New York City is facing a mental health crisis and Mayor Adams is sitting idly by at best. At the State of the City address, Mayor Adams offered no insight into how much the city would invest in the given proposals. It has been over a year since the murder of Jordan Kneely, a black man suffering from mental illness. What has changed since then? Where is the progress? What is there to show for the increase in policing? Rikers Island is New York City’s largest mental health institute, but it’s a jail where most people have not been found guilty of any crime.
This month is Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. We have seen Eric Adams and his administration tout a mental health agenda across the city, allegedly focusing on harm reduction and “non-traditional practices.” At the last State of the City address, the city announced a wide-ranging mental health plan that aimed to triple the number of clubhouses for people with severe mental illness, launch a virtual mental health care platform for teens, and bolster harm reduction services in neighborhoods such as South Bronx and upper Manhattan. The agenda consists of three plans: reduce overdose deaths and support those who have substance use disorders, support those with severe mental illness, and address the needs of families and children with mental health issues.
Reality is far removed from the proposal. While there are experimental pilot programs in the works such as the B-HEARD program, an initiative under the City Council’s Mental Health Roadmap, they still seem to fall significantly short.
The Adams administration has proven itself to be a paper tiger. How can one claim to be tackling the mental health crisis while also directly fueling it? The people of the city clearly see through the ruse. In a time of ludicrous rates of unemployment, rising costs of living, broken windows policing, and a mayor on a power trip, it is no wonder why the mental health crisis seems never ending. Adams’s only solution seems to be incarceration, but a police state won't solve the problem. According to a Washington Post database on fatal shootings by on-duty police officers within the United States, 1 in 5 people fatally shot by police have mental illnesses. Over 1,400 people with mental illnesses have been killed by police since 2015.
Addressing the rapidly growing mental health crisis means investing in our communities, but it seems the city would rather incarcerate en masse in a last-ditch effort to keep Rikers open. At the same time, most of our public libraries now must close on the weekends due to budget cuts. Meanwhile, Mayor Adams somehow found $225 million to fund the construction of a “cop city” in Queens.
According to the city’s most recent data, there were 2281 deaths by overdose in just the first three quarters of 2023, 75 more than the equivalent portion of 2022. Under Adams, those numbers will only continue to climb. The Adams legacy will be the redoubling of broken windows policing, decrepit public services, and easily preventable death.
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