Menaces not welcome
With crime up in public housing while it plunges across the five boroughs, the mayor who celebrates the New York City Housing Authority as a low-cost haven for more than 400,000 city residents must do more to protect their safety — by heeding the alarms sounded by his Department of Investigation about dangerous tolerance of criminals within.
Like drug dealers, and muggers, and gunmen, and sex offenders, and more — all of whom, says DOI Commissioner Mark Peters, continue to live in or frequent NYCHA apartments even after being banned permanently from the premises by the authority as menaces to the community.
It happens hundreds of times a year: NYCHA hauls in tenants for eviction proceedings after learning that someone tied to the apartment is engaged in crime, a lease violation.
While most cases are dropped, about one in three tenants agree to exclude the offending person.
And then what? Not a whole lot — even as residents and visitors rob, assault and menace the neighborhood.
The NYPD routinely now reports crimes to NYCHA involving its residents — a big improvement, Peters said, over its spotty performance the last time he checked in 2015.
When someone on a police report is also on the list of excluded tenants NYCHA can move to evict. And almost never does.
Out of the 131 times it busted tenants for violating the agreements in the first 10 months of 2016, Peters found, it only made even an attempt to evict the tenant in eight. For the rest, nothing changed.
Unhelpfully, NYCHA employs a piddly staff of just five unarmed inspectors to check on 5,000 crime-crossed apartments citywide, surely missing many malefactors still menacing law-abiding neighbors.
Disturbingly, NYCHA maintains that this is exactly as it should be — and what’s more praises its own plan underway to help tenants kick out the bad guys but stave off eviction.
Score high points for principle, and a failure for public safety.
No government agency should arbitrarily eject tenants, as the NYPD did via its nuisance abatement program until the Daily News exposed abuses and the City Council and NYPD took action.
The regime Peters recommends is nothing close to so unreasonable. He is simply asking NYCHA to make eviction a credible threat for tenants who chronically harbor criminals. That means bringing in armed officers where necessary to root out the roughest elements.
NYCHA wrongly refuses those common-sense measures — hardly consistent with shining promise of public housing Mayor de Blasio so often extols.