New York City agencies tasked with removing homeless encampments from public spaces have cleared away 1,531 of the camps during Mayor Adams’ first year in office, data released Thursday by the mayor’s office revealed.
The data shows that only 104 people living in the encampments accepted services — a number that city officials claim as a win.. Homeless advocates, however, argue it demonstrates that the city’s encampment-sweeping policy is ineffective.
The statistics — which represent the city’s efforts from February, when it first announced the sweeps, to Sept. 18 — also show that there were still 128 “active” encampments as of last month.
Adams recently met with the Daily News in an exclusive interview to demonstrate how he and other city officials track the data in real-time — and how the new system has enabled the city to more proactively remove the encampments.
“We want to be able to coordinate what we’re doing because this city was just so disjointed,” Adams said, making a veiled dig at his predecessor, former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who left office nearly ten months ago. “We did not want to be reactive. We did not want people to call us and say, ‘Hey, I have an encampment.’ When the cops go out and do their patrol, they go and actively look — let me find the encampment, let me get it in the system — which is totally different.”
Part of the goal here is to better coordinate the response of city agencies involved with sweeping away the encampments and providing help to those impacted, especially with mental health or substance abuse issues. The agencies involved include the NYPD, the Parks Department, the Department of Homeless Services and the Sanitation Department.
When city workers such as cops discover an encampment, Adams said they’re required to report it. That information is then put into a spreadsheet he and other officials can track. The spreadsheet serves as a timeline and shows when the Department of Homeless Services was notified by the police, when city workers have given notice to people occupying the encampment that it will be removed and when the camp is scheduled for the actual removal.
Adams’ Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi said the approach differs from de Blasio, whose administration also removed encampments, in that de Blasio’s was less proactive.
“Under de Blasio, I believe they did the complaint-driven [approach] for about a year and they had about 30 placements,” she said, referring to the number of homeless people who accepted services. “We’ve been doing this for about six months and we have slightly over 100 placements with one of the hardest-to-place populations.”
Adams said he’s also making sure that cops on patrol — and their supervisors — stay on their toes through his reconnaissance efforts.
He described looking up the data from his laptop while being driven around the city and then assessing where an encampment is in the process of being removed — or if it’s been identified by an agency yet.
In cases when he finds an encampment that’s not listed in the database, he said he’ll directly call the police officer who’s responsible. He recalled one encampment specifically, on the corner of Flatbush and DeKalb avenues in Brooklyn.
“I called the platoon commander and said I want you to meet me over here. I said I looked at the form — why isn’t this registered on the form?” he recalled. “He’s flipping out … The platoon commander was over. The patrol sergeant came over. I said, ‘Sergeant, this is not on the form. Why isn’t this on the form?'”
Adams said he then might ask an officer whether they were aware of their responsibility to report the encampments, to begin with.
“What has happened historically is we give these orders up here, and we never go on the ground and say, ‘Do you know this initiative?'” he said. “When I go on the ground and ask that sergeant to come to me, that night it’s all over the city. Everywhere, people are now on the radio: ‘The mayor’s out here’ … Everyone is now going to say the mayor was out last night. And now it gets into the ear of the police commissioner. Now everyone knows this guy’s inspecting what he’s saying he wants done. That’s so important because it changes the culture.”
Many of the people living in encampments are struggling with addiction and mental health issues. And many are distrustful of the police and people working for other city agencies.
This is one of the main reasons many homeless advocates have criticized Adams’ policy of clearing away encampments.
Jacquelyn Simone, the policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless, said the data released by the city bears out what she and other advocates have been saying for months — that sweeps are not an effective way of persuading people to come into shelters. The city’s ability to track the data effectively, she said, is secondary.
“You can have a well-organized and well-managed bad policy,” Simone said. “I don’t think that the fact that they are tracking police engagements of unsheltered people and sweeps justifies the existence of massive tax resources spent to traumatize a vulnerable population without actually offering them the services that they want and need to come indoors.”
Adams suggested that such criticisms are part and parcel of what he called “the battle in this space.” On one side of that battle are advocates and elected officials who share Simone’s view. On the other are people like himself who believe more should be done to quickly get homeless people off the streets.
One way Adams has proposed doing that is by more frequently employing Kendra’s Law, which allows for court-ordered outpatient treatment and limited involuntary inpatient commitment.
During his interview with The News, Adams noted that his health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, is looking into how to potentially expand on that law. He also alluded to the role doctors play in recommending the law be employed and said the city is looking into ways to expand that — possibly to police and social workers, a move that is bound to be controversial if enacted.
“Right now, only a medical professional can make that determination. We think we need to look at loosening up that grip,” he said. “We don’t have it fully fleshed out. He [Vasan] is going to flesh it out.”
