Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday asked the city of Albany for help in its long-standing effort to remove mentally ill vagrants from the streets and protect them. He condemned the murders committed by a maniac in Manhattan as a tragic result of inaction.
“Everyone told me I was inhumane and that we just wanted to institutionalize people,” Adams said at his weekly off-topic briefing. “Well, this is the result. This is the result of inaction and ignoring people who need help.”
Adams said city officials plan to analyze the mental health of the killer, Ramon Rivera, and ultimately his three victims, as well as the criminal justice system's deficiencies.
“Three New Yorkers were murdered in our city by someone who was betrayed by our health care system,” he said.
The mayor outlined steps the city has taken to keep mentally ill people off the streets, including efforts to transition to small mental health “clubhouses.”
But Adams said Albany needs help from state lawmakers to strengthen its controversial involuntary eviction program.
The Supportive Interventions Act, a bill Mr. Adams supported that would have given the city more power to take troubled New Yorkers off the streets and into psychiatric treatment, had no effect in Albany.
“We have been going back and forth with Albany to advocate for codification and clarity in the law of our authority to deal with people with severe mental illness,” he said.
Hours after the mayor's comments, a disheveled-looking Rivera, 51, appeared in a Manhattan courtroom for arraignment on three counts of first-degree serial murder.
Prosecutors said Rivera, a homeless man with a history of mental illness and arrests, randomly targeted and killed three New Yorkers on Monday as they went about their daily lives from the West Side to the East River.
He coldly told officers he chose his victims because he was “lonely” and “distracted,” law enforcement sources told the Post.
