NEW YORK (Dispatches) – U.S. organizations helping homeless individuals and families have criticized New York City’s mayor for ordering heavy-handed police tactics against people seeking shelter during the cold winter.
Mayor Eric Adamson, a former police captain, on Monday began removing homeless people from the city’s subway system and bar people from sleeping on trains or riding the same lines all night.
Adamson, who likened homelessness to a “cancerous sore,” said he would deploy more teams of police officers and mental health workers to the subway to enforce rules more strictly.
Homeless advocates and others who have criticized police’s heavy-handed tactics said banning homeless people from subways won’t solve the problem.
Shelly Nortz, the deputy executive director for policy at the Coalition for the Homeless, denounced Adamson’s comments as “sickening”. She said criminalizing homelessness is not the solution to the problem of homeless people.
“Repeating the failed outreach-based policing strategies of the past will not end the suffering of homeless people bedding down on the subway. It is sickening to hear Mayor Adams liken unsheltered homeless people to a cancer. They are human beings.”
Police Commissioner Keechant Seweell said the police department will start enforcing the new rules in New York City subway this week.
Police teams, she said, will focus on high-traffic areas or areas where there have been reports of crime.
Homeless people who live in the underground tunnels of New York City have been referred to as Mole People or Tunnel People.
British documentary feature film Dark Days (2000) is about a group of homeless people living in the New York City subway.
Teun Voeten’s book Tunnel People, published in 2010 by the Oakland-based PM Press, also describes the underground homeless community in New York City.
Homelessness in the U.S. is increasing in the least affordable rental housing markets and cities with skyrocketing home prices.
Expensive cities include New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, among others.
Last year in a similar move, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed a sweeping rule making it illegal for homeless people to be in almost all places across the west coast city.
Los Angeles, California’s largest

city, has over 66,000 homeless people as of the last citywide count, a 12.7 percent increase over the previous year.
After implementing the new rule, homeless people there would face citations, fines, or misdemeanor charges for being homeless.
At least six people were stabbed in New York City’s subway system over the weekend, with the first attacks unfolding just hours after Adams and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled the new plan, authorities said.
Five people were stabbed in the subway system within just over 24 hours after Adams and Hochul revealed the 17-page “Subway Safety Plan,” which will see more police and mental health teams deployed across the subway system starting Monday.
A sixth person was stabbed Sunday evening on the 6 line near Canal Street, the New York Police Department said.