By: Greg B. Smith – TheCity.nyc
Last week, two police officers approached two apparently homeless women on the No. 1 train platform at Penn Station, asking them to leave after one of them tossed something from her collection of plastic bags onto the tracks.
The interaction quickly escalated into an order — and it wasn’t going well.
One of the women cursed at the male cop, who repeatedly stated, “You have to get out. Get out.”
As the officers edged the women out of the gate and towards the street, one woman turned to yell, “Who the hell are you, the police commissioner?”
The male cop shoved the woman, who then stomped up the stairs with what was left of her belongings. From there, she faded into the streets.
The female transit cop assisting in the ejection shouted after her, “Tell her if she comes back down here, I’m putting her in handcuffs.”
The encounter took place Monday morning, Day One of Mayor Eric Adams’ new push to get people who are essentially living in the subway out of the system. By week’s end, Adams had doubled down on his pledge, proclaiming that his administration will be “dismantling every encampment in our system.”
But the scene at Penn Station, witnessed by THE CITY, illustrates a key unresolved question about Adams’ plan: once homeless people are booted from the subways, what happens to them?
The female officer involved in the Monday confrontation, who spoke to THE CITY on the condition that her name not be mentioned, confided that the NYPD had given them little instruction on how to handle these situations other than to tell them to enforce the rules and “Just get them out.”
A week into Adams’ subway enforcement campaign, City Hall has yet to reveal anything about its results other than to say that 100 individuals were “contacted” by so-called Safe Option Support (SOS) outreach teams of cops and social workers on the first day of engagement.
The mayor’s office, the NYPD and the Department of Homeless Services all declined THE CITY’s request to provide details on how many people talked to by SOS teams actually accepted placement in shelters or were transported to hospitals for psychiatric observation. City Hall said they would not provide daily updates but would release a report at an unspecified future date.
Civil rights lawyers and advocates for the homeless, however, immediately charged that the new campaign is fatally flawed: it calls for ejecting the homeless from subways but does not adequately address the question of where they are supposed to go.
“It’s a very magical kind of thinking that we’re going to get people out of the subway when you don’t have any place to put them,” said Beth Haroules, senior staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “You can remove that person but what are you doing for the person? You make the neighborhood feel better or you make people on the subway feel better, but you’re not solving the problem.”
The campaign — which Adams announced Feb. 18 at a news conference with Gov. Kathy Hochul after hinting at it in January — comes in response to a spike in subway crime during the pandemic and in the midst of several particularly brutal crimes, including the death of a woman pushed in front of a train by a mentally ill homeless man and the beating of a 57-year old woman with a hammer during a robbery at the Queens Plaza station.
But the mayor’s message also extended beyond just the issue of homelessness.
“No more smoking. No more doing drugs. No more sleeping. No more doing barbecues on the subway system. Not more just doing whatever you want,” he said at the press event. “Those days are over. Swipe your MetroCard. Ride the system. Get off at your destination.”
The so-called Subway Safety Plan says officers will begin enforcing the MTA’s Rules of Conduct, which were amended soon after a March 2020 fire that killed a subway motorman at the Central Park North-110th Street station after a shopping cart was ignited on a No. 2 train.
THE CITY reported this month that the NYPD declined to say how often officers have enforced the shopping cart ban in a subway system that has struggled with crime, unruliness and track trespassing since the early days of the pandemic.
Not Enough Beds
On Thursday at the MTA board meeting, transit officials noted a survey of the subway system last month found 29 homeless encampments in tunnels and another 89 in stations. More than 350 people lived in these spots, according to the survey.
But Haroules of the NYCLU and advocates for the homeless made clear that getting people out of the system is the easy part. What happens after that is a much more complicated task.
Most of the homeless individuals who are approached refuse to go into shelters because they say they’re too dangerous. And COVID made things worse, with infections spreading rapidly in close-contact settings, particularly in shelters for single adults.
Shelly Nortz, deputy executive director for policy of the Coalition for the Homeless, cited the city’s own data showing that from May 2020 through last month — a period that included 12 months when the subways shut down in the wee hours for COVID cleaning — only a small number of the thousands of apparently homeless individuals approached by outreach workers wound up staying in shelters.
During that time, 9,200 individuals accepted transportation to shelters, but only 3,100 accepted placement once they arrived. And of that number, only about 250 were still in shelters as of this month — about 8% of those who initially accepted a ride.
Nortz said unsheltered individuals are more likely to accept beds in city-funded Safe Haven facilities, where there are fewer rules and fewer residents, or in supportive housing — actual apartments where residents are provided with mental health support.
