City Councilman Erik Bottcher has finally gotten religion on the corrosive impact of homeless drug addicts colonizing the streets of his Midtown West district, but can he manage to evangelize his progressive colleagues on what he rightly calls a “humanitarian crisis”?
The Sunday Post exclusive on the “West Side zombie zone,” plagued by mentally ill, drugged-out fiends, is a reminder of how left-wing nostrums can destroy a neighborhood’s quality of life and risk rendering the entire city unsafe and unlivable.
Over the course of two weeks, The Post observed homeless, mentally ill and doped-up derelicts shooting up in public near bustling Penn Station.
Bottcher complained of “people who have been arrested 50 or 100 times without any meaningful intervention.”
Progressives insist that drug users should get “harm reduction” sites to shoot up, that it’s wrong to hospitalize the mentally ill against their will.
Yet how is it compassionate to cycle these addicted and tormented people endlessly in and out of hospitals and jails?
And render a prime ‘hood into a “zombie zone”?
“We are the gateway to New York City for millions of people every year,” Bottcher told The Post. “We are the district that millions of people go to work in every day.”
He’s pleading for the city to act, but it’s his council colleagues who most stand in the way, bowing to the self-appointed “advocates” who earn a living pushing ideology at the expense of common sense.
The seriously mentally ill (and far-gone addicts) need to be removed from city streets and subway stations for their own sake and that of their fellow New Yorkers.
Yet progressives are blocking Mayor Adams from expanding involuntary removal and hospitalization of street crazies.
Sunday’s near-tragedy where this leads: Ebony Butts, an unhinged woman with at least nine priors dating back to 1999, including a 2016 arrest for randomly punching a woman in the face in Brooklyn, allegedly shoved two tourists from Mexico onto the tracks at a Manhattan subway station.
Living on the street (or in our jails and prisons) is a rotten substitute for mental-health treatment for these troubled New Yorkers and an outrageous burden on everyone else.
Yet city progressives obscenely turn a blind eye.
If New York is to thrive again, Bottcher needs to convince his fellow colleagues to abandon free needles and get behind the mayor’s drive for genuinely humane “tough love” solutions.
