Photo from Sunday by Stacie Joy
City agencies returned this morning to Ninth Street between Avenue B and Avenue C, where a group of unhoused residents has been living in tents under the sidewalk bridge at the former P.S. 64.
The result: 8 arrests.
Here's more from The New York Times:
The protest began as dozens of police officers, accompanied by a sanitation crew and a single homeless outreach worker, forced out the people living in the encampment for at least the seventh time in the last six weeks.[Tompkins Square Park] has become ground zero to the small but vocal movement protesting Mr. Adams's policies for addressing homelessness. "Housing is a human right, fight, fight, fight," the protesters chanted as police vans pulled up on neighboring streets around 9 a.m., and campers and supporters from a host of mutual aid and tenant activist groups taped off the tents with red packing tape.
After a standoff, police arrested seven activists and one of the unhoused residents.
All went willingly except Johnny Grima, 37, a homeless man who has emerged as the public face of the protests. He has been arrested three other times in the last month.As officers wrestled him out of his tent, then carried him toward a waiting police van, a protester shouted: "Shame on you. Is that how you treat houseless people?"
According to city stats cited by the Times, there have been more than 700 cleanups from March 18 to May 1 — many of them of the same site multiple times — and 39 people have accepted the placement into shelters.
Unhoused residents have said that the shelter system is not safe. Read our interviews with some of the Ninth Street residents here.
Previously on EV Grieve: