City Limits – City Hall defended its practices at the time, saying a housing placement for a street homeless person can require time-intensive trust building and casework—trust advocates say is eroded by the sweeps themselves.
Under Nurse and Hanif’s legislation, the city would also have to start tracking how many people were arrested per removal, or brought involuntarily to a hospital for a mental health assessment.
Nurse placed sweeps in a longer history of broken windows policing, which was embraced in the 1990s by then mayor Rudy Guliani. It’s based on the theory that serious crime thrives in areas where, as criminologists George Kelling and James Wilson described it, “disorderly behavior goes unchecked.” [Read More]
