It was one story about cops rousting a single homeless man from his encampment, yet it touched two hard truths: the near-futility of current policy, and the serious mental illness of so many “street people.”
Some 20 officers booted Thomas Harris, 61, from the Brooklyn plaza where he’d camped for weeks. He broke into tears several times as they dismantled his odd hovel made of shopping carts and plastic sheeting, claiming he wasn’t homeless but rather “a soldier in the war on poverty.”
As two fellow homeless helped him haul belongings away, he vowed to stick with his effort to make money by peddling hand drums on the street: “The plan is to try to make a living as usual. The plan [of the city] is to bring me down wherever I go.”
Heartbreaking — even though the city is entirely right to break up encampments, large or small, and especially ones like his, right by a subway entrance.
Also heartbreaking: He noted that cops had rousted him from another spot last year. And, as night fell, he was settling in just a few blocks away, declaring, “I am going to end up anywhere I want.”
To everyone else’s dismay: “I can’t believe they can’t do anything more for him than just move him along,” one observer griped.
The city’s whack-a-mole approach isn’t the only problem. Indeed, moves like this are an improvement over what had seemed a citywide halt in breaking up encampments, until questions from The Post last month about an illegal shantytown off Times Square finally prompted a crackdown.
And that was a step up from Mayor de Blasio’s response in 2015, when he denied any problem with vagrants at all — until, again, The Post published evidence.
Fact is, the city’s follies start at the top, with de Blasio and homeless czar, Steve Banks, who spent much of his life fighting for squatters’ rights to stay on the streets. Under their “leadership,” the city has been reluctant to act forcefully with the street homeless, even for their own good.
They also refuse to deal meaningfully with the underlying mental illness that leads to so much homelessness in the first place. Yes, First Lady Chirlane McCray runs an $850 million mental-health initiative, ThriveNYC. But as the Manhattan Institute’s Stephen Eide has pointed out, the program “lacks focus” and offers “too little assistance to the people who really need it.”
Gov. Cuomo hasn’t done much to address this issue, either: The state’s decades-old default continues to be keeping people out of psychiatric hospitals. Yet that practice, as Eide also notes, has fueled the explosion in the ranks of the homeless.
Psych centers in the city lost 15 percent of their beds from 2014 to 2018, even as the number of seriously mentally ill homeless jumped by about 2,200, from 2015 to 2017, Eide reports.
True, the city has opened six homeless shelters for the mentally ill, but it’s far from clear they’ll do the job.
Meanwhile, to address a record number of homeless, around 77,000, de Blasio has focused on building yet more shelters — a total of 90 new ones, he vows, though he’s only opened 17 so far.
New Yorkers shouldn’t have to step over bodies strewn on the streets or face cardboard-box villages. Nor is there anything humane about letting the homeless live that way.
Options exist: Beefing up Kendra’s Law, which allows forced medication of the mentally ill. Prioritizing efforts to hospitalize those who need it. Getting squatters off the streets quicker, and seeing they get adequate mental-health care.
This doesn’t take rocket science — just commitment. Will officials like de Blasio and Cuomo ever have that?