with English supertitles) settles at Nelson’s frequent artistic home, the Public Theater, for a short run. (Sept. 16-21, Public Theater)

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These days weather reporters like Stacey (Julia McDermott) are called upon to deliver apocalyptic accounts of a world either drowning in floods or bursting into flames along with their forecasts. Written by Brian Watkins (the creator of the time-travel Western series “Outer Range”), this solo play straddles satire and warning. (Sept. 16-Oct. 12, St. Ann’s Warehouse)

The most intriguing pairing this month may well be that of Elizabeth Marvel and Tim Blake Nelson. They are not onstage together, though: Marvel stars in this new play by Nelson, who somehow finds time to write (he also has a novel, “Superhero,” coming out in December) in between gigs as an ur-character actor (next up: the film “Bang Bang” and the series “The Lowdown”). Marvel plays a lawyer in a near-future society where the justice system is even more out of whack than our current one. (Sept. 19-Nov. 2, La MaMa)

The title character of Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s play is a young Mexican woman, portrayed by Jacqueline Guillén, who yearns to make a space for herself in bullfighting — which the WP Theater’s site noncommittally refers to as “a controversial practice that we neither condemn nor condone.” Tatiana Pandiani choreographs and directs. (Sept. 20-Oct. 19, WP Theater)

Sally Carson’s play premiered in Britain in 1935 and takes place just a couple of years earlier, in Germany — you can guess what the title refers to. The show, based on Carson’s own novel, presciently tracks the rise of Nazism through the prism of a divided Bavarian family. (Sept. 20-Nov. 1, Mint Theater)

N.Y.U. Skirball plays a vital role in the New York cultural ecosystem by programming radical theatermakers from around the world, albeit for blink-and-you’ll-miss-them runs. Such is the case with this piece by the experimental German company Rimini Protokoll (“Remote New York”) in which Helgard Haug intertwines the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight in 2014 with her father’s slide into dementia. Bonus: a live score by the exquisite Berlin-based musician Barbara Morgenstern and Zafraan Ensemble. (Sept. 25-27, N.Y.U. Skirball)

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Take a Closer Look at These ‘Great’ New York City Trees

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Take a Closer Look at These ‘Great’ New York City Trees
Species Magnolia grandiflora

In 1968, this magnolia tree, then over 40 feet tall, was supposed to be cut down to make way for an apartment complex. Hattie Carthan jumped into action. Ms. Carthan, an environmentalist and activist in the Black community, moved to Brooklyn in 1928 and had a deep love for trees. In 1966, she founded the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee, which planted more than 1,500 trees and also taught youth groups about caring for them — not a popular mission at the time. “When I first suggested that we buy trees, I almost got thrown out of the block association,” Ms. Carthan told The New York Times in 1975. “They said, ‘Oh, trees make leaves and you have to sweep.’”

Ms. Carthan was so determined to save the magnolia on Lafayette Avenue, which was estimated to have been planted in about 1885, that she campaigned for it to be designated by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission as a living landmark — and won. Today it is the sole remaining landmark tree in New York City.

In 1972, Ms. Carthan created the Magnolia Tree Earth Center, which, despite her death in 1984, continues to educate young people about environmental issues. The center is facing financial hardship, but there is hope that it will be revitalized, said Wayne Devonish, the chairman of its board. “We need to embrace all that it represents in terms of being like a little urban oasis, smack dab in central Brooklyn,” he said. “If we show the tree, and the center, love, hopefully there’s another good 100 — or 200 — years.”

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