What the mayor says....is that some policy will be created (apparently using current laws) and if you were seriously mentally ill....they'd go back to the old system of hauling you off to a eval, and then setting you down in a permanent facility.
Will it happen? I would imagine that the police, prosecutors, and judges have been given a weekly number (say twenty), and that's the limit. Yeah, it's mostly say there are crazies, and they will be put away, but you won't dare go and haul off 600 people the first week.
I grew up in Alabama in the 1970s. Within five miles....I'd say that we had around ten folks who probably were crazy enough....to be in a facility, but not dangerous-crazy where they were a threat. If you drove around the state, we probably had more than 50,000 people with that crazy tendency.
Having spent some days in NY City....I'm prone to say that there might be 20,000 just in the city at large, and 3,000 of them are a threat to public safety.
But here's the thing.....do you really want to pay around $500 a day for some institution to care/guard each guy? You'd be talking about $1.5 million a day....messing around with them. You'd be better off to just agree to giving them government-funded fentanyl each morning....after each breakfast, and letting them sleep off their life in some field (upstate region).
