NY Post
City officials covered up nearly 120 “serious incidents” at homeless shelters by downgrading their severity so they wouldn’t have to be disclosed to state regulators, according to the city Department of Investigation.
The DOI conducted a yearlong probe into allegations that the Department of Homeless Services wasn’t “adequately” reporting arrests and other problems to the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which is responsible for ensuring that shelters are safe.
The investigation revealed that DHS created its own “priority codes” that minimized “life-threatening injuries,” mental-health emergencies and some arrests of residents, visitors or staffers, according to an April 8 DOI memo obtained by The Post.
There were “approximately 117 internal reports” from January through June 2017 that contained information that should have been reported, the memo said.
City Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-The Bronx), who tipped off DOI to the situation, told The Post,
“There’s only one word for the conduct of DHS: inexcusable.”
“DHS adopted a dubious definition of serious incidents that it knew would lead to the under-reporting of incidents consisting of serious injuries, mental health emergencies, arrests and situations affecting the safety of its own residents and staff,” Torres said.
NY Post
Security at the city’s homeless shelters is so shoddy that
one Harlem facility had its own in-house heroin dealer, according to
records and fed-up workers.
Parkview Inn resident Alice Cuesta, 52, was finally busted
last month with 60 glassines of heroin after clumsily dropping them
right in front of an NYPD sergeant inside the elevator at the West 110th
Street shelter, prosecutors said court papers.
Before her fateful fumble, Cuesta had held free rein at the
shelter “for a long time,” law-enforcement and DHS sources told The
Post — adding that the situation is similar at shelters across the city.
Security gaps, as well as overworked DHS officers who simply don’t have the time, training or help to conduct thorough investigations, have left some residents wondering if they wouldn’t be better off taking their chances on the street.
