New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has carefully plucked away another small but significant element of public order.
According to the New York Post, the mayor’s office issued a directive that the New York Police Department would no longer be responding to calls relating to homeless encampments. Instead, officers will now have to first dispatch social services to deal with such matters before they are allowed to act.
The move is just the latest by the Mamdani administration to peel away public order in the Big Apple in the name of social justice.
The administration had already put up roadblocks to prevent the NYPD from removing homeless encampments, but now it will be further handcuffed.
The New York Post noted that this move represents a radical change and will likely mean that problems at homeless encampments may never be addressed at all.
“This year, the NYPD responded to more than 26,000 of the 36,000 complaints to 311 about encampments,” the Post reported. “Now, [the Department of Homeless Services] will handle triple the calls they previously responded to, with fewer than 2,000 staffers across the entire agency.”
While Mamdani has been careful not to work too directly against the NYPD since he was elected, this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That crime-fighting revolution paid dramatic dividends for decades.
Even though many crimes have dropped to rates below their post-George Floyd riots peak, urban chaos remains a problem and in some cases is getting worse.
Subway and transit violence shot up dramatically after Mamdani was sworn into office. Many of those incidents were committed by unstable and mentally ill repeat offenders who had been living on the street.
And unsanitary homeless encampments filled with drug addicts and people with mental illnesses who belong in an institution are sprouting up all over town.
In fact, according to a report from the mayor’s office, the number of homeless people in the city has reached a five-year high.
And the growing numbers of homeless people are clustering in encampments that are transforming parts of the city, particularly the ones by the Intrepid Museum, Citi Field—where the New York Mets play, and under FDR Drive.
“Local residents and workers are decrying a homeless takeover under the FDR Drive, where mountains of trash, foul smells, and fights are regular occurrences,” amNewYork reported. “According to locals, the parking area under the highway from 17th Street to 23rd Street has become a massive homeless shelter.”
Mamdani did do something about one shantytown. The city swept away an encampment on Wednesday that had built up near the NYU dorms. Oh, it’s in an area likely filled with a high concentration of Mamdani superfans. A coincidence, I’m sure.
Apparently, the former denizens just moved a few blocks away and set up camp again. And why not? Mamdani has made it clear that he intends to let these kinds of encampments fester and is effectively neutering public complaints about them.
Don’t you worry about that filthy, mushrooming fentanyl den on your block, a social worker is on the case.
As a New York Post editorial explained, deploying overstretched social workers to alleviate the problem isn’t going to fix it.
“The vagrants who erect and inhabit these camps are hard-core homeless who’ve already rejected the option of living in a shelter,” the Post editorial noted. “ … Compassionate encouragement won’t dislodge people sleeping on cardboard sidewalk pallets. That’s why the city has always tasked police with handling encampments.”
Unfortunately, these sorts of anti-policing tactics by the Mamdani administration may “work” in a certain sense. The encampment problem will surely grow. But as the situation slowly gets out of hand the administration can better defuse the blame without immediately infuriating the public.
They’ll say that the problem is “affordability,” that the budget is too small, and that systemic racism is causing an epidemic of homelessness.
All of that being nonsense, but by the time the issue is out of control the public may be more accustomed to thinking it’s endemic rather than a consequence of bad policy decisions.
Slow-growing encampments don’t drive headlines the way dramatic increases in murder rates do. Mamdani probably knows that. He may have even learned that lesson following the disaster of the “defund the police” years.
When leftist social goals were rapidly unlocked, the immediate consequences ignited an immediate backlash. He’s clearly trying to avoid that.
Methodically stripping away the enforcement of public order, eroding trust in the police, and making authorities unresponsive to those who want the situation fixed is a cynical but effective way to hide a malignant social revolution.
In that sense, Mamdani is succeeding where other leftist regimes failed, even if the eventual result will be the same miserable failure.
