New York authorities announced on Friday that they will expel from the giant metro network of the big city the countless homeless people who survive in it and are accused, in part, of the recent increase in crime.
After the outbreak of the new coronavirus in 2020, crime and extreme poverty rates rose in New York City, especially in the subway, but did not reach the levels of the 1980s and 1990s.
Mayor Eric Adams - an African-American, former police officer, Democrat but center-right who was elected in November promising to fight crime - said he had instructed police and social workers to evict anyone who took refuge in wagons or wagons.
"We are not using the (subway) system for roofing, but for transportation," Eric Adams told a news conference.
The mayor, who took office on Jan. 1 and has already been forced to manage a series of gun attacks and killings, also said the New York Police Department (NYPD) would crack down on smokers and drug addicts.
Many homeless people are taking refuge on the docks and trains of the New York subway, which is now obsolete, some of whom may harass its users in a less-than-aggressive manner, according to city officials.
The measures
Measures are being envisaged, according to Adams, such as driving homeless people to reception centers or hospitals by police and social workers.
The governor of New York, Kathy Hawkul, for her part, clarified that she will ask for the creation of reception centers with about 500 extra beds in the big city of nine million inhabitants with deep socio-economic inequalities.
According to the NYPD, 2021 homicides were committed in the city in 488, a number slightly higher than in 2020, when their rise was much more dramatic (468 vs. 319 in 2019). At the same time, violent crimes in the metro between 2019 and 2021 increased by 25%. However, the total number of offenses committed in the subway does not exceed 2% of the total in the giant city of the five neighborhoods (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island).
In January, Michelle Gow, a XNUMX-year-old Asian American, was killed when she was thrown into a railroad trap, homeless with psychiatric problems as a train entered Times Square in the heart of Mann.
in.gr