Excellent summary of the 17th precinct meeting last week by Mort Greenberg! "Top line, I walked away from my first 17th precinct meeting motivated that there are a lot of people already working on the core issues we have identified." However, we only had 4 people from our group there. We need numbers at 17th and 13th Precinct Community Council meetings. The more people, the more attention we get. The more attention to our issues the more police patrol. Turns out these monthly meetings have a strong agenda and not just an open forum. While we did not present our “story”, every one of our story lines came up multiple times from pre-scheduled speakers. Below is the overview of the 2 hour monthly meeting: 1) Howie Levine from Dan Garodnick’s Office, city council member from the 4th district (Tudor City / Waterside) talked about needing a permanent change to 30th street shelter. 2) Following Garodnick’s office Diane Bartok of the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association talked about their concern about 30th street shelter and Mainchance. Their take is to work with Mainchance to create a program like the Doe Fund to help clean up the area with a pre-screened group of people. Diane’s hope is that residents of MH will volunteer to provide training to MC people… Not going to happen… 3) The lean of our group (Third & 33rd) is that we would prefer to have Mainchance police their members to stay indoors until their lease expires and then find a new location in 12 months when it does expire. We need to better understand all of the politics around what all of the groups want with Mainchance, and figure out best way to interject our request of Mainchance. 4) However, what is clear is that the money is flowing from people that live in our neighborhood directly into the pockets of the “Homeless” people that we see on our streets. The take away from the police is that many of the people we see on our streets take the train in every day to work our neighborhood because the people that live here essentially tip well. 5) In one story we heard that as the police were dragging an older woman away, a guy walked by felt guilty and gave her a $50 bill. 6) However, where the meeting started getting interesting was when the commanding officer of the 17th precinct, Clint McPherson gave his update: a. Increased Street Presence - Today they launched a joint mission with the 13th precinct and DHS. They approached 23 homeless people in the 3rd avenue / 33rd street area. Only 1 of the 23 wanted the services they were offering. They arrested 2 for disorderly conduct b. Encampments – The sunken stair area at 3rd b/n 32nd and 33rd as of right now is a place people can hang out without getting arrested. The reason is that the building does not have signs up saying you cannot loiter. Since it is private property the building owner needs to put up signs and sign an affidavit allowing for the police to come onto the property to enforce the no loitering. Once both of these items are in place the NYPD can start making arrests for anyone hanging out there. So today the police spoke with the building manager and we are now waiting for the building owner to do their job and get the signs up. c. Beat Cops – The 17th precinct is doing a pilot project with 2 officers assigned to patrol the area around the 30th street shelter, develop relationships with the people there and figure out who the troublemakers are, then make arrests. d. McDonalds – The location at 32nd and 3rd location used to have large signs covering the window which inadvertently allowed people to go in and do their drug deals, etc without anyone from the outside watching. They have asked the owner of McDonalds to remove the signs so the cops can see in, and this has been done. e. Library – The 31st and 3rd location is a public library and we are told people can be there, even if we do not like what they are doing. However if anything looks or is illegal call 911 and they will send a police car over. f. Time Responding to Call – It is taking time to get around our neighborhood due to the 34th street and related tunnel traffic, but they are stepping up patrols too which should increase response time… So the big take away for me was that people that live in our neighborhood or come in here for work are giving lots of money to the homeless and that is a key reason we are seeing so many homeless people laying all over. Turns out someone can make $100+ per day for a few hours work just sitting around. There is a phrase we need to understand, “negative contact”. Negative contact is what the police have with homeless who are causing problems on the street. Once a person is assigned to a shelter by NYC law it take almost a year to move them if they are trouble. However… If a person has had negative contact with the police, then they can be immediately moved. So that means we have to keep calling 911 and 311 and filing our complaints. Next up is a meeting at Mainchance next week… While we have to fine-tune our story, I think we have our asks in place. We have to have a stronger position than the Murray Hill Association on Mainchance. An immediate next step for us all is to sign the petition to support the Doe Fund and not allow them to have to take sex offenders. Since the city cannot store them in Murray Hill now due to proximity to schools we now have to help the Doe Fund who does a great job not get saddled with these people, https://www.change.org/p/mayor-de-blasio-keep-sex-offenders… We need to get to know Captain McPherson in the 17th precinct, his counterpart in the 13th, the leaders of the community councils, and elected officials to share our story and thoughts on what we want as a group. Hope this overview helps. Again, at least for me a good night with positive action that started earlier today with the NYPD and DHS starting their joint mission to directly engage with people on the street and make arrests.