From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Behind 94 Acts of Shocking Violence, Years of Glaring Mistakes   
   By Harris and Ransom, Nov. 20, 2023, NY Times   
   Times reporters spent more than a year examining how often homeless mentally   
   ill people under the care of the city have committed acts of violence. There   
   is no official accounting of such incidents, but The Times set out to create   
   its own, scouring court    
   filings, police records and news reports to identify more than 130 acts of   
   violence carried out in recent years by people who were homeless and mentally   
   ill.   
      
   The reporters scrutinized each case, conducting more than 250 interviews,   
   obtaining tens of thousands of pages of confidential treatment records and   
   visiting courthouses, jails, prisons and a psychiatric ward. The lack of   
   public information about the    
   incidents made it difficult to evaluate about a quarter of the cases. Still,   
   the examination identified 94 instances in the past decade in which breakdowns   
   of the city’s social safety net preceded the violence, sometimes by just   
   days or hours.   
      
   The review focused on the major elements of that safety net — a disjointed   
   patchwork of homeless shelters, hospitals and specialized teams that was   
   stitched together after the state began closing its notorious psychiatric   
   institutions in the 1960s. It    
   found a widespread failure by the agencies to share information, even though   
   the state created a detailed database expressly for that purpose. It also   
   revealed a pattern among the agencies of taking the narrowest possible   
   approach to care, and an    
   unwillingness on the part of city and state officials to fully fund crucial   
   programs, leading to understaffing and harried treatment.   
      
   Each of the cases examined by The Times was its own portrait of individual   
   suffering. A bipolar man who was kicked from one shelter to the next while in   
   the grips of a crisis. A young mother who was still unstable when she was cut   
   loose from an emergency    
   room. A 23-year-old whose outpatient treatment team stood by as he became   
   increasingly violent, doing little to intervene. Taken together, the 94 cases   
   offer the fullest picture yet of how, where and why the safety net has broken   
   down.   
      
   The breakdowns occurred most frequently in the city’s homeless shelter   
   system, which in recent years has spent more than $1 billion on dedicated   
   mental health shelters but failed to reliably place mentally ill people in   
   them. One man whose history of    
   delusions should have landed him in such a shelter was instead placed in a   
   general shelter last year before he deteriorated and stabbed three other   
   homeless men, killing one of them.   
      
   Next were the city’s private and public hospitals, which have regularly   
   discharged people in severe psychiatric distress. Private hospitals, in   
   particular, have cut psychiatric beds to boost their bottom line. Public   
   hospitals have repeatedly erred    
   while being overwhelmed by nearly 50,000 psychiatric patients per year. At   
   least some of the discharges documented by The Times appeared to violate a   
   federal law requiring hospitals to stabilize patients before releasing them.   
      
   A network of special treatment teams was supposed to be New York’s solution   
   for caring for high-risk, mentally ill people on the streets, but more than a   
   dozen cases identified by The Times occurred on the watch of such teams. The   
   failures took place    
   as the state has starved the teams of funding, leading providers to pay   
   caseworkers low wages and saddle them with staggering caseloads. Some teams   
   spent just 15 minutes per visit with patients — the minimum amount of time   
   required to bill Medicaid for    
   services.   
      
   The remaining cases involved people who appeared to have been failed by the   
   jail, prison and parole systems and other agencies.   
      
   The killing of Michelle Go by a homeless mentally ill man sparked outrage and   
   led to candlelight vigils on the streets of New York City.Credit...Jeenah   
   Moon/Reuters   
      
   The killing of Ms. Go horrified a city still emerging from the depths of the   
   coronavirus pandemic, and Mayor Eric Adams responded by urging the authorities   
   to step up involuntary hospitalizations and by ordering the dismantling of   
   homeless encampments.   
      
   In doing so, Mr. Adams became the latest in a line of city leaders to grapple   
   with how to treat homeless mentally ill people, who flooded the streets when   
   the state began shuttering its mental institutions. Each administration   
   attempted its own fixes,    
   met with limited success and then passed the problems on to the next one.   
      
   “The public has been gaslit for nearly four decades,” said Mary Brosnahan,   
   who spent 30 years leading the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York advocacy   
   and service organization. “We keep being told something is done, but nothing   
   has changed.    
   There is constant finger-pointing at every level of government and dropping   
   the ball with the hopes that it won’t result in another Michelle Go.”   
      
   Mr. Adams declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, he said   
   that addressing the mental health crisis was a top priority.   
      
   “After decades of past administrations ignoring this crisis, we are not   
   going to continue walking by those who need help,” he said, citing plans to   
   add resources and training and improve coordination among agencies. “This is   
   our moral mandate as a    
   city, and we will not fail to deliver for our most vulnerable.”   
      
   The agencies that run the city’s homeless shelters, hospitals and mental   
   health programs refused to answer questions about failures in specific cases,   
   citing patient privacy laws.   
      
   Asked about Mr. Gomez, for example, a spokeswoman for Northwell Health, which   
   runs Long Island Jewish Medical Center, declined to discuss his discharge, but   
   said: “Northwell Health takes all such decisions seriously and is fully   
   committed to ensuring    
   the health and safety of our patients.”   
      
   The agencies declined to discuss the failures even when provided with signed   
   privacy waivers.   
      
   Representatives of the agencies said they were doing their best under   
   difficult circumstances.   
      
   “No one piece can fix the whole thing,” said Ann Marie T. Sullivan, the   
   commissioner of the New York State Office of Mental Health, adding: “I think   
   we’re on a path here to provide some really good community-based care.”   
      
      
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