NYAPRS Note: Yesterday, a group of mental health, cross disability, legal rights and criminal justice reform advocates gathered in Albany in a spirited news conference and demonstration to urge state legislators to reject the Governor’s proposals to expand the use of Kendra’s Law. The groups included National Alliance on Mental Illness-NYC (Kimberly Blair), VOCAL (Felix Guzman), NY Association on Independent Living (Lindsey Miller, Meghan Parker), Mental Health Association in NYS (Glenn Liebman), New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (Ruth Lowenkron), Friends of Recovery (Chackupurackal Mathai), Western New York Independent Living (Maura Kelley) and NYAPRS (Harvey Rosenthal). We were very pleased to be joined by a number of prominent state legislators including Assembly members Michaelle Solages, who serves as the Chair of the New York Legislature’s Black, Hispanic, Puerto Rican and Asian Caucus, Esta Littlejohn and Jessica González-Rojas and Senate Committee on Crime and Correction Chair Julia Salazar.
The event was covered by several print and TV media. Here’re 3 pieces…look for more into Friday.
Lawyer Questions Proposal to Expand Courts’ Power to Impose Mental Health Treatment Under Kendra’s Law
By Brian Lee, New York Law Journal March 29, 2022
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget proposed an expansion of the law, and would make it easier to recommit someone who had fallen under the law’s jurisdiction in the past. Critics railed against the measure as “recklessly broad.”
Ahead of the April 1 state budget deadline, a lawyer questioned the constitutionality of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to expand Kendra’s Law, a 23-year-old statute that would continue to give courts the power to impose medical treatment for mentally-ill persons.
Ruth Lowenkron, director of the Disability Justice Program at New York Lawyers for Public Interest, asserted that the “most despicable part” of the governor’s proposal was that it erases the requirement of demonstrating the treatment would actually benefit the individual.
“That is nothing shy of disgusting,” Lowenkron said during a demonstration of more than a dozen advocates Tuesday outside the Assembly parlor of the New York State Capitol Building.
“We are here to help our colleagues,” Lowenkron said. “We are not here to lock them up, sweep them away,” she said, as rally-goers chanted, “Forced treatment is not treatment.”
By her own admission, Lowenkron’s voice boomed outside the Assembly parlor as she railed against Hochul’s proposal.
“We need to be loud here,” Lowenkron said. “This is a loud issue.”
Lowenkron was among mental health, disability and criminal justice reform advocates who converged on the Capitol Building to ask lawmakers to reject the plan.
Then-Gov. George Pataki signed Kendra’s Law into effect in 1999, and it’s since been reviewed periodically by the legislature for continuation.
Kendra’s Law requires that each county in the state and New York City establish a local court-ordered assisted outpatient treatment program. It charges the New York State Office of Mental Health with monitoring and overseeing the implementation of outpatient treatment statewide.
Hochul’s executive budget proposes an expansion of the law and would make it easier to recommit someone who had fallen under the law’s jurisdiction in the past. Under the law, if the patient refuses services, they can be ordered into a psychiatric hospital without his or her consent.
Said Lowenkron: “We can’t stand by when things are happening to our family members, our community members. This is not the kind of society that we want to be.”
The law was named after Kendra Webdale, a woman who was shoved into an oncoming subway train by a mentally ill man who was known to be a danger to himself or others, and who was in and out of the New York City mental health system for years.
But much of the push for expansion comes after the recent death of Michelle Go, who was shoved from a subway platform by a homeless man in New York City in January.
Kendra’s Law was scheduled to expire this summer, but Hochul, whose office did not respond to a message Tuesday, proposed extending it another five years.
During the Capitol Building rally, Lowenkron indicated the issue was personal to her. She said she has a sister with severe mental illness.
“I have learned a lot over the years from that—and one of the main things I’ve learned is that forced treatment is not the answer,” she said.
“We can force people into treatment, perhaps for a little while, because we’ve got the courts behind us and what have you. But that’s not the answer. It will double up on the resistance.”
The rally was organized by both the New York Lawyers for Public Interest and the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services.
Harvey Rosenthal, the association’s chief executive director, said the advocates weren’t criminals or scapegoats for a violent society.
“We’re not responsible for the homeless crisis in the subways,” he said, referencing the recent 17-page subway safety plan to quell violence on subway platforms and stations that was recently enacted in New York City, through a phased implementation.
