Should Cops or Homeless Advocates Get EDPs off Our Streets?
Since many emotionally disturbed persons are only a hair trigger away from violent outbursts, the NYPD must have the right and authority to involuntarily remove such persons from our streets. After that, the EDPS can find services to deal with their demons, but the primary motivation has to be protect the public.
| 25 May 2023 | 03:07
Homeless Person on a bench outside a high end department store in Manhattan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Homeless person hunched over a cellphone with belongings in two shopping carts on a platform along the A line. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Debate is underway over whether the NYPD or the Department of Homeless Services should be the first responders if homeless person shows signs of becoming dangerous. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
By Hank Sheinkopf
It gets very tiring to listen to the opinions of the highly dissatisfied as they work so very hard to change reality to suit their incessant public ballasting of the social order. If you listen to them, our cops wake up every day dreamingabout committing some violent unlawful act against a citizenbecause doing something like that would be so much fun.Untrue. And worse such thinking and talking isn’t just anti-cop.It disrupts the social order and is as bad as the garbage we hearfrom never off the payroll politicians—left or rightwingers—who demagogue their way into history.Hostage negotiation to protect life—even of criminals? AnNYPD innovation. One time enforcement of anti-loitering and public nuisance statutes with little use of force? Police doing their work according to the book. That the nation’s cities are less affordable and that housing costs spike is something politicians can’t blame on cops. They would if they could get away with it. And not enough affordable housing grows homelessness. It’s a bad day any day for the human condition to see homeless people—many with emotional problems and a hair trigger away from violence—acting out on subway trains and stations, yelling at demons only visible to them as they wander through our streets. There are those who say we must allow the emotionally disturbed to chase their demons. Don’t interfere they say. And they are wrong. EDP’s (Emotionally Disturbed Persons) often are in a state of adrenalin rush, and the shortest and smallest can with a single pinch put the biggest of us in hospital. Let the best trained and most respected and innovative police in the country take the violence prone off our streets whether they like or not. Make it easier for cops to take social work courses and to get education needed to do the work we will need done. But first things first—demon chasers are minutes away from violence. Our cops will get them off the streets, and to treatment. New York City is already too much of a social experiment. And it just can’t be allowed to continue.
Hank Sheinkopf is a former police officer and now head of PR firm Sheinkopf Communications.