Gotham’s crazy weather only lasted a few days, but the madness in the streets never seems to end.
Last Sunday, a woman known only as “Pop Star” was caught on video wreaking havoc in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, overturning a table, dragging one woman by her hair and scarily lunging at a mother and baby.
Several 911 calls brought cops in to arrest her, but after psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue she was back in the neighborhood the next day.
Unhinged behavior is all around us:
- Monday morning brought a Queens teen on her way to get her hair done for prom shoved onto subway tracks by a homeless woman. The girl scrambled back onto the platform before the train arrived, made her appointment and the prom, while the attacker was later arrested at her shelter.
- Tuesday, another unhinged woman was caught on video insulting parkgoers with slurs and harassing diners in and Tompkins Square Park.
- Thursday saw a stranger assault a man, 54, on a Bay Ridge subway platform, slashing him on the collarbone with a switchblade but never saying a word before fleeing.
- The week also brought news of another random subway attack late last month: a man seemingly in his 60s pummeling a woman, 29, in the face aboard a Brooklyn Q train.
- Friday, it was a shirtless homeless man stabbed to death in a wild brawl in the middle of a Chelsea crosswalk.
It doesn’t let up.
Late last year, Mayor Eric Adams gave cops the authority to involuntarily transport mentally unstable persons (and those plainly unable to care for themselves) to hospitals for mental-health evaluations, but (as with “Pop Star”) even the plainly dangerous are soon back on the streets.
And the mayor’s B-HEARD pilot program, which deploys teams of EMS worker and mental-health pros to respond to 911 calls for assistance for (less dangerous) mentally ill individuals in 11 precincts, was unable to answer one in four calls last year.
Get the program more money — enough to go citywide.
And look at reordering hospitals’ priorities: They sure seem eager to not treat the toughest cases.
Meanwhile, the Legislature is wrapping up its session without doing a thing to strengthen involuntary-commitment laws to allow the city to help the parade of lost souls roaming its streets, parks and subways.
Mind you, it’s pure misguided ideology behind the lawmakers’ refusal to act; it only seems like they’re as crazy as the unhinged they refuse to help.
