Editorial
Time to meet the desperate needs of our city
justice reforms put in place, have
truly been effective in making our
city safer. Maybe all of this will pay
off in the long run, but right now,
the crises persist.
Many will blame the de Blasio
administration for the current state
of our city, where the most vulnerable
among us sleep out in the open,
endangered by the elements and by
deranged individuals.
But our collective, long-term ignorance
toward the homeless, the
mentally ill and the formerly incarcerated
is largely to blame. It’s said
that our government is often a reflection
of who we are as a society.
In this case, our society has come
up with half-baked solutions to serious
problems that only seem to
address quality of life issues and
property values — but completely
disregard the human condition involved
in these problems. It’s easy
to write off a homeless person as a
“bum”; it’s much harder to realize a
homeless person is one of us.
All of us must demand more from
our government, and ourselves,
when it comes to addressing homelessness,
mental health and criminal
justice. We can no longer look inward
toward what we want; we must
look outward toward what people
need to live healthy, secure lives.
Will our leaders step up and finally
address our desperate needs?
What kind of city have
we become?
Anyone who read
about the senseless murder of
four homeless men in Chinatown
this past week — all of whom
were brutally bludgeoned by another
homeless individual — had
to ask themselves that question
this week.
A deranged individual, for no
known reason, destroyed four
lives. He has a rap sheet reflecting
a violent history. He spent
time in and out of prison, and
in and out of homeless shelters.
Then he finally snapped, with
deadly consequences.
In one horrific incident, we saw
the convergence of three of the city’s
biggest problems: a homelessness
crisis with no end in sight; a failing
mental health care system that
doesn’t reach every New Yorker; and
a criminal justice system that allows
violent individuals to somehow slip
through the cracks.
These problems have been building
up for the better part of the last
decade. As the skyline soared, so
did the rents and overall cost of living.
The fortunate ones scraped up
enough cash to move somewhere
more affordable; the less fortunate
wound up in the shelter system, or
on the streets.
The de Blasio administration has
burned through more than a halfbillion
dollars in taxpayer funds
on programs such as ThriveNYC,
which aims to expand mental health
care. It’s also spent tens of millions
more on criminal justice reform efforts
to lower the jail population
through supervised release, and
eventually replace the jails on Rikers
Island with borough-based facilities
strongly opposed by many of
those who live there.
It’s still largely unclear whether
ThriveNYC, or all of the criminal
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This photo of the Queensboro Bridge, also known as the 59th Street
Bridge, is from 1910. The bridge had been completed just one year earlier,
opening to the public on March 30, 1909 and having a ten-cent toll to drive
over. At the time, the bridge was the fourth-longest in the world and was
called the Blackwell’s Island Bridge, after an earlier name for Roosevelt Island,
which it spans across from Manhattan to Queens. Today, the multinamed
bridge is offi cially called the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.
-Gabe Herman
12 October 10, 2019 Schneps Media
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