FILE – An officer within the High quality of Life division patrols Coney Island.
Photograph by Dean Moses
The mayor introduced the enlargement of the NYPD’s High quality of Life Division in June, proudly touting the variety of summonses and arrests since its launch in April – 6,100 and 357 respectively – as a marker of success. Let’s be clear: giving out tickets, making arrests, and rising police presence shouldn’t be the identical as enhancing high quality of life. It’s a troubling return to failed insurance policies that deal with poverty, psychological sickness, and homelessness as public issues of safety slightly than the human crises they’re.
New Yorkers perceive this actuality. In response to our citywide ballot with the 5BORO Institute, performed earlier this 12 months, an amazing 84% of metropolis residents consider we face a critical psychological well being disaster. Much more telling, 58% of New Yorkers say they really feel principally empathy—not worry or frustration—for these on the streets or subways scuffling with psychological well being, substance abuse, and different points. This isn’t a metropolis that wishes extra punishment; it’s a metropolis that wishes extra compassion.
New Yorkers know what high quality of life appears like. It’s reasonably priced housing. It’s clear streets, protected parks, and accessible psychological well being providers. It’s figuring out your neighbor has a roof over their head and meals on the desk. It’s no more police vans parked on corners or extra summonses handed out to individuals who have nowhere to go, no job to get to, and no help to lean on.
Advocates have been saying this for years and our survey reveals that the general public agrees. When requested what town needs to be doing to deal with the psychological well being and homelessness disaster on our streets, the highest reply, given by practically one-third of New Yorkers (29%), was that town ought to prioritize increasing psychological well being and housing help. That is what actual high quality of life funding appears like: not criminalization, however care.
High quality of life can’t be legislated via legislation enforcement, it have to be nurtured via neighborhood funding. Arrests and summonses don’t present psychological well being care. They don’t stop evictions or feed hungry households. They don’t tackle dependancy or home violence. They simply push individuals additional to the margins.
Most of the points this activity drive is focusing on—public drug use, panhandling, loitering, avenue homelessness—are signs of deeper systemic failures. They’re straight tied to our metropolis’s affordability disaster, the collapse of accessible psychological well being care, the defunding of community-based help programs, and the decades-long disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods.
Importantly, New Yorkers aren’t asking for a selection between security and compassion. Our survey responses present sturdy help for city-funded applications that mix psychological well being help with public security initiatives to cut back crime and violence. This factors to a wiser strategy that acknowledges that true public security comes from addressing root causes, not signs.
Nonprofits, social staff, public well being professionals, and outreach staff have the coaching, expertise, and trauma-informed instruments to deal with these challenges compassionately and successfully. These are the individuals who can join New Yorkers to shelter, therapy, meals, and job coaching. These are the individuals who construct belief with weak communities. These are the people who find themselves geared up to enhance high quality of life.
It’s time to hearken to what New Yorkers are saying about what’s going to work for our communities to construct a safer, more healthy, extra livable metropolis. As an alternative of increasing punishments for many who want our assist essentially the most, we have to put money into the organizations and leaders already working in our communities to offer psychological well being and housing help.
We have to cease equating high quality of life with policing. New Yorkers perceive that real enchancment in high quality of life comes via social justice options, not by rising legal justice statistics. If New York Metropolis needs to stay as much as its promise of fairness and alternative for all, we should begin investing in options.
Dr. Jocelynne Rainey is the President of Brooklyn Org.