The subway plan includes a crackdown on people sleeping, littering, smoking, doing drugs or hanging out in the subway system, and it calls for clearing passengers out of trains at the end of their lines.
“We are people who simply want the right kind of care,” Rosenthal said. “We are failed by the system and then blamed by it. We are seen as an object of fear by the public. They’re talking about a public safety answer.”
Rosenthal called on lawmakers to expand existing services that he said were proven to be effective and that bring forth a continuum of crisis services.
Rosenthal noted that the deaths of Webdale and Go were by assailants who wanted treatment.
“A big part of the antithesis here is that the system failed,” Rosenthal said. “It’s not a patient failure. It’s not a patient’s unwillingness in most cases. If you give people what they want, and you work with them in that fashion, and often if you don’t start with medication, but you start with food, shelter and clothing—that’s the place to engage people.”
Rosenthal said several powerful groups, including the New York Drug Policy Alliance, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and coalitions for behavioral health and the homeless, support their movement.
“We sent a letter with 69 groups to every legislator, and we have over 3,000 letters, at least, that have been written by constituents in the last few days,” he said.
State Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, who chairs the Committee on Crime and Correction, said communities she represents in the city, and communities across the state, have seen disinvestment in mental health care and mental health services.
“We need to get these beds back online so that people can voluntarily get the treatment that they want,” Salazar said.
Assemblywoman Michaelle C. Solages, D-Elmont, chair of the New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, called for “smart approaches” to serving communities’ mental health needs.
“Many of these individuals are crying out for our help and support—and scooping them up involuntarily is not the solution,” she said, calling for more support for mental health professionals to go out and talk to individuals and get them to seek treatment voluntarily.
Sen. Robert Jackson, D-Manhattan, said he was in a meeting, but hurried over to the rally in hopes of catching the activists and “communicating to the world, especially our governor and the legislative body to take action not to expand” Kendra’s Law.
“Take a pause,” the lawmaker said. “Let’s review and see what needs to be done with input from everyone involved.”
Kim Blair, manager of public policy and advocacy of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City, called the proposed expansion to Kendra’s Law “inappropriate and recklessly broad.”
An expansion of the law, along with the subway safety plan in New York City, will put people who are experiencing crises on the subway onto the cold streets, she suggested.
—-
Of Kendra’s Law Could Expand State’s Power To Commit The Mentally Ill. Advocates Are Concerned
By Joshua Solomon Albany Times Union March 30, 2022
ALBANY — A killing in New York City’s subway system more than two decades ago resulted in Kendra’s Law, a controversial legal change in which people with mental illness who refuse to take court-ordered medication can be temporarily committed to outpatient psychiatric care.
It was named after Kendra Webdale, who was shoved from a subway platform to her death by a young man with schizophrenia. According to news reports from 1999, the measure was intended to balance the rights of those with mental illness and the safety of the general public. Signing it into law, Republican Gov. George Pataki called the legislative fight over the bill a “difficult thing.”
Some advocates feared it would criminalize mental illness: Joseph Glazer, president of the Mental Health Association in New York State, said at the time the law was “well-intentioned” but would punish the innocent “and provide absolution to a system that is guilty of total failure.”
The law is rarely used by law enforcement on the streets, but is more likely employed by family members to address a relative’s crisis.
Two decades after its passage, state officials are considering a significant expansion of Kendra’s Law after a similar tragedy has added to already heightened concerns over public safety. The changes could create a pathway for the removal of mentally ill people from the subway or from homeless encampments if they are unable to feed, cloth or shelter themselves, and if they pose a “substantial risk of physical harm.”
The expansion could be folded into the state’s budget, which is expected to to be voted on this week.
The proposed changes are “the slippery slope we were worried about, and 20 years later we’re seeing the worst part of it,” Harvey Rosenthal, executive director of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, said Tuesday at the Capitol.
Rosenthal believes people avoid services because the system has “failed them.” The solution, he believed, is permanent supportive housing and funding mental health professionals at sufficient levels. It is not necessarily increasing the number of psychiatric beds, which has plummeted as the state has attempted to move toward de-institutionalization of the mentally ill.
“If what we’re doing now is making involuntary inpatient criteria so broad that people will be scooped off the street for failure to do basic life things that are now portrayed as danger to self, it’s heading into institutionalization,” Rosenthal said.
