It hasn’t been a great week for the image of the city’s roving psychos.
The shoeless guy who was gifted with a pair of boots by a sympathetic cop has turned out to be a common chiseler with an apartment and a brace of taxpayer-funded benefits.
But it was a far worse week for New Yorkers who are not roving psychos — in particular, Queens resident Ki Suk Han, who was pushed to his death in front of a Q train by a maniac in the 47th-49th Street station.
And it was a frightening time for passengers on a southbound No. 6 train last Friday morning between 77th and 68th streets. A nearly 6-foot tall, white woman in a long off-white coat and densely matted hair (description provided as a public service) abruptly began spewing from mouth and nose.
Her ghastly, interminable, long-range discharge (accompanied by cursing) chased riders into the next car the moment we reached the station. I couldn’t wait to get out of the subway at my final stop — ill-fated 47th-49th Street on the Q/N/R line.
But the first thing I saw on the sidewalk was a familiar outrage: hustlers hawking “just one penny” for the “homeless.”
Three years after cops broke up the phony “United Homeless Organization,” the thieves with their glass bottles are back in force — especially on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 48th and 50th streets.
The punks ply their trade within a few feet of an NYPD observation tower. The cops watching the crowds presumably have better things to do than interrupt the scam taking place right below their noses.
The two Seventh Avenue blocks — increasingly also home to CD peddlers who surround tourists and demand money if they so much as look at the wares — have begun to resemble the bad, old Times Square.
“Street homelessness” has dropped 26 percent since 2005, according to the Department of Homeless Services, which also boasts that the ratio of street homeless to the overall city population, 1 to 2,506, is among the nation’s lowest.
That’s little comfort to citizens who now fear the sidewalk insane more than conventional muggers. And to a guy who walks several miles every day and rides the subways and buses more than most city bureaucrats do, there are suddenly more terrifying bums out there than I’ve seen in years.
That “homeless” beggars are free to hassle passersby even where cops gather in force speaks to our institutional, political and cultural resistance to facing reality: Maybe we can’t lock them up, but we sure can stop sentimentalizing, romanticizing and enabling them.
My fellow passengers who fled the spewing lady might have been among those I see every day give money to panhandlers only slightly less gruesome — especially those who play “jazz” on an out-of-tune trumpet.
I know, I know: It sounds so fascistic, so lacking in compassion, to deny small change to the suffering. After all, aren’t the shelters as full as they can be and the city’s capacity to deal with the crisis limited by finite resources?
But our compassion ought to be for the vast majority of citizens whose daily routines are warped by deranged, diseased, often violent and occasionally homicidal “homeless” who live on the street for reasons having nothing to do with an “affordable” housing shortage.
Fact: Not all, but many more than a few, are on the street because they like it there and/or because they’re mad, alcoholic and/or drug-addicted. That we can’t lock them up or institutionalize them en masse doesn’t require us to make them into folk heroes.
Of course, their enablers are legion — “advocates,” socialistically inclined lawyers, and media pundits nostalgic for the crack-ridden city of 25 years ago. But it’s time to set aside ideological malarkey in favor of acknowledging truths that are obvious to everyone else.