“Where are our neighbors?”
Chalk graffiti scattered across Washington Square posed this haunting question. Just days after a drug raid led to 19 arrests on the park’s west side, the city deployed nearly 70 new police officers to the area. With the local unhoused community now almost entirely displaced, a once vibrant park is now characterized by an uncanny stillness.
Some see the change as a welcome safety precaution addressing longtime concerns about local crime. But for many students, the round-the-clock policing has only made the park feel hostile.
CAS first-year Caspin Berklee regularly spends time in the park feeding the pigeons, and has developed relationships with many of the people who spent time in that section of the park. Since the Oct. 30 raid, Berklee said the park has been eerily quiet.
“I feel like a large community is gone,” Berklee said. “They scalped it. These people were there talking, playing music and just walking around.”
Following the raid, NYU told WSN it was “pleased” to see an increase in law enforcement in the park. It had joined the Village Interagency Task Force months earlier — a coalition of stakeholders aimed at addressing homelessness, mental illness and drug use in the neighborhood by coordinating law enforcement and other city agencies. This kind of “quality-of-life” policing has deep roots in the Village, dating back to 1990s initiatives piloted under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Silver student Sara Karp said she struggles to understand the purpose of the expanded presence beyond reinforcing New York City Police Department’s authority. While she wishes the city invested in long-term solutions to the housing crisis, she said the removal of the park’s unhoused community has made Washington Square feel less like a shared public space.
“The criminalization of poverty is never the solution to anything,” Karp, who studies social work and public policy, said. “It ruins the form of community that these people have built and puts them in riskier situations. I walk through the park and I just feel reminded of all of the money that is going to these police officers patrolling the park that could be going towards providing housing for those people.”
Berklee said the removal of the park’s unhoused community feels far from accidental. He recalled watching officers approach a man with a blanket sitting quietly and refuse to leave despite him repeatedly asking them to. The man eventually stood up to walk away, only to be followed around the park by the same officers, who told him they would either escort him out or take him to the hospital.
Berklee said that he felt that the police had strategically prodded at the man until he became agitated rather than addressing a preexisting issue.
“It just felt like their intentions were to get him into a state where they would have reasonable cause to kick him out,” Berklee said. “They were waiting for a reason to try and remove him.”
Unease over increased policing isn’t shared by everyone. Not only did the Washington Square Park Conservancy say they received “overwhelming positive feedback” on these new safety developments, but some students have stated that the increased police presence has improved their sense of safety on and around campus. For Steinhardt first-year and Lipton Hall resident Shohini Chakraborty, the heightened law enforcement presence has made her more comfortable walking through the park at different times of day.
“There are definitely some parts of the park where it felt unsafe to walk through,” said Chakraborty. “I always felt like during the daytime it was safe to go there but I would avoid the park at night, and now I feel like I don’t have to.”
Still, the park’s emptiness raises concerns on the broader impact of increased policing. The shift has made students like Karp and Berklee question what kinds of risks these individuals may now face elsewhere in the city, and whether the park’s current state of order has been achieved at too high a cost.
“I’ve never had an experience where I felt unsafe around these people. In my mind, they’re just people — it could easily be me as much as it is them,” Berklee said. “They aren’t monsters or subhuman, they are just people struggling with an addiction or a medical issue. The park was a home for them.”
Contact Sam Donagi at culture@nyunews.com.
This story Washington Square Park’s turn from homely to hostile appeared first on Washington Square News.