Physician Mike Pappas works for a "harm reduction facility" in New York City, and writes a piece for Left Voice entitled Eric Adams Prescribes More Cops and Prisons for New York’s Poor and Oppressed. Who can be against harm reduction? And whose harm are they reducing?
Dr. Pappas' lede (link in original):
Last week, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced his new directive allowing cops to forcibly remove people from public areas and involuntarily detain them for transport to hospitals. The mayor’s guidance expands previous definitions which allowed cops and qualified professionals to involuntarily detain someone if the individual is deemed to be a threat. Now, the new recommendations allow cops to detain people if they deem they are “unable to meet their basic needs.”
My wife and I spent two days in Singapore last month, sightseeing. The most striking feature is that there are no beggars or homeless people on the streets or in the subway. It's the only city in the world that I've been to with that feature. This makes the city much more pleasant for the tourist. It is safe to walk around late at night. One doesn't need to fear pickpockets or muggers. One certainly doesn't have to worry about aggressive panhandlers on the subway.
It's much easier to be a tourist in Singapore than in New York. The no-beggars policy is obviously successful--this site claims that the "city of Singapore is very popular with international travellers. In 2019, it reached the 4th place of the world's most popular cities with 19.76 million tourists." For a city with less than 5.5 million people, this is pretty impressive (and even more impressive if you consider there isn't really very much to see there!).
Of course tourists aren't the only beneficiaries. The city hosts lots of hotels--we stayed in a big one--employing thousands of people. A key draw is the food--there are hundreds of restaurants at competitive prices. (For a delicious cheap-eat, go to the Chinatown Market.) The shopping centers are to die for. A rule of thumb is for every two tourists you need one employee. There are nearly 70,000 hotel rooms in Singapore, which at double occupancy results in 140,000 tourists every day. That means 70,000 people are employed taking care of them.
No wonder Singapore is such a rich country! When it comes to harm reduction, getting the beggars off the streets earns city residents some serious cash!
But Dr. Pappas will undoubtedly ask What happens to the mentally ill? the indigent? the addicted? Fair questions, those. Given the city-state's draconian drug laws, the addicted are probably in jail. The mentally ill are housed in hospitals--or at least some place that pretends to be a hospital. And the indigent are likely provided with subsidized housing--and told to stay there.
Singapore is not a free country. Civil liberties don't carry much weight. A harm reduction method that works there will not work anyplace else in the world--certainly not in messy, rambunctious, lively New York City.
At the same time, what Dr. Pappas calls "harm reduction" doesn't really cut the mustard. His horizon of "harm" extends only as far as the homeless--he wants to make their lives more comfortable. He ignores the welfare of an urban neighborhood when a few dozen homeless people camp out in their park, depriving them of its use. He doesn't see the effects on city life when homeless people shelter in subway stations or on trains. He pretends that mentally ill people pushing people on to subway tracks is not a real problem (only isolated incidences, he'd claim). He forgets that for every shooting in Times Square, there are thousands of potential tourists who decide they'd rather not spend their money on Broadway.
A New York Times article from this past March says that there are about 50,000 homeless people living in shelters. Nevertheless,
While it is difficult to accurately count the number of people living unsheltered, the city’s most recent estimate, conducted in January 2021, tallied about 1,300 people sleeping in subways and about 1,100 on the streets. Many advocates consider the estimate to be an undercount.
Those 2400+ people living rough are doing great harm to the remaining 8.465 million New Yorkers who don't sleep in subway cars or commandeer park benches. They scare tourists, commuters, restaurant patrons, pedestrians, and anybody else who wants to live in a civilized world. Mr. Adams' proposal is a perfectly reasonable effort to get people who for whatever reason can't follow rules of common decency and courtesy off the streets. This looks to be a police function--harm reduction for that small group of people can happen at the facility where the cops drop them off.
I also strongly urge the mayor to arrest turnstile jumpers and panhandlers. These are a small group of uncivilized people who hijack public conveyances for their own selfish purposes. Securing the right of 8.465 million New Yorkers to enjoy public spaces that they pay for constitutes a much greater degree of "harm reduction" than anything Dr. Pappas proposes.
In his headline, Dr. Pappas claims the homeless are "oppressed." This is not true--not even by Marxist standards. "Oppression" happens when surplus value is taken from workers in the form of profit. Homeless people are not workers, and they contribute nothing of value, much less surplus value. Instead they are thieves, stealing public spaces from workers who pay to ride the subway to work every day, and who deserve the quiet enjoyment of their ride.
The homeless, the turnstile jumpers, the squeegee guys--they're not oppressed. Instead, they are the oppressors. One can certainly feel sorry for them at some level, but they have absolutely no right to take over the subway or other public spaces.
Unfortunately, the harm reduction crew, which includes Dr. Pappas, isn't entirely innocent. Here is what it seems they're really interested in.
Workers at OnPoint NYC [a city-funded harm reduction outfit--ed] officially submitted their demand for voluntary union recognition on Thursday, December 8. The workers, who are demanding union recognition with the New England Joint Board of UNITE HERE, are calling their union OnPoint United. They are fighting for a wall-to-wall union, greater job security for employees, better healthcare, and a democratization of the workplace.
The truth will out! The harm reduction folks are more interested in their own bennies than in any serious harm reduction. Indeed, their incentives look to be entirely in the wrong place. The more homeless people there are, the more their services will supposedly be needed, and the more money they'll get. Rather than "harm reduction," their goal appears to be the exact opposite. They benefit most when the homeless population expands.
The vast majority of New Yorkers are civilized people. They deserve to live in a civilized city.
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