Alliance Alert: The NYPD and NYC government have withheld evidence around the number and identifying data as to how many City residents have been subjected to a mental hygiene arrest and involuntarily transported to local hospitals due to a finding of mental illness and inability to voluntarily meet basic needs. The policy is based on police officers to make those assessments, for which they are not typically qualified to make and training that is supposed to assist that process. Also missing is data to indicate racial diversity of such residents.
Why is this data especially critical?
Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposal to place this policy into state law, a move that is likely to significantly increase the number of state residents who are subjected to involuntary pickups, transports and admissions, is also based on the appropriateness of policy making those assessments and the training they’ll received. Advocates like the Alliance, MHANYS, legal and housing rights groups have strenuously opposed the Governor’s proposal and have called on the legislature to block its implementation. While the Governor claims to have an agreement with the legislature on such a policy, budget bills have yet to be printed.
NYPD ‘Stonewalled’ Request For Involuntary Removal Data, Lawsuit Alleges
The New York Civil Liberties Union asked the police department in December 2023 for details on how it is implementing Mayor Eric Adams’ policy
By Maya Kaufman Politico Mary 1, 2025
NEW YORK — The New York Civil Liberties Union is suing the NYPD to pry loose data on Mayor Eric Adams’ efforts to involuntarily commit people who appear unable to meet their basic needs due to mental illness.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday, accuses the police department of unlawfully stonewalling NYCLU’s request for that information under the state Freedom of Information Law.
NYPD and City Hall spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment.
Background: The civil rights group filed a public records request in December 2023 for data on individuals taken involuntarily by police to hospitals under Adams’ policy, which at that point had been in effect for just over a year. The request also called for materials being used to train officers on the policy.
NYCLU previously obtained NYPD training materials on the policy, after filing a similar lawsuit in March 2023. The organization’s new petition seeks updated versions of those materials.
Fifteen months later, NYCLU has yet to receive a single record from the department in response to that request, according to its petition now pending in Manhattan Supreme Court.
During the same timeframe, Adams administration officials publicly touted a curated set of data points as evidence of the initiative’s success, such as the number of “successful placements” among the city’s two “top 50” lists tracking homeless people with severe needs.
That made it clear City Hall was “withholding fundamental details” about the policy’s implementation, NYCLU alleges in its petition.
Even a legally mandated report on the city’s involuntary removals, which the Adams administration released at the end of January, was full of significant deficiencies and caveats, according to NYCLU’s lawsuit. The report did not include five months of NYPD data on involuntary removals resulting from 911 calls, claiming the department’s reporting system could not previously capture those figures. It offered incomplete race and ethnicity data. And it lacked information on what happened to people after NYPD officers brought them to a hospital.
“There’s been a series of selective releases of information,” Beth Haroules, director of disability justice litigation for the civil rights organization, told POLITICO. “There were a lot of excuses.”
As a result, Haroules said, it is impossible to fully assess the policy’s impact on the individuals swept up in it.