Paris Drake is quite a piece of work. His criminal career started when he was 14, and he has been arrested 22 times in the intervening 18 years. Drake, a New York native who has no fixed address, has served time for drug-dealing, assault, weapons possession, larceny, and burglary. His prison sentences have ranged from a day to four years, and each time he was released he picked up where he left off. Then, on November 16, he became enraged because he couldn’t raise enough money to buy crack. So he picked up a six-pound paving stone and hurled it at the back of Nicole Barrett’s head. Barrett is a young office worker who just happened to be walking by. She suffered terrible head injuries and almost died.
The attack reminded New Yorkers that for all the amazing progress that has been made in bringing order to the city, there are still a lot of evil, dangerous people around. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responded with measures to assert some authority over the hardest of the hardcore homeless. He proposed that street vagrants who refuse offers of shelter and violate the law should be issued summonses or arrested. He also announced that able-bodied homeless people who could work in exchange for their benefits should be asked to do so.
All hell broke loose. Rev. Al Sharpton rounded up the usual suspects for street protests. Hillary Clinton went to the New York Theological Seminary and blasted Giuliani’s policies. She said they violated the Christmas spirit, which celebrates “the birth of a homeless child.” She implied that Giuliani was driven merely by polls and said, “Criminalizing the homeless with mass arrests for those whose only offense is that they have no home is wrong.” Mrs. Clinton promised that if elected senator, she will instead work to triple the value of new housing vouchers. Last Wednesday, Judge Elliot Wilk, a longtime activist judge on homeless matters, temporarily halted the mayor’s plans.
The whole episode serves as a depressing reminder of how tough it is to change a political culture. Giuliani has spent the past six years trying to restore public authority in New York. His efforts have produced obvious and remarkable improvements. You would think that some of his enemies would have been moved to rethink their policy views. Instead, they have worked ever more aggressively over the past year to topple Giuliani and roll back his programs. The Al Sharptons of the world still equate orderly streets with racism. Hillary Clinton tries to breathe new life into the liberal orthodoxies of the mid-seventies, as if homelessness were a failure of capitalism to provide cheap housing and not a consequence of the bungled deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Some minds are permanently closed.
Let’s be clear about the true state of play in New York. The city has some of the most generous social provisions for the homeless in the country. It devotes $ 850 million a year to homeless services. New York is the only city in the country that by law must offer shelter to every homeless person who requests it. No one is turned away.
The problem is that many of the hardcore homeless do not want shelter. These are not just unfortunate individuals down on their luck. They are not families cast out of housing because of economic crisis. Disproportionately, they are mentally ill, often schizophrenic. Most have some serious addiction. Most lead horrific lives. They are beaten and robbed, and occasionally beat and rob in turn. Hillary Clinton may have some romanticized image of the homeless as Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, but this has nothing to do with the reality of homelessness as it is experienced by people who don’t ride in motorcades.
The city of New York and private groups have under-taken noble and high-minded efforts to try to coax these people into shelters, where they can be given medication and treated. The Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) procured over $ 2.5 million in state and federal money to hire teams of social service professionals to roam the streets, trying to persuade vagrants to visit the new “respite center.” Over the first year of the program, BID spent $ 700,000 and managed to persuade all of two people to accept housing. To its credit, BID hired a journalism professor to write up a candid report on the effort, which was in turn picked up by Heather Mac Donald in the City Journal. (If there were any justice in the world, Mac Donald would be knee-deep in Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards for her pioneering work on homelessness and other urban issues.)
The report describes the non-threatening approach adopted by the BID social workers. One day the workers came across a large cardboard box on the sidewalk across the street from the New York Times building, with a dirty hand sticking out. They noticed the hand was moving, so figuring the body attached to it must be okay, they moved on. They came across a man known as Shoeshine Bill with swollen ankles sitting in a puddle of his own urine. He assured them he was doing fine so they moved on. A young couple was lying on the street, the woman in the advanced stages of alcoholism. They declined to go to the shelter, though the man joked they’d be willing to go for an hour if they could get a private room with a bed. Another vagrant, known as Heavy, barricaded himself behind some mail carts when he saw the social workers coming.
Many of these people are not capable of thinking in their own long-term self-interest. In the short term, they see little need to go to places where they can get treatment, because activist groups bring food and clothing straight to their boxes — a delivery service that keeps the homeless untreated and fresh in the minds of the public.
The Giuliani administration says it is time to impose the sort of tough-love approach to the hardcore homeless that seems to be producing positive results as part of welfare reform. That means prodding the homeless to take responsibility for themselves, whenever possible, by working for their benefits. It also means building on serious efforts, undertaken in dozens of cities nationwide, to get the homeless off the streets. Mrs. Clinton talks of mass arrests for the crime of lacking shelter, but that is sheer demagoguery. Since Giuliani ordered New York police to intensify their efforts to rein in homelessness, the cops have had contact with 1,674 homeless people. Of those, 380 were taken to a shelter, 67 were taken to a hospital for physical or mental treatment. Only 164 were arrested, often because there were prior warrants out for their arrest. The fact is, the Giuliani policy does distinguish between the many different sorts of people who are homeless. Compared with Mrs. Clinton’s crude attacks, his policy is a model of nuanced sophistication.
Over the past 20 years, city after city, run by Democrats and Republicans, has tried to reassert public order. Mayors have argued that the liberty of the homeless doesn’t necessarily trump the interests of the community. Nobody has a right to defecate in doorways, intimidate pedestrians, and menace store owners. In this new era, an attempt is being made to balance liberty and license with civility and order.
But as with most political struggles, there is never a conclusion. The liberationists sense they are gaining strength. They sense that the voters in New York now take the gains of the past decade for granted and are weary of Rudy Giuliani’s aggressive style. They sense an opportunity to return to the old policy regime, and they may be right. If they are, there will be more Paris Drakes out on the streets, and more Nicole Barretts in the hospitals.
David Brooks, for the Editors