At the peak of institutionalization in the 1950s, the state had 93,000 people in its psychiatric centers, according to the state Office of Mental Health.
Before Kendra’s Law passed in 1999, the number had fallen to 5,000 people in psychiatric beds. It currently serves about 2,000. Additionally, 154,000 are in state-funded supportive housing, according to OMH.
New Situation, Similar Dynamics
The latest proposal, pitched by Gov. Kathy Hochul and pushed by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, follows the January death of Michelle Go, who was pushed in front of a subway train by a 61-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness. And it comes as officials want to make sure people feel safe as they push for a post-pandemic return to work and a revival of tourism.
The first glimmer that the state was going to expand the law came on Feb. 18 at a news conference in a subway station held by Hochul and Adams.
Hochul told anecdotes about people coming up to her on the street with their concerns. “They have a baby stroller, couple of toddlers and an infant. And they say, ‘We want the old New York back. We don’t feel safe anymore.’ And that hits me right here in my heart,” the governor said. “We just have to take care of some problems.”
Adams said the state has become “enablers to those who need help,” and turned to Dr. Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, and Ann Marie Sullivan, state commissioner of the Office of Mental Health.
“We believe that there is room within existing law,” Katz said before outlining what would become the thrust of Hochul’s proposed language to change Kendra’s Law. Sullivan said that the state was issuing guidance in the meantime.
“You always have to be aware of the civil rights of individuals,” Sullivan said, “but sometimes someone’s self-neglect is so severe that it would fall into that substantial harm category.”
Path Forward
Mental health advocates are concerned that Hochul’s changes — part of her controversial 10-point public safety proposal that centered around tweaks to the state’s bail laws — are unconstitutional and coercive.
The proposal would remove a standard that requires a determination that the person facing commitment would likely benefit from the treatment — a provision on which prior court cases rested their constitutionality, noted Ruth Lowenkron, director of the disability justice program for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.
“This is going well beyond that,” Lowenkron said of the proposed standard. “Someone doesn’t have food, clothing, shelter? What does that mean?”
The administration views its changes as a “strengthening” of the law for people who “pose a danger to themselves through self-neglect,” according to Hochul’s proposal.
The changes remains on the table in budget negotiations, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Even lawmakers opposed to the expansion said Kendra’s Law, which has technically already expired after a five-year extension in 2017, is likely to be renewed.
“We also recognize that extending the legislation not only allows us, but compels us to re-evaluate the program every few years to look for opportunities for improvement,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said in 2017. But outside of the proposed expansion, it does not appear that any re-evaluation has taken place.
“It’s not a public safety plan,” Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas, D-Queens, said of the proposed changes. “There’s a lot of ways to come at this problem, and (an expansion of) Kendra’s Law is not one of the solutions.”
State Sen. George M. Borrello, who went to Fredonia High School with Kendra Webdale in Chautauqua County, is a major proponent of her namesake law.
The Republican wants to see it maintained to protect people, especially in the wake increased mental health crises due to the pandemic.
“We need to give our mental health professionals, doctors, the tools to help people,” Borrello said. “Sometimes that means holding someone for observation and treatment so that they are not a danger to themselves and others.”
———
Pushback Against Governor’s Expansion of Kendra’s Law
By Amal Tlaige WTEN March 30, 2022 (see video at https://www.news10.com/news/pushback-against-governors-expansion-of-kendras-law/).
ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) — Mental health and criminal justice reform advocates are opposing Governor Kathy Hochul’s possible expansion of Kendra’s Law in the New York State budget.
The law, which came into effect in 1999, was named in memory of Kendra Webdale. A young woman who was pushed in front of a New York City subway by a man with a history of mental illness and hospitalizations.
Kendra’s Law allows the court to order assisted outpatient treatment for people who are deemed as mentally unstable and in need of supervision.
Opponents say Kendra’s Law criminalizes and coerces people into treatment and that the real solution is to fund more mental health programs.
Assembly woman Michaelle Solages explains additional services the state can offer. “We can go as simply as making sure that these people have secure housing… access to their medication and we can go as broadly as making sure they have access to mental health professionals, ya know, some time of job, some type of stability.”
Lawmakers and mental health advocates say there’s no evidence Kendra’s Law has been working and expanding it would only hurt those in need of mental health assistance. However, studies have shown it does improve mental health for those who stick with the program.
https://www.news10.com/news/pushback-against-governors-expansion-of-kendras-law/