Encampment sweeps add to the woes of homeless
When on the fifth day of his mandate as mayor, Zohran Mamdani recognized the ineffectiveness of sweeping operations for the homeless and declared to end it, homeless adults, advocates and advocates rejoiced. This administration’s commitment to no sweeps brought homeless people modest relief because police officers, social workers, and sanitation workers would no longer sweep up their makeshift homes and life possessions.
But the Arctic cold snap has arrived. As are calls to reinstate Adams-era policies aimed at removing homeless encampments in order to incentivize the people living there to move there. These calls intensified as the temperature dropped precipitously and several people died from the cold, despite none of the 20 dead lived in a camp.
Last week, Mamdani announcement a plan to restore these sweeps. It’s a bad decision.
Mamdani says these sweeps would be different from those of his predecessor. He put the onus on the Department of Human Services rather than the NYPD. And that there would be seven days of daily awareness raising before the start of the search operations. None of this makes any difference to our customers.
Sleeping outside is a choice of last resort. NYLAG’s homeless clients are routinely robbed, assaulted, and harassed by police officers. Many suffer from malnutrition, chronic pain from sleeping on the floor and suffer from exposure. If they have never suffered from mental illness before, the trauma of sleeping outside and being constantly on alert causes severe anxiety in our clients.
However, for many of our clients, these risks are far preferable to staying in a congregate shelter, where up to 100 men share a dormitory. Our clients face many barriers to entering and staying in single adult shelters. For example, the intake process to enter a DHS shelter can take up to two days and clients are informed that if they leave, they will have to start the process again.
Once you arrive at a shelter, the rules – restrictive curfews, limited food supplies while prohibiting outside food, and no pets – are too prohibitive. Other times, congregate shelters are either intensely policed, rife with crime, not wheelchair accessible, and gender-blind.
Shelters do not provide the mental health assessments and support services needed to transition to permanent housing. Some of our clients can’t even consider the prospect of collective shelter because it brings back the trauma of their experiences in prison or in the military.
Data proves our customers’ experiences. In a Audit of the municipal controller 2023of 2,308 people captured in Mayor Adams’ homeless sweep the previous year, only 90 people remained in a shelter for more than only one day.
For years, outreach workers came in day after day to offer only the same group housing option, so many of our clients stopped interacting with them. And worst of all, it’s a sweep, where our clients are not suddenly uprooted, but lose their practical items, like their clothes and papers, as well as their precious personal memories. For our customers, a sweep is a show of brute force rather than an invitation to enter.
There is no difference to our clients between a DSS-led sweep and an NYPD-led sweep. Although Mamdani believes that just one week of outreach before a sweep is enough warning, any outreach effort that ends up throwing away our clients’ belongings and treating them without dignity will never foster trust among our clients.
Mamdani’s approach in freezing weather was the start of rebuilding trust with homeless communities. Let’s not go back now. Do not restart the scans.
Berkman is director of the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Shelter and Economic Stability Project.
