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Mayor de Blasio Announces Plans to Boost Security and Mental Health Staff at New York City Shelters

Mayor Bill de Blasio in December spoke about tracking the city’s homeless population.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

The de Blasio administration announced steps on Friday to increase security at 27 shelters and add medical staff to help identify people with mental illness among the city’s growing homeless population.

The deployment of additional peace officers from the Department of Homeless Services began immediately in some areas, Steven Banks, the head of the city’s Human Resources Administration, said in a telephone interview.

Among the first to receive new officers was the Boulevard shelter in East Harlem, where a former public school teacher, Deven Black, 62, was killed on Wednesday by another shelter resident, and where security had been provided by the nonprofit that operated the shelter, not by city peace officers.

Before the killing, residents at the shelter said the assailant, Anthony White, who is still at large and has a history of psychiatric troubles, had been acting erratically and making violent threats.

“Certainly a tragedy has occurred, and we’re moving forward with these initiatives that were in development in order to take the kind of action that we think is needed overall and to address this tragic incident,” Mr. Banks, one of the city’s top officials on homelessness, said.

He said the city would increase the number of mental health workers at the intake centers where homeless people first enter the shelter system and improve communication between city hospitals and the Homeless Services Department in cases when people with mental health issues go back and forth between hospitals and shelters.

Mr. Banks and city hospital officials declined to say whether Mr. White had been treated recently in a city-run hospital, citing health care privacy law. But he said that in the past, in cases when a patient was brought in by the Homeless Services Department, the hospital would not alert the department when that person was discharged.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, after dismissing criticism of his homeless policy last year, has moved aggressively to address health and safety issues in the shelter system, as well as reduce the number of men and women living on city streets and better track those with a propensity for violence.

Many who live on the street resist going to a shelter, even when offered a ride there by the police, citing concerns over violence and theft. The Homeless Services Department last year added 108 peace officers at a dozen shelters — all but two were mental health shelters — that saw the most serious incidents, in an effort to increase safety and counter the widespread perception among many homeless New Yorkers that the shelter system is dangerous.

The cost of the new services announced on Friday, as well as the exact number of peace officers who would be deployed, was still being determined. Mr. Banks said the Police Department would be conducting a review of security at shelters and making recommendations about deployment.

The city has also been consolidating information on hundreds of New Yorkers with a history of mental illness and violent tendencies in a tracking system known as the hub, allowing agencies to determine the best treatment for those men and women, many of whom pass in and out of the criminal justice system and city jails.

Mr. White was not among those being tracked in this way.

“The hub has been set up for individuals with a history of violence,” Mr. Banks said. “This individual had no history of violence.”

He added that the city would be establishing a process for such situations so that men and women in extreme distress would be identified before violence took place. “We want to make sure that no stone is unturned,” Mr. Banks said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: De Blasio Plans to Improve Security and Mental Health Help at Shelters. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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