Baerga v. City of New York

Background

The plaintiffs are four individual plaintiffs and several mental-health advocacy organizations. They allege that the New York City Police Department detained people experiencing mental-health crises in violation of the Constitution and other laws. Their amended complaint seeks class certification for people who, because of an actual or perceived mental disability, have been, could have been, or will be seized, detained, or subjected to force during interactions with New York Police Department officers.

The motions addressed a November 2022 city directive concerning involuntary removals of people experiencing mental-health crises. The directive instructed New York Police Department officers to act under New York Mental Hygiene Law § 9.41. The plaintiffs challenged the provisions concerning police officers and sought a preliminary injunction, which is a court order temporarily limiting conduct while a case proceeds. They also sought expedited discovery. The defendants opposed both motions and argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The defendants’ motion to dismiss the amended complaint was still pending.

Standing for Injunctive Relief

Standing is the requirement that a plaintiff show a concrete injury connected to the challenged conduct that a court decision is likely to remedy. For a preliminary injunction in a civil-rights case, the court said a plaintiff must show both an unconstitutional official policy or equivalent conduct and a likelihood of future harm under that policy.

The court rejected individual standing based on the affidavit of Steven Greene. Greene relied on three earlier involuntary hospitalizations, but all occurred years before the directive was enacted in November 2022. Because those events could not be fairly traced to the directive, they did not establish that Greene had previously been subjected to it. The court also found that Greene’s fear of future detention under the directive was speculative because he had never experienced a mental-health arrest under the directive. The court concluded that this reasoning also prevented the other individual plaintiffs from establishing standing for the requested injunction.

The court separately rejected organizational standing for the Steering Committee of Correct Crisis Intervention Today—NYC. The organization did not show that any member had been detained under the directive or faced a sufficiently imminent future injury, so it lacked associational standing. The court also found no organizational standing because the organization’s alleged activities—meeting with member organizations and coordinating possible responses—were consistent with its existing mission and did not show a perceptible impairment of its activities. The court found no evidence that the directive restricted a core activity or caused the organization to divert resources from an activity.

Ruling

Because neither the individual plaintiffs nor the organizational plaintiffs established standing, the court said it could not reach the merits of the preliminary-injunction request. It denied the motion for a preliminary injunction without prejudice. It also denied the motion for expedited discovery without prejudice, finding no good cause for expedited discovery when there was no impending preliminary-injunction hearing. The Clerk was directed to terminate the motions at ECF Nos. 108 and 122.