Alliance Alert: The Op-Ed below, “Involuntary Transport of People is Truly Awful,” highlights the trauma and harm caused by forcibly removing individuals from the street under the guise of mental health support. These types of interventions are not only ineffective—they are deeply damaging. They reflect a system that continues to fail people in crisis.
As negotiations over the final New York State budget continue, the Alliance for Rights and Recovery is urging the Governor and Legislature to reject any proposals that expand involuntary inpatient or outpatient commitment. The Legislature has already excluded these proposals from both one-house budgets, sending a clear message: forced treatment is not the solution.
We cannot keep using police-led mental hygiene arrests—complete with handcuffs, shields, and potential force—as our response to homelessness and mental illness. These actions criminalize mental health and poverty, especially for Black and Brown New Yorkers, who made up over 60% of involuntary transports in 2024.
Instead, we must fully invest in voluntary, community-based solutions that work:
- Mandate and implement Mental Health Incident Review Panels to ensure accountability after critical incidents.
- Expand INSET teams, which voluntarily engage individuals who are disconnected from services.
- Establish Peer Bridger programs to support smooth transitions from hospitalization to stable community living.
- Fund Housing First programs with ACT teams to provide people with immediate housing and support—no conditions attached.
- Guarantee housing for individuals who are hospitalized while experiencing homelessness, to stop the cycle of discharge to the street.
- Implement Daniel’s Law mental health first responder teams to effectively support people experiencing mental health and substance use crises.
These are the strategies that lead to real recovery, safety, and dignity. Let’s not repeat the failed policies of the past. Let’s build a system that treats people as people—not as problems to be removed.
Opinion
Involuntary Transport of People is Truly Awful
UPDATED: February 21, 2023
…Involuntary transports are a cacophonous scene, with sirens and flashing lights, handcuffs and violent restraint. The encounter can exacerbate mental illness, as can the hours that clients are then made to wait in an often overcrowded and chaotic psychiatric emergency room. After admission, care is well intentioned, but necessarily focused on short-term crisis intervention; it is rarely effective at achieving sustainable outcomes, and may instead reinforce long-term treatment resistance.
Involuntarily transporting someone from the street to a hospital was never an act to be celebrated. As a clinician, it meant that I, and a multitude of larger systems, had failed this individual. We had failed to create mental health care services in which they felt welcome and safe, where they saw a viable path to lasting stability. Sometimes, the reluctance to access services may be rooted in symptoms of mental illness, but often, these individuals are making rational decisions to avoid a system unequipped to treat them.
The Adams administration is now seeking to loosen existing involuntary transport criteria to include individuals who appear to be mentally ill and who display an inability to “meet basic living needs,” a highly subjective standard. Safe involuntary transportation demands that an assessing clinician is able to self-reflect and examine how their positionality, education, and training may have created biases that affect clinical work and judgment.
…The power to transport someone against their will is a great responsibility that can cause harm if not used with extreme caution and careful planning. Even trained clinicians may struggle to employ this approach ethically. And we are now handing this responsibility to the NYPD.
…The mayor has not been using the word removal, but media outlets covering the issue have been. The language used to discuss policy matters, it can dehumanize and create further stigmatization. We remove a stain. We remove debris. And now, we seek to remove human beings.
McCullough is a social work doctoral student at NYU.