The influx of homeless people, mentally ill people and drug addicts has created a full-blown “humanitarian crisis” facing the millions of tourists and office workers who flock to Midtown and surrounding high-traffic areas, City Councilman Eric Bottcher wrote in a recent letter to the mayor pleading for help, The New York Post reports. Violent crimes in the area were up 71 percent on July 22 and 28 compared to the same week last year, according to the NYPD. Data shows such crimes in the borough are up 10 percent this year compared to the same period in 2023. The problem in Midtown is clear, Bottcher said. “We are the gateway to New York City for millions of people every year,” he said. “We are a neighborhood where millions of people commute to work daily.”
Over the past two weeks, the paper’s reporters have visited West Side neighborhoods where many crazy people have been seen, including a dead-eyed drug addict wandering with a needle on 36th Street near busy Penn Station. A scruffy security guard who identified himself only as Fisher said he sees homeless people doing drugs “all day and all night” in the courtyard of the once-famous Midtown Holiday Inn on Eighth Avenue. “This is crazy,” the guard said.
Rep. Bottcher said entire areas of the West Side, including the Washington Square Park area, the West Fourth Street subway station in the West Village, and the Garment District, are in “particularly deplorable conditions.” Homeless drug addicts do as they please here. NYPD stations in the area are inundated with endless calls about open drug sales and use, destroyed property, threatening acts of physical and verbal intimidation, shoplifting, and more. And police are unable to arrest these misfits to help locals, he claimed. Bottcher, in a letter to Adams, a former police officer, urged the mayor to support a bill requiring the city’s health department to place licensed social workers in NYPD departments. However, the mayor, who has made it his priority to fight rats and not drug addicts on the streets of the Big Apple, as the bill is called, did not respond to the call.
