FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 15, 2026
Contact: Team Saritha
Email: [email protected]
Former Federal Prosecutor Will Investigate Shelter System Statewide; Recover Billions in Medicaid Fraud; Put Savings Into Beds
New York, NY – Crime-fighting New York State attorney general candidate Saritha Komatireddy, who will lock up repeat offenders, create residential facilities for the mentally ill homeless, and root out fraud if elected in November, today released “Law & Order-Love & Order,” her plan to end the era of leaving severely mentally ill and addicted New Yorkers to live – and die – on the streets of our state.
Ms. Komatireddy is an award-winning federal prosecutor who has put leaders of ISIS, al Qaeda, and the Sinaloa Drug Cartel in prison. She convicted the most senior Mexican law enforcement official in the Mexican government of working with the cartels to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. She served as chief of staff to the 10,000-person U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and was Counsel to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Ms. Komatireddy, 42, a mother of four and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, has worked for three U.S. Presidents, Democratic and Republican. She is a partner at a New York law firm and an adjunct at Columbia Law School.
“There’s nothing compassionate about walking past a man sleeping on a subway grate in January and calling it freedom,” Ms. Komatireddy said. “He’s not free – he’s sick, and we have the tools to help him. Love & Order is a simple idea: bring people in, treat them, and stop pretending that abandonment is some form of respect.”
Ms. Komatireddy noted that in the years Letitia James has held the office of attorney general, homelessness in New York has risen 38 percent and drug deaths have risen 63 percent. More than 20 homeless New Yorkers died on the streets in the first months of this year alone. At the same time, the state shed 990 inpatient psychiatric beds between 2014 and 2023, a 10.5 percent drop in capacity, according to the State Comptroller, while the number of people served by the public mental health system rose 23 percent.
“When severely mentally ill people wander the streets, bad things happen,” the former federal prosecutor said. “We’re seeing that now. Erin Piacenti, Debrina Kawam, Amelia Lewis… Every one of the people who attacked them was known to police, to hospitals, or to the courts. The men and women dying of exposure and overdose on our sidewalks are known, too. This is not a mystery. It’s a choice, and I am asking New Yorkers to make a different one.”
The Love & Order plan has four parts. Every one of them is within the existing legal authority of the New York State Attorney General
1. An Office of Civil Commitment opened on Day One.
Under New York law, the state may commit a person who is a danger to himself or others, or who cannot provide for his own basic needs, provided physicians certify his condition. That authority has gone largely unused. On her first day in office Ms. Komatireddy will establish an Office of Civil Commitment inside the Office of the Attorney General, staffed with law enforcement professionals and physicians working side by side. Its sole mission will be to identify the severely mentally ill New Yorkers everyone already knows are dangerous or unable to survive on their own, secure the medical certifications the law requires, and bring them into treatment before the next attack and before the next freezing night. The office will work with hospitals, sheriffs, mental health professionals l, transit police, and outreach workers across the state.
2. Residential treatment centers in every region of New York.
Commitment without a bed is a revolving door. Ms. Komatireddy will reverse a decade of closures by building residential treatment centers for the severely mentally ill and addicted throughout the state, in New York City and upstate alike. She will direct the state’s $3 billion in opioid settlement funds to where they were always meant to go: residential treatment for every New Yorker who needs it. Hardworking, law-abiding New Yorkers want the people on their streets helped, not hidden. These centers will do that.
3. A statewide Charities Bureau investigation of the homeless shelter system.
Nearly every homeless shelter in New York is run by a nonprofit, and the attorney general’s Charities Bureau is the primary regulator of every one of them. Under Ms. James, that oversight has been almost nonexistent. New York City alone now spends roughly $81,000 per unsheltered homeless person each year, and the homeless population keeps growing. The City’s Department of Investigation reviewed 51 shelter nonprofits and found problems at all 51: nepotism, no-bid contracts, conflicts of interest, and executive pay of more than $1 million a year at CORE Services Group, more than $900,000 at Acacia Network, and more than $700,000 at CAMBA, all of it drawn from taxpayer money. Meanwhile, shelters themselves have become places many homeless New Yorkers refuse to enter because of drugs, violence, and theft, which is why so many sleep on trains instead. Ms. Komatireddy will audit and investigate every shelter nonprofit receiving public funds in New York State for safety, effectiveness, and misuse of money.
4. A Medicaid fraud crackdown to pay for it.
New York’s Medicaid program costs more than $100 billion a year — more per resident than any other state — and independent experts have estimated that billions of dollars are being lost annually to fraud. In June, the federal Inspector General for Health and Human Services denied recertification of the attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and suspended its funding, finding that a unit with 270 employees and roughly $60 million a year in federal support produced only eight or nine criminal indictments a year, the lowest of any large state, and that a third of its open cases were more than three years old. Previous New York attorneys general of both parties treated Medicaid fraud recovery as a core mission and returned hundreds of millions to taxpayers. Ms. Komatireddy will restore criminal and civil Medicaid fraud enforcement as a top priority of the office, with a first-term goal of recovering at least $1 billion, and will press the Legislature and Governor to dedicate those recoveries to building and operating the residential centers in this plan.
Additional measures. As part of Love & Order, Ms. Komatireddy will shut down the state-sanctioned drug injection sites, which are illegal under state and federal law and which she has called cruel; launch a Transit Crime Strike Force so that the subway is no longer the state’s largest unstaffed shelter; and assign half the office’s attorneys, 350 assistant attorneys general, to prosecuting crime, including cases progressive district attorneys refuse to bring.
“People ask me whether this is a public safety plan or a mental health plan,” Ms. Komatireddy said. “It’s both, because the two were never separate. When a woman is burned alive on the F train, the city failed her, and it failed the man who killed her years earlier when it left him untreated in a Brooklyn shelter. I spent my career as a prosecutor learning that if someone has died, we have already failed. Prevention is the whole job.”
“Starting next January, I will bring the dangerous in, I will bring the dying in, and I will make the people who have been getting rich off this misery answer for it. We can do so much better than this, and we are going to.”
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