Several members of Mayor de Blasio’s task force to revamp the city’s response to 911 calls involving the mentally ill say the year-and-a-half long process was a sham.
“I’m feeling a little used,” Brooklyn community leader Mark Winston Griffith told The Post.
Griffith was one of 80 members of the NYC Crisis Prevention and Response Task Force formed in April 2018 by de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray after several mentally-disturbed New Yorkers were killed during confrontations with police.
Last week, de Blasio released a one-page press release outlining his plan for helping New Yorkers in distress, a year after his administration promised a comprehensive “blueprint.”
Griffith and other participants said the mayor didn’t listen to their ideas and kept them in the dark about his conclusions.
“When I was asked to participate on the committee I was assuming that I wasn’t just some figurehead or some person to fill a room,” Griffith said, “And not only would they be looking for genuine participation, but they would regard me as a stakeholder and inform me of the process as things went along.
“That just did not happen,” he said.
Fellow task force member and mental health advocate Carla Rabinowitz agreed that they were used as window dressing.
“What’s missing in the mayor’s plan is first the transparency. Before issuing the press release he didn’t bring us back to look through these ideas he had,” she said.
She noted that the co-response teams — the thrust of the plan outlined in the release — are “an old idea” that doesn’t work because police instead of medical providers are still in charge of responding to people in crisis. The teams, comprised of NYPD cops and civilian mental health workers, will respond to 911 calls about emotionally disturbed people.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams called de Blasio’s mishandling of the task force “worse than any process I’ve seen since I’ve been elected.”
Williams entered public office as a councilman in 2009.
A mayoral spokesman defended the process.
“Every single recommendation put forward by the planning committee of the Task Force was accepted, including significant health-only and health-first responses like HEAT, Mobile Crisis Teams, and Mobile Treatment Teams,” spokesman Joshua Goodman said.
“Task Force members, including many of the advocates who are now saying they are not happy with the outcome, endorsed these recommendations at the time that they were put forward.
“Task Force members were invited to a meeting a few weeks before the announcement and we discussed the process moving forward. They will also be meeting three times a year so we can get their input on implementation,” Goodman said.