NEW YORK (PIX11) -- With more NYPD officers heading into the subway system during the overnight hours, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he is also looking to get mentally ill homeless people off the trains with a new option.
Pointing to the repeated cycle of mentally ill people getting stabilized in hospitals but ending up right back on the street, Adams announced the creation of a 100-bed treatment facility for people with severe mental illness who were recently discharged.
Adams is also looking to create 900 more "safe haven beds," shelters with private and semi-private rooms that cater to the chronically homeless. The mayor's team said the new facility and additional beds would be created as soon as possible but did not give a specific timeline.
"You know you see the same individuals over and over and over again," Adams said. "Our goal is to give them the trust they need to come inside."
However, in response to the recent unrest underground, it is police officers, not mental health workers, who will be surged into the subway overnight. Gov. Kathy Hochul said Tuesday the state would pick up the overtime tab for the next few months.
PIX11 News asked the mayor if the overnight deployment would include additional social workers and medical professionals to push people to the new resources he is highlighting.
"No," Adams said. "Having an outreach worker with each police officer is not realistic."
The mayor noted that he has doubled the number of outreach teams during his time in office, but he said NYPD officers will still need to do the heavy lifting, with outreach workers on call to respond overnight if necessary.
Brian Stettin, who advises the mayor on mental health policy, said the city would like to have more outreach teams, but "we'd be lying to the public if we said that was going to happen. The number of nurses or graduate level social workers just aren't there."