Citing safety, New York kicks mentally ill people off the subway

Inside a subway station in Lower Manhattan, a group of police officers slowly followed an emaciated man in a dirty gray sweatshirt who stuttered and flailed his arms wildly.

Please leave me alone, she cried. He beat his chest with an open palm and then, exasperated, sat down on a ladder. what did i do wrong

He had snot on his beard. Stained trousers hung from his slender frame.

Let’s go, said one officer, Heather Cicinnati, as the man stumbled forward, disoriented and agitated. We have to leave the station.

The police officers were part of a team led by a medical worker whose job it is to forcibly move, if necessary, mentally ill people, who are often homeless, out of New York City’s transit system. That morning in March, the team handcuffed him and dragged him out of the subway station. A white hood was then placed over his head.

The response teams are part of a sprawling effort to make the subway safer after a series of shocking crimes. Part of the plan involves finding solutions to one of the most frustrating problems in transit systems: mentally ill and homeless people living on trains and in stations.

Officials from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, said they were doing what was necessary to help people in trouble while keeping them away from passengers. In survey after survey, motorists have said they would use public transport more often if they saw fewer people behaving erratically and more police officers.

But some advocates for the mentally ill believe the teams are using heavy-handed tactics that are doing more harm than good. Ruth Lowenkron, director of the New York Public Interest Lawyers’ disability justice program, expressed dismay at the use of the hooded equipment, calling it an anachronistic tool.

This is not who we want to be as a society, said Ms. Lowenkron. There is no reason to do this. And that won’t make people safer.

In defense of the method, MTA officials said the agencies’ police officers sometimes have to restrain people suffering from severe psychiatric distress in order to provide them with critical medical care.

Launched last fall, the program, called Subway Co-Response Outreach, or SCOUT, has removed at least 113 people from the subway. Most willingly go to shelters or hospitals for medical treatment, according to traffic officials.

Among the people removed from the subway, 16 have been sent to the hospital against their will for psychiatric evaluations. Most involuntary detainees were admitted as patients.

This is the governor, the city and the MTA coming together to do something about it, said Tim Minton, a spokesman for the authority, as officers arrested the distraught man in March. To try to help people who need treatment, who need assistance and not just walk away from it.

There is no data to suggest that people with mental illness are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. But some New Yorkers have been affected by a series of high-profile attacks by homeless people with mental illness in recent months. Crime rates also rose on the transit system earlier this year before falling.

SCOUT program is growing In March, Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state would provide $20 million to expand it from two teams to a dozen by the end of 2025. City and state officials also they have flooded the transit system with thousands of police officers and surveillance cameras. In March, Ms. Hochul deployed the National Guard to the system, amassing a force of approximately 3,000 law enforcement officers dedicated to patrolling public transportation. By the end of 2022, he told the MTA to put cameras in every train car, and today there are about 16,000 across the system.

Every weekday, the two SCOUT teams, each consisting of a medical worker and two or three MTA police officers, scour some of the subway’s busiest stations in search of people who appear to be taking refuge there.

Just before the March encounter at the Fulton Street station in Lower Manhattan, the team’s medical worker, Ameed Ademolu, 41, had already kicked several people off the subway that morning without any resistance.

Mr Ademolu was carrying a clipboard and wearing an orange vest and mask when he approached the man in the gray hoodie. The officers, standing a few feet away as they waited for Mr. Ademolus’s orders, watched to see if the man or any onlookers would attack.

Mr Ademolu quickly made the call: officers would have to take the man to a hospital against his will. He resisted for about 20 minutes, stripping and searching his pockets.

State laws allow both police and medical workers to forcibly take people to a hospital when their behavior poses a threat of serious harm to themselves or others.

Once outside, officers pressed the handcuffed man against a wall and placed a hood over his head because they said he was spraying mucus at the officers while screaming. He was then strapped to a gurney to be transported to Bellevue Hospital.

Nancy Juarez, 25, of Brooklyn, was walking by the scene with a friend when she stopped and urged officers to let the man go.

That’s damaging, said Ms. Juarez, who said she works mostly remotely as a policy analyst at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that opposes incarceration . This causes more trauma.

But officials said some people who have been removed from the system have behaved in ways that put them and others at risk. It is known that a person started a fire inside a station. Another was reported to have pushed a rider onto the tracks, and a third said he believed he was in Iraq and that the outreach team was a group of hostile soldiers.

Sergeant Steven Simmons, 26, who is part of a SCOUT team, said he was frustrated by the reactions of some observers who didn’t seem to understand the team’s intent. He said he believed the work he was doing was helping people who would otherwise be left on the streets.

We just need to know in our own hearts that he was getting the help he needs, she said. Sometimes, unfortunately, you can’t please everyone.