NYC Thrive continues sending city money and services into the void

 

THE CITY

In the fall of 2017, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene signed a contract to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to rehab a 14,000-square-foot former IRS office inside an anonymous beige Bronx building covered with graffiti.

The project was part of a key criminal justice reform Mayor Bill de Blasio adopted in 2014. The idea: to create state-of-the-art “diversion centers” staffed by mental health experts where police could drop off people experiencing mental health crises instead of escorting them to hospital ERs or jail — institutions ill-equipped to deal with their needs.

The city committed $52 million to fix up and run the Bronx facility for a decade. But nearly four years later, the place sits empty.

Meanwhile, the city dedicated $51 million to a similar operation in East Harlem that opened this past November. The number of people brought in for help so far: 45, or $1.1 million per visit.

Diversion centers eventually became part of the Mayor’s Office of ThriveNYC, a broader program run by de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, to improve the lives of New Yorkers struggling with mental health issues.

ThriveNYC has come under fire for costs upwards of $1 billion and for the administration’s inability to provide evidence the program is working. Last week, de Blasio rebranded ThriveNYC — changing its name to the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health.

The purpose behind diversion centers was to stop cycling people with mental illness through the criminal justice system instead of getting them treatment and other services.

Meanwhile, deadly encounters between NYPD officers and people in emotional distress have led to 18 fatalities in the last five years — driving demands to remove cops from the equation.

Even as the diversion centers sit empty or underused, de Blasio made the surprise announcement April 29 that another $112 million would be spent on a new program to pair EMT teams with social workers to handle 911 calls citywide about people having a breakdown, without sending police.

EMTs, though, aren’t signing up in big numbers.

You can say the only diversion center that actually functions in this city is de Blasio and McCray's joint mayoralty budget money laundering apparatus in City Hall.