Needless Death
The price of ditching ‘broken windows’ policing
ROSALEE Sanchez, 19, didn’t have to die. She was bludgeoned, stabbed and strangled in lower Manhattan’s old Fulton Street Fish Market early this month. The teen’s death was preventable — or would have been, if New York hadn’t given up 30 years of crime-prevention knowledge.
The area fits the definition of “broken windows” disorder. The city moved the market to The Bronx nearly 16 years ago. Since then, its old warehouse has sat abandoned. Ideas to build everything from more empty supertall condos to a London-style outdoor market, like Covent Garden, have gone nowhere. The building’s covered in graffiti and pocked with, well, broken windows.
As the old theory, modeled by the late criminologist George Kelling, goes: When someone breaks a window and nobody fixes it, someone else is tempted to break another window. No one is in charge.
That’s what happened at the city-controlled Seaport, and so the fish market has been plagued with squatters.
Among the latest were Sanchez, her boyfriend and her alleged killers, 25-year-old
Austin Boehm and 20-year-old Christian Mercado, assisted by 33-year-old Amber Wilson, who allegedly hid the body. All were “homeless,” according to The Post.
The word “homeless” triggers a reflexive response in New York’s aspiring leaders: “Housing first!” This approach assumes all vagrancy is due to a lack of housing and that the city should have given each of these young people an apartment.
Except none of them was “homeless” in the mythical way: down on their luck, in need of assistance until they “get back on their feet.”
The victim, Sanchez, had a loving home in Newark. “I always tried to keep her safe . . . but when she turned 18, she didn’t want anyone helping her,” her mother, Iris Garcia, told The Post. “I said, ‘Come back.’ ”
Sanchez was mentally disabled and mentally ill, said her mother, factors exacerbated by pot and alcohol use. She was in no way equipped to live on her own.
Nor would “housing first” have helped her alleged killers. Boehm, Mercado and Wilson also aren’t “homeless” New Yorkers, either. Rather, they are grifters — all recent newcomers to Gotham from Pennsylvania, California and Maryland.
Neighborhood residents and workers told The Post the group was believed to be associated with low-level crimes, from theft to harddrug use (and, of course, trespassing).
The area has had hundreds of 311 complaints just since December, including 45 for “homeless person assistance,” 32 for “homeless street condition,” 21 for “unsanitary conditions,” seven for “encampments” and 13 for “dirty conditions.” It wasn’t hard for police to find Boehm, Mercado and Wilson after the murder.
Why not before? Shoplifting is a crime, and the perpetrators were accused of stealing clothes from one nearby retailer. So is drug use. Tellingly, none of the perpetrators, or the victim, had any local criminal record before the murder and corpse-hiding charges.
In New York’s new approach to disorder, any drug, shoplifting or trespassing arrest that results in a few days at Rikers and then a release, to repeat the process again, is a sign of a failed system.
So now New York’s criminaljustice system leaves the vagrants be, unless they are convinced, after dozens of socialservices contacts, that they want to come in for help.
I’ve asked several mayoral candidates what they would do when a persistent drug-using vagrant doesn’t want help — and only former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said that arrests must be a tool.
Sanchez didn’t live long enough to come in for help — but a low-level arrest may have been the stick that her mother needed to persuade her to come home. Indeed, persistent arrests for drugs, theft and trespassing — even if the users and thieves never did hard time — may have made the alleged killers’ lives miserable enough that they would have “moved along,” in the old policing parlance.
Might the alleged killers have recreated their drug den somewhere else? Not necessarily.
Grifters venue-shop, looking for a neighborhood healthy enough to yield money for drugs through riskless theft and begging but, ironically, still safe enough to sleep. Disrupting such behavior likely would have prevented this senseless murder.
But even if they did commit their crimes elsewhere, what’s the harm in trying? They allegedly killed someone anyway; it wouldn’t be worse to have the murder happen somewhere else.
Now Boehm and Mercado are at Rikers (Wilson was released on no bail). They may not be “homeless” for a while.