Mayor de Blasio vowed last week to crack down on vagrants in the subways. Question is, does he mean it this time?
“We will not tolerate people bringing vast amounts of belongings into a subway car. We won’t tolerate people sleeping on the benches,” the mayor said, even threatening arrests.
Trouble is, he has been making similar vows about public homelessness for years — ever since, in fact, The Post ran photos of street vagrants that utterly shattered his denials of the problem.
Let’s be honest: For decades, the city has been steadily losing (or willingly ceding) its power to tame antisocial behavior, including, notably, public homelessness. The trend has only accelerated under de Blasio.
Rewind to the 1981 consent decree in Callahan v. Carey, in which the city agreed to recognize a “right to shelter” and to several similar rulings and settlements that followed. The idea that City Hall was obligated to provide services on demand only hastened the flood of “homeless” here.
The 1987 Billy Boggs case, in which the city sought to hospitalize a mentally ill woman who lived on an East Side sidewalk, tested the limits of civil commitment: A court eventually ordered her released on the theory that, despite her illness, she was no immediate danger to anyone.
Since 1999, Kendra’s Law, which allows courts to order psychiatric treatment, has helped. But it’s far from sufficient. And Stephen Eide, a Manhattan Institute expert on homelessness and mental health, says the bar today for civil commitment is extremely high.
He also says the state lacks sufficient beds at psychiatric hospitals: “We’re committing fewer mentally ill New Yorkers to state psychiatric institutions than we were five years ago,” he wrote in The Post.
Various rulings, laws and policy decisions further handcuff cops when it comes to rousting the homeless: high standards for what counts as “aggressive panhandling,” for example, and tests for just which jury-rigged “housing” can’t be set up on sidewalks.
Even so, Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg somehow found legal ways to contain the street dwellers. Then again, they wanted to contain it.
As for de Blasio, who knows? His pick for homeless czar, Steven Banks, spent most of his adult life fighting for the rights of vagrants to remain on the streets. The mayor and City Council also decriminalized low-level offenses, like public urination, further lowering the bar for what behavior the rest of us have to tolerate.
An aide to Manhattan DA Cy Vance recently acknowledged that his office hasn’t prosecuted anyone for sleeping in subway stations since 2016, “under a policy jointly established with the police commissioner and mayor.” Meaning, unless there’s an obvious threat to public safety, cops will, at most, merely roust people, only to have them return when the coast is clear.
Even in today’s anything-goes climate, de Blasio and NYPD boss James O’Neill can rein in this scourge, which is no kinder on the homeless, who need help, than the public, which is often threatened by them. But first, they must truly want to.
