Will Civil Libertarians Give Mayor Adams’ Homeless Plan a Chance To Work?
There is no doubt that the policy lands in murky constitutional waters.

Mayor Adams has drawn national attention for his announced plan to remove potentially dangerous, homeless, mentally ill New Yorkers from the streets, even if involuntarily. This may seem like common sense, in the wake of the deaths of subway riders pushed to the tracks by untreated schizophrenics.
As a legal matter, it may prove fraught. For its benefits to be realized, civil libertarians will have to be willing to hold off from court action until results, both regarding public safety and the treatment of the “rough sleepers,” start to come in.
Civil libertarians, who played an outsized role in creating the city’s system in which shelter is a right but not a requirement, have already signaled their unease with the Mayor’s interpretation of law underlying the new policy.
The executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Donna Lieberman, has charged that Mr. Adams is “playing fast and loose with the legal rights of New Yorkers.”
She notes the “federal and state constitutions impose strict limits on the government’s ability to detain people experiencing mental illness — limits that the Mayor’s proposed expansion is likely to violate.”
There is no doubt that the policy lands in murky constitutional waters.
In a 1975 case, the Supreme Court, at a time when many large and poorly-maintained state psychiatric hospitals were still the norm, ruled that “a State cannot confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.”
New York state law precludes such confinement if someone is not clearly a danger to himself or others. Mr. Adams proposes a loose interpretation of that standard, such that police need not wait for a violent crime to occur to order a clearly disturbed street person into treatment.
Civil libertarians may only be waiting for the right plaintiff claiming to have suffered harm before heading to court to block the new policy.
Let’s hope they’re willing to hold off as it rolls out. Assuming their concern is with those struggling with serious mental illness, they can’t overlook the more than 3,000 New Yorkers sleeping with their possessions piled on carts and bedrolls. This is, in other words, no time to insist on first principles as the city is mugged by reality.
The NYCLU’s Ms. Lieberman, however, insists that “forcing people into treatment is a failed strategy for connecting people to long-term treatment and care.” Yet the results of doing the opposite have helped neither the public nor the mentally ill.
Simply put, the state has failed to provide treatment facilities adequate to compensate for the psychiatric hospitals it closed, in no small part through the efforts of civil libertarians. These were institutions with flaws but which at least kept residents warm and fed.
In 1955, there were nearly 95,000 New Yorkers living in state-run asylums. At its peak, Pilgrim Psychiatric Center on Long Island alone had about 14,000 patients. The number of such beds, most now in general hospitals, has fallen to about 6,000.
It may be true that, as a result, those swept off the streets to simply wind up back outdoors after minimal treatment. Yet it’s just as plausible that the Mayor’s high-profile push will create political momentum for expanded treatment. Indeed, Governor Hochul rapidly pledged an additional if paltry number of additional beds — 50.
We are hopefully watching as New York, like cities and states across the country, takes steps toward building an effective public psychiatric treatment system to replace that which we began to tear down in the 1960s with the advent of deinstitutionalization. It’s not too much to ask civil libertarians to let that get underway, before they assume it will fail.