Add former mayor Rudy Giuliani to the thousands of New Yorkers complaining about homelessness. In an exclusive interview with NBC 4 New York, Giuliani revealed that he recently filed a complaint about a homeless man camped out on his East Side street.
“I myself, two weeks ago, had to go to a precinct to complain about a homeless person who was defecating and urinating,” he said. “Do you know when people lived on the streets and didn’t use bathrooms inside? It’s called the Dark Ages.”
Giuliani said his neighbors encouraged him to make the complaint and he was initially met with resistance from the NYPD when he went to the 19th Precinct stationhouse on East 67th Street. Officers told him they were familiar with the homeless man but the owner of the townhouse had given him permission to sleep there.
“Great,” Giuliani said he told police. “Then why doesn’t the owner of the townhouse invite him inside?”
The former mayor said he encouraged the officers to be more aggressive in policing quality-of-life offenses, referring to the strategies he and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton employed in the 1990s to “get rid of” the then-ubiquitous homeless people, squeegee window-washers and panhandlers.
“You chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em, and they either get the treatment that they need or you chase ’em out of the city,” he said.
Giuliani said that by the time he returned home, the homeless man was gone and he has not been seen since.
The former mayor took a shot at both Bratton and Mayor de Blasio, who recently named a task force to get advice on how to clean up nudity and aggressive panhandling in Times Square.
“I didn’t need a task force,” he said. “It was me and Bratton. My brain. His people.”
Read more at NBC NEW YORK.
{Matzav.com Newscenter}
