Opinion

NY’s Les Misérables

With almost no public announcement, Gov. Cuomo has put in place a policy that will send the mentally ill out on the street with no regard for public safety.

That will be the consequence of new regulations that limit the mentally ill to 25% of the population in privately run adult homes and forbid the homes from taking in new residents. Instead, these people are to be placed into “community housing.”

The regulations come despite a warning from City Hall that the state is putting the cart before the horse by not having services or funding in place to make the policy work.

As one adult-home operator told The Post, most residents of such facilities “need reminders several times a day to take their medications and see their doctors.” Indeed, many of those affected by this decision “used to be in homeless shelters and went from hospital to hospital.”

So what’s behind this move? Certainly Albany has been under pressure from the Obama administration. It’s also part of the state’s attempt to comply with a ruling from our good friend, federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who says that institutionalizing the mentally ill in adult homes violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The idea is essentially to empty adult homes — where residents are under constant supervision — by moving the mentally ill into “supportive” apartments to live on their own, with only minimal oversight.

Such a move shirks two responsibilities of the state: to protect the general public and to help ensure that the mentally ill get the care they need.

These are real concerns. The public has a right to be protected from those who threaten their safety. That’s especially true of those who are a danger when they refuse to take their medication.

Ask Pat Webdale, whose daughter Kendra was shoved to her death in 1999 by a schizophrenic who’d stopped taking his meds. She calls this policy “the same as putting people on the street.”

That’s precisely what happened back in the ’70s and ’80s under a policy that emptied institutions — and led directly to the massive homeless crisis.

The state’s new policy essentially moves mentally ill people who are unprepared to take care of themselves into local communities that don’t have in place the services these folks need.

We’ve been here before. And New York has come too far to risk a return to the days when the problem of the mentally ill was dumped onto the streets, making the city at once less caring and less livable.