Residents of Oost -Hharlem begs the Trump government to do what their local leaders will not do -conclude the controversial safe injection location that has been a magnet for crime and chaos in their neighborhood for years, has learned the mail.
Grassroots organizations East Harlem Neighborhood Group and one city rise argue with the American Attorney General Pam Bondi to quickly close the shooting gallery supported by the government, which they said to have a clear violation of federal law.
“Our daily living situation has become completely untenable as a result of this facility that is opened in our residential area,” they wrote to Bondi in the three pages of Tage 17 February, a copy of which was shared by mail.
The East Harlem facility, which is managed by the non-profit Onpout together with a second site in Washington Heights, has seen consistent outdoor drug trafficking just outside its doors since the opening of 2021, said residents.
“Every day in the area outside the facility and in the blocks around the drug trafficking facility, there is regular place in broad daylight, while drug addicts can be found, lying on the street, beg for handouts and committing small crime,” reads.
“We need federal intervention to close it,” they wrote, following a plea by Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn). For the US Department of Justice last week.
The post this week witnessed the chaos, including a man who pounded $ 20 accounts of a giggling, bent junkie before he handed him a plastic bag just 150 feet from the entrance to the facility at East 126th Street, opposite A kindergarten.
Two blocks down, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 124th Street, a man in a northern facial jacket handed plastic bags with a trio white pills and about half an ounce of weed to a man in exchange for what seemed to be what seemed to be what $ 40.
An hour and a half later, a vast bearded man was seen on the concrete on Lexington Avenue near East 125th Street next to a pool of his own vomit, who attracted disgusting looks of passers -by.
“I thought that should be placed to help people, but they don’t help – they make it worse,” Barber Cole Brown, 38, told The Post.
“People go there to get help, and they buy drugs!”
But guard Devon Frost said that the program was a good thing, at least for addicts who were given sterilized needles, which helps to stop the spread of diseases, such as AIDS.
Yet he added: “They should not give them needles, they must try to get them from heroin.”
In November 2021, the then Bill de Blasio of the country celebrated the first “overdosis prevention centers” that opened in East Harlem and Washington Heights, where Junkies could sniff or inject their chosen medicine under medical supervision, in addition to picking up clean paraperernalia To be used in or outside their walls.
Mayor Adams, announced plans for three more safe injection facilities in March 2023 to be working by 2025. No new sites have been open since then.
All the while, residents in East Harlem complained a hellish scene who destroyed their community, and noted that their complaints were ignored by local leaders.
“My sons walk through people who inject themselves in their necks, in their legs, they walk through bodies that have crept over,” said Elizabeth Jarrett van Clief, 55, co-chairman of the East Harlem Neighborhood Group, who has lived the neighborhood since 2004.
“This had never happened before this injection site was opened.”
Drug-related 311 complaints at the address of the Safe Injection Site of the East Harlem rose to 272 in 2024, an increase of 377% compared to only 57 in 2020, the year before the facility was opened, according to a NYPD spokesperson.
Sam Rivera, executive director of Onpoint, defended the activities of the safe injection sites and noted that staff intervened in more than 1,800 overdoses in addition to offering social services such as medical and mental health care.
Spokeswoman Rachel Vick of the Health Department defended the facilities in the same way as “valuable community support” by connecting New Yorkers with different services.
Jarrett van Clief said that she and the hope of her neighbors for change in their neighborhood were interrupted when the then American lawyer Damian Williams warned in 2023 that the Onpower facilities indicate in a clear violation of the federal law but not closed them
President Trump’s return to the White House has ‘made it carefully optimistic’, she said, adding the current administration seems to be ‘more concerned about law and order’ than the Biden administration.
Cody Diaz, a shelter in East Harlem, pointed to the White House this week, moved to Ax to make the disgusting congestion price tax as a sign. The current administration has a Chutzpah to close the many malignant facilities.
“Everything is possible with Trump,” Sad Diaz, 42.
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comments.
