Former NYPD Chief John Chell took aim at the mayor‑elect’s decision to end homeless encampment sweeps, warning that the policy shift could spark a sharp rise in makeshift settlements along city streets. Chell blasted the promise on Friday, calling it a drastic turn that the incoming administration announced only a day earlier.
Under current law, you generally cannot force individuals into shelter—and the majority refuse services, Chell wrote on social media. “Outreach does not automatically mean acceptance. Ending street intervention programs before building sufficient housing, shelter, and treatment capacity is not a plan—it’s a gamble.”
Those resources must be created first and clearly codified, he added, cautioning that the predictable outcome will be a sharp increase in encampments, worsening street conditions, and serious quality‑of‑life impacts across neighborhoods.
The ex‑chief, now a TV pundit, dismissed the mayor‑elect’s plan as more rhetoric than reality, quipping, “We don’t have time for experiments.”
Mamdani, 34, told reporters that he intended to scrap the series of operations dismantling makeshift camps and emphasized that the policy had failed to place enough people in permanent housing. “If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you’re doing to be a success,” he said, criticizing the previous administration’s approach.
He pledged to focus on linking people to housing but offered no concrete details on how the long‑standing issue would be addressed. The problem has plagued successive mayors, with more than 45,000 complaints about encampments filed this year alone.
The sweeps were reinstated by former Mayor Adams earlier in his first term as a key strategy to clean up city streets. “We cannot tolerate these makeshift, unsafe houses on the side of highways, in trees, in front of schools, in parks,” Adams declared in March 2020, shortly after launching the policy shift. Adams has faced criticism for the sweeps, with critics arguing he did not provide enough permanent housing for those displaced.
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