The NYPD’s data-driven approach to tracking homelessness — which cops call “Bum-Stat” — is part of an “extraordinary coordination” among city agencies, Mayor de Blasio said Monday.
The initiative, first reported in the Daily News, began several weeks ago and involves the NYPD; the Sanitation and Homeless Services departments, and nonprofits that are helping the city house and treat the homeless, de Blasio said.
They are working “to ensure that we are addressing any issues related to homelessness,” the mayor said.
Under the new effort, precinct commanders must inform higher-ups about problems involving homelessness in their commands, including encampments, aggressive panhandling and crimes in shelters.
That information is then sent to Police Headquarters and other city agencies.
“Homelessness is a priority at this time in terms of the quality-of-life issues,” said Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.
Because it focuses on tallying the numbers of homeless people and reporting those results to the higher-ups, some cops have compared the initiative to the successful crime-busting CompStat program.
That program is widely credited with helping bring down the city’s soaring crime rates in the 1990s.
But Bratton said the department has no plans to add homelessness to CompStat, which tracks serious crimes like murder and shootings.
He also took pains to say that even though he has spoken about homelessness at the department’s weekly CompStat meetings — in which NYPD bigwigs are grilled on methods being employed to bust crime — he is still very much focused on rooting out lawlessness.
“Certainly shootings, murder and other crime that we track very closely in CompStat have not taken a backseat,” he said testily.
The News reported Monday that homelessness dominated an Aug. 20 CompStat meeting, with the brass from Midtown South and the 13th Precinct in the E. 20s on the hot seat.
Although the shelter census has dropped to around 57,000 — down from a high of nearly 60,000 in the winter — the number of people on the streets tends to swell in the summer.
City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who represents an East Side district that includes the 20s, said the area always had a homeless issue because of an 850-bed shelter near Bellevue Hospital.
But she said in the past several years, the problem has gotten worse.
“Before, where we might have seen one person panhandling, now there are multiple people,” said Mendez.
Local resident Ilana Bobrov, 28, says she has noticed more people sleeping in the streets in the neighborhood.
“I think it’s a big problem,” she said. “I don’t think anybody is attending to them. I’ve called the NYPD before to report a homeless person who seemed to have an eye infection, who wasn’t able to care for himself. . . . It seems that no one knows what to do. Some people may report, but most people pass by,” she said.
Another area resident, Jeff Kupferberg, 58, says he has noticed an increase in the local homeless population, adding that he doesn’t blame the mayor.
“There are more guys hanging out, panhandling, I guess. Do I feel like it’s a political problem that I’m seeing more homelessness? No. I think the expectations are higher for Bill de Blasio than they were with Mayor Bloomberg.”
