“We will get rid of the camps on our way and put people in healthy living conditions with wrapping services,” Adams said on Friday, although he gave a few details on how exactly they will be provided with this extra benefit. “I’m looking to do it in two weeks,” he told the New York Times. The Times reported that the number of people living in parks and on the streets is estimated at around 1,100, although this number was probably a serious count. The issue of homelessness in New York has arisen amid rising crime in the city and a series of high-profile violent attacks, although supporters point out that the city – and its homeless population – is trapped in crisis due to insufficient mental health services for many years. The debate has focused on the subway in recent weeks, the scene of a series of attacks. It has erupted in recent weeks as city managers and employers draw up a “Metro Safety Plan” to reinstate office workers after a two-year pandemic break. Officials at MTA, the city’s transportation system and homeless workers said they found 29 homeless camps in subway tunnels and another 89 at stations earlier this month. Adams said that as a former traffic policeman he realized how dangerous tunnels are. “When you have one that uses tunnel systems without any form of law enforcement interaction, you could have a person who is not only there to deal with the dangers of being homeless on the slopes, but you also have a potential person trying to he is doing something harmful, “he said. But he admitted he could not stop the homeless from sleeping on the streets or force them to stay in a homeless shelter. “But you can not build a cardboard miniature house on the streets,” he added. “This is inhuman.” Proponents of homelessness say that cleaning up the subway or clearing the streets is nothing more than moving people from one subway station to another or another public space, often after losing their belongings in the process. Craig Hughes, a social worker at the Urban Justice Center, told the New York Times that such efforts leave “people more precarious than ever before.” The mayor’s ultimatum was quickly followed by a video circulating on social media of an 18-year-old city council member who was roughly arrested by NYPD police after jumping a turnstile at a Brooklyn subway station. She was arrested after the head of NYPD crime control strategies said in a statement that the force she planned to participate in “preventive enforcement may be the difference that prevents the next shot and prevents the next child from being injured”. For some, this echoes the “broken windows”, a controversial policing policy introduced by Mayor Giuliani in the 1990s, which many claim is unfairly targeting racial minorities and low-income people for petty offenses. Adams said suppressing quality of life offenses is not a return to that policy. “We will not return to abusive policing,” he said on Friday. But the city’s progressive politicians said the incident was tantamount to just that. Local council member Chi Ossé compared the arrest of a woman to the death of an Asian woman on the subway that was thrown under a train by a schizophrenic homeless man last year. “Four cops were on the podium when Michelle Go was tragically pushed into the subway lines and the police did nothing,” Ossé wrote on social media. “A black woman jumps in a tourniquet and is confronted by four police officers with cuffs, teasers and firearms… for $ 2.75.”
