#MTA boss ‘frustrated’ by NYPD withdrawal from homeless outreach

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Interim NYC transit President Sarah Feinberg
Matthew McDermott

The city’s decision to nix the NYPD’s role in homeless outreach has the MTA “very worried” about its end-of-night efforts to clear stations and trains of vagrants, Interim Transit President Sarah Feinberg said Monday morning.

“One of the things that have been really disappointing in recent weeks is the NYPD has really pulled back on this,” Feinberg told FOX 5 New York in an interview.

The MTA has closed down the subways for four hours every night since May 6 for deep cleaning amid the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of the effort, joint teams of MTA staff, city outreach workers and NYPD officers initially worked together to remove homeless individuals from the system, while offering the transients shelter and services.

Feinberg said NYPD began to pull back from the program during the city’s George Floyd protests in late May, and has continued its limited role thanks to budget cuts enacted by Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council earlier this month.

“They started moving people around [during the protests] to make sure that they could be responsive to everywhere they needed to be,” she told the station.

“I think with budget cuts, we’re not seeing those folks come back.”

The budget eliminated the NYPD’s homeless outreach unit, Gothamist reported Friday, along with de Blasio’s year-old “subway diversion program,” which allowed unruly subway tramps to accept social services instead of getting arrested.

“They were a massive help to us in assistance when we started doing our end of line efforts, when we need to close down the system overnight,” Feinberg told reporters later Monday morning at a press conference in Manhattan.

“That effort is not as successful as it can be unless we’ve got a healthy security presence,” she added. “It’s just time consuming, and it’s much more efficient if we’ve got [police] at all of the end of line stations.”

“Any pullback from NYPD, we feel immediately in our system.”