A new bill in New York City may prohibit law enforcement from doing any outreach to the city’s homeless.
In New York City, issues with the homeless have been around for decades, but some are looking to take that problem out of the NYPD’s hands. A new bill has been proposed that would ban law enforcement from doing homeless outreach.
The bill proposal coincides with the city’s efforts to defund and regulate the NYPD.
Back in July, the city council took $1 billion dollars out of the NYPD’s budget.
After the NYPD’s Homeless Outreach Unit lost its annual funding, the monthly number of complaints to the city involving homeless people spiked from 79 to over 400.
Police sergeant and founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, Joseph Imperatrice, said there’s a group of mentally unstable homeless people who are violent and who pose a threat to everyone.
“Taking police officers off the street to help the people that are a danger to themselves or others is not a smart move for the people that need the help, and also for the regular civilians that have to interact with these individuals back and forth to work and going back and forth to home every single day,” said Imperatrice.
The monthly number of homeless cases has stayed in the triple digits since the police budget cut.
Sources say as temperatures drop, the number of civilian city workers doing homeless outreach will decrease.
