Hapless on the homeless
Mayor de Blasio can’t seem to decide whether or not the NYPD is useful in addressing problems among NYC’s homeless population. As the pendulum swings for the third or fourth time, give him a thimble of credit for landing in the right place, at least until the next policy shift.
We’re old enough to remember the big show de Blasio made six years ago of using cops to crack down on and clean up a series of homeless encampments across the city.
That now feels like ancient history. In January 2020, de Blasio touted newly created teams of homeless outreach workers and cops he planned to send onto the streets and into subways to convince people living on the street to enter shelter. Then last June he changed his tune, announcing plans to yank cops from homeless outreach efforts entirely.
“The NYPD played, I think, a constructive role, but as we’ve talked about how to figure out what needs to be shifted to civilian agencies, what can be effectively shifted, it’s become clear that our department of social services and homeless services can handle this work,” the mayor proclaimed.
Almost a year later, the reversal of the reversal has been reversed. Amid complaints about parts of the central business district being overrun with vagrants, with companies complaining they’re having a hard time convincing employees to repopulate their offices, de Blasio is now deploying 80 police officers to Midtown as part of a newly-formed Business Improvement Unit.
Better late than never. While being homeless isn’t a crime, it is a crime to defecate in the street, shoot up, or sucker-punch a stranger in the face. And while civilian outreach and social services workers have helped convince some people to take shelter and accept services, they haven’t managed to shrink squalid, semi-permanent encampments, or stop the open-air drug use inside of them or a string of random, violent assaults on strangers.
Turns out, to help homeless men and women, you need social workers. But when outreach fails while problems in city streets persist, somebody’s got to call the cops.