Eric Adams targets quality of life crackdown message to conservative audience

Mayor Eric Adams announced his priority for next year’s state legislative session Thursday – though it’s unclear he’ll still be in office in January to fight for it.

Adams wants to expand the city’s ability to remove people from New York City streets – a message he first took to conservative audiences as he continues an uphill campaign for reelection in November. 

First in a New York Post exclusive, and then in a speech at an event hosted by the right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, Adams pitched a new law that would allow involuntary hospitalizations of homeless people who seem to have a drug addiction.

The so-called “Compassionate Interventions Act” would expand the city’s existing authority to involuntarily hospitalize people with serious mental illness deemed a danger to themselves or others. (In this year’s state legislative session, Adams, aligned with Gov. Kathy Hochul, successfully pushed state lawmakers to lower the threshold for involuntary removals to define a person’s inability to meet their own basic needs as a danger to themselves.)

The announcement is part of a quality-of-life campaign Adams announced this week called “End Anything Goes.” “As we look forward to a new legislative session in Albany, we’re asking for your support of the Compassionate Interventions Act,” Adams told the Manhattan Institute audience. “It would help those in the grip of addiction recover, improve quality of life across our city, build a culture of compassion, instead of the place where anything goes.” 

A former Republican turned moderate Democrat who was elected on a public safety platform in 2021, Adams has increasingly turned to conservative audiences during his first term and is continuing to do so in his independent bid for reelection. He’s also cozied up to President Donald Trump – whose Justice Department succeeded in having federal corruption charges against him dropped – and has become a more frequent guest on Fox News programs.

Though Adams’ proposed new law has a name, it does not yet have state legislators committed to carrying the bill in Albany. (City Council Member Yusef Salaam, who represents Harlem, praised the proposal in a press release from the mayor’s office.) The new law also lacks proposed bill language, so it’s unclear how a person would be evaluated as struggling with addiction.

Some mental health care providers have criticized the city’s focus on involuntary removals as both inhumane and failing to address root causes of serious mental illness. Some have also suggested that it’s politically driven, used as a tool to address fears about crime. Still, a pitch for expanded involuntary removals found purchase outside of the moderate to conservative spectrum this year, with more left-leaning Democratic officials like Comptroller Brad Lander endorsing a version of it as he ran for mayor.

The Legal Aid Society said in a statement on Thursday that focusing on voluntary treatment and permanent housing would be a better use of resources. “Forcing New Yorkers struggling with addiction into involuntary detention is traumatic, raises serious civil rights concerns, and does nothing to address the root causes of substance use,” the organization’s statement read. “Moreover, the Mayor’s attempt to frame this as a ‘quality of life’ measure is revealing – treating people in crisis as a nuisance to be swept out of public view rather than as human beings deserving care and dignity.”

On Thursday, Adams also highlighted expanded investments in substance use treatment and outreach efforts.

Constantly warning doubters not to count him out, Adams nonetheless faces a tough road to reelection. He dropped out of the Democratic primary in June, where he faced plenty of competition, and is now running as an independent, where recent polls show him well behind both Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani and independent candidate and ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.