By: Ilana Siyance
The mental health crisis in NYC has reached a violent peak. Lawmakers, first responders, patient advocates and everyday New Yorkers are finally speaking out to beg the city to take meaningful action following the tragic results which have been unfolding this month. On Friday, a mentally ill street peddler hit a police officer in the head with a metal chair at a Brooklyn nail salon in Brownsville. The veteran NYPD officer is in a coma being hospitalized, and the bi-polar, untreated, T-shirt vendor, Kwesi Ashun, was shot dead.
Just two days earlier, another mentally ill menace with an extensive history of violence, was caught on video pushing a woman head-first into an idling train. Earlier in October, Rodriguez “Randy” Santos, a homeless psychotic was blamed for beating four homeless men to death in Chinatown. The list goes on, with mental illness ending in violence all too often.
As reported by the NY Post, nearly everyone agrees that more steps must be taken to help the mentally ill before the situations get dangerous. “Have we lost our minds?” Gov. Andrew Cuomo fumed Saturday, referring to why recidivist subway predators are not kept out of the system. “We need to know more about that for sure,” Mayor Bill de Blasio conceded Saturday, in response to questions about the attack on the officer in the nail salon. “Investigation underway,” said the Mayor.
New York City officially has 239,000 seriously mentally ill residents, according to mental illness advocate D.J. Jaffe, the head of the city-based Mental Illness Policy Organization. Roughly 40 percent of them–which make up about 93,000 men, women and teens–are not receiving any treatment, despite serious psychosis, including large numbers with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The city even knows the names of these 93,000 untreated individuals, because at some point they were all either in a hospital, jail or homeless shelter.
This is not novel news. The city has already launched a wellness program known as ThriveNYC, spending $1 billion over five years. But, some experts say the money is being spent unwisely. “Some 6 million is spent running and advertising the NYC Well phone number— if you’re feeling under pressure, call!” says Jaffe. “All of New York is under pressure! Why not spend that money on the seriously mentally ill?” “Take your outreach workers, and instead of having them talk about ‘wellness,’ put them at the exits of the jails, the hospitals, the homeless shelters”, Jaffe recommends.
“What we’re seeing is more and more incidents of mentally ill really acting up and resisting any kind of apprehension or pushback, whether from the public or the police,” said Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association. “As a police officer, I’m being put in a position that I may have to shoot him in order to stop that. If you look at all the police involved shootings, we’re seeing almost one a week,” Mullins said.
The family of Ashun, 33, said they knew there was a problem and had called in a city Department of Health mental health crisis team to evaluate him. His sister said, they were told he was not a threat, and they should call 911 if things changed. “I said we have to wait until he’s physically violent to call 911? We’re reaching out for help now,” Bartley told The Post she told officials.
“It’s ludicrous to have laws that require violence,” Jaffe said. “Laws should prevent violence.”
