NY MAYOR DE BLASIO'S LEGACY

Open-air heroin markets: De Blasio’s most telling ‘gift’ to New York

 

Post Editorial Board 

 

New York Post

September 27, 2021

 

 

 

For a clear view of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s legacy, take a stroll around the Garment District and note the heroin addicts freely shooting up under the golden sun.

The block bordered by 35th and 36th Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues is a certifiable den of iniquity — out-of-it addicts surrounded by used needles, broken glass crack pipes, trash, urine and feces.

As The Post reported last week, a single walk around that block revealed three different people injecting into their wrists or fingers. Our team also spotted drug dealers patrolling the streets like they know they own the place.

“We have been fighting to put an end to this crisis, however our city officials have unfortunately failed to address the problem and have allowed this public disorder to continue,” Garment District Alliance President Barbara Blair told The Post.

The scene was no better on Sunday: Our reporter spotted another three men shooting up in front of an apartment building on 36th between Seventh and Eighth avenues that afternoon; one passed out on the sidewalk as his cronies abandoned him. “They left me for dead,” the man said when he came to about 40 minutes later.

A traffic cop was writing tickets nearby as those junkies shot up. Similarly, as two men exchanged cash and small plastic bags on 36th Street, police officers on Eighth Avenue between 35th and 36th just hung out, leaning on a police van looking at their phones.

That’s because the politicians have “effectively ordered” cops to let drug addicts roam free, says Manny Gomez, a former NYPD sergeant and FBI special agent who now heads MG Security Services.

Make an arrest? Possession of needles or small amounts of heroin and even publicly injecting drugs are all non-bail offenses, thanks to New York’s disastrous “criminal justice reforms”: Arrest a junkie for using and he’ll be back out on the street in no time at all. Such actions have no consequences in de Blasio’s New York.

Gone too is any compassion. The police won’t intervene and neither do social workers. The city saw 1,446 overdose deaths in the first nine months of 2020, up 38 percent from a year earlier, per the most recent stats from the Department of Health.

Open-air heroin markets and shooting galleries: You couldn’t ask for better proof that this mayor doesn’t care about the lives lost to addiction, nor the nightmare they inflict on every other New Yorker.