IN THE HOT SEAT
Gov, MTA blast Blas for subway homeless
Gov. Cuomo and MTA boss Joe Lhota criticized Mayor de Blasio for abrogating his responsibility to police the subways after this photo of a sleeping homeless man appeared in The Post.
It’s a picture worth a thousand fighting words.
A Post photo of a homeless man sleeping under a subway seat prompted Gov. Cuomo and MTA Chairman Joe Lhota to rip Mayor de Blasio Monday, saying it’s the city’s responsibility to get people the help they need.
“The New York City Police Department polices the subway system,” Cuomo said. “It’s up to them. Period. [Mayor] Rudy Giuliani did that.”
Lhota said that letting the homeless sleep on subway cars is “degrading for all.”
“The response is not to defend or excuse the presence of the homeless, but to get them the help they desperately need,” he said.
“Every New York City mayor since Koch has realized this except our current mayor.”
De Blasio on Sunday said he was appalled by the photo of the subway snoozer, which The Post captured on a 3 train Saturday, and vowed to crack down.
“It’s not acceptable for people to sleep on a subway train like that,” he said.
He noted that “there are particular rules related to the MTA that give additional enforcement ability to the NYPD,” and said cops could use their “discretion” to arrest people.
But Lhota accused de Blasio of “making every attempt to distance himself from the Transit Authority.”
“The fact is that since 1995 the NYPD has been the police force charged with enforcement in the subway system,” he said in a statement.
“The MTA board gave Mayor Giuliani the authority to consolidate the Transit Police within the NYPD, giving the city primary jurisdiction. That’s a fact.”
De Blasio announced last year that cops would stop arresting people for taking up two or more seats on the subway and said those cases wouldn’t be pursued in court.
Cuomo, touting his own re- cord helping the homeless, said the issue of vagrants riding the rails was “something that we figured out 30 years ago.”
“We need to get the homeless off the trains and out of the subway stations so people feel safe and to get the homeless people the help they need,” he told NY1, noting that his two daughters use the system.
“You do not help a homeless person by saying we’ll let you sleep on the train.”
Instead of just mulling police crackdowns, de Blasio should fix the underlying problem by giving the homeless better alternatives, Cuomo said.
“Have clean, safe shelters,” the governor said. “And have the NYPD do what they used to do, which is get help for the homeless person.”
NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said on Monday that when it comes to cracking down on homeless sleeping on the subway, there should be “a level of compassion, too.”
“We offer people services,” he said, noting the NYPD’s homeless-outreach and crisis-intervention efforts.
“When I saw that picture, it’s really — what drives you to be at that point in life? We have to keep in mind here that part of the responsibility of keeping New Yorkers safe is to make sure that they get the help they need.”
NYPD Chief of Transportation Joseph Fox said, “We will enforce when necessary,” adding that cops have written 2,000 summonses this year.
City Hall, meanwhile, dismissed Cuomo’s criticism.
“The governor criticizing the men and women of the NYPD is an attempt to distract New Yorkers from his unwillingness to fix a subway system he runs,” City Hall spokesman Eric Phillips said.
“His attack on our police won’t fix the trains and it won’t get homeless New Yorkers the help they need.”
The . . . city Police Department polices the subway system. It’s up to them. Period. — Gov. Cuomo
Every . . . mayor since Koch has realized this except our current mayor. — MTA Chair Joe Lhota
Mayor de Blasio brags that cops are handing out fewer criminal summonses for low-level offenses. But the price, as Post readers know, may be more of those offenses.
On Friday, Hizzoner boasted of a “90 percent drop in criminal court summonses” since a new law took effect June 13, through Oct. 1. The change let cops write civil rather than criminal tickets for quality-of-life offenses.
Under orders to avoid issuing criminal summonses, police gave out just 4,370 criminal tickets for such offenses, vs. 55,224 over the same time last year. That, crowed de Blasio, shows “we can smartly enforce key low-level offenses without sacrificing New Yorkers’ quality of life or safety.”
In fact, quality-of-life offenses have been pervasive under this mayor — as The Post again displayed with Sunday’s photo of a vagrant sleeping under the seats on a No. 3 train.
De Blasio was shocked (shocked!) by that evidence, vowing to assign “whatever per- sonnel we need” to stop such behavior.
Yet such unruliness is hardly uncommon: “Every day is always someone, a homeless, [lying] on the platform or on the seat,” one rider told The Post. And the mayor, while promising to fix things, said cops could exercise “discretion.”
Indeed: Last year, he said they’d no longer arrest folks for hogging seats.
On Monday, Gov. Cuomo called vagrants on subways “a terrible problem” and squarely blamed the city: Cops need to act, he insisted, “so people feel safe.” They need to “do what they used to do” and get help for the homeless. “Rudy Giuliani did that.”
In fact, Giuliani cracked down on all lowlevel offenses as part of his historic reversal of Gotham’s sky-high crime rate. And though crime’s still low today, the spikes in homelessness and quality-of-life offenses come amid de Blasio’s retreat from that crackdown. Looks like that subway vagrant isn’t the only one snoozing.