4 ms·
(A) It's cold (B) Our cops are super aggressive with the homeless. I mean, technically that can be described as "policy", but probably not the way you meant it
by arkades 7y ago
(A) It's cold
(B) Our cops are super aggressive with the homeless. I mean, technically that can be described as "policy", but probably not the way you meant it
I used to volunteer for an annual winter round-up, where a bunch of volunteers would get vans and go looking for homeless and try to get them into shelters. We did this on one of the coldest nights of the year, trying to prevent people from dying in the chill. We had no problem finding shit-tons of homeless folk, with the caveat that unlike in other cities I've been, they put a little effort into hiding from the public eye.
This was in the outer boroughs.
- CPLX 7y ago(C) NYC has a right to shelter law. Combine that with your B and you can start to see the outlines of an actual policy decision.
- jjoonathan 7y agoYes, but the details completely determine whether or not it is any good. A real right to shelter plus police action against homeless camps _could_ be reasonable, but if the police action is real and the right to shelter isn't, it becomes evil again.
- arkades 7y agoSo, I've never been homeless, but I do work in mental health. We see a lot of patients that are chronically homeless, and they view shelters as a place to dip into briefly when they have to show that they've got a physical shelter (so that we can do a "safe discharge"), and then promptly bounce. Some won't even make it to the shelter, and have their ride from the hospital pull over and let them out so that they can head out immediately. There are caveats to be added to the above, but, I've never gotten the impression that our implementation of shelters has resulted in something people utilize in anything less than a crisis situation, for a population that doesn't consider "chronically homeless in the winter in a northern latitude" a crisis.