Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office planned — then abruptly canceled — a police raid on a South Bronx park that has been at the center of Post stories about public drug use and littered syringes, a report said Monday.
Politico New York reported that City Hall had been planning to step up enforcement at St. Mary’s Park in Mott Haven starting Monday following the series of articles, but the sweep was scrapped when the news site reported on the plan.
On Jan. 11, Politico published an article noting that the heavy-handed police action would run counter to de Blasio’s promise of a more compassionate approach to addiction and homelessness.
Days later, the news site said the raid was called off.
“It was a situation where the city was being reactive, and that’s not good for anyone,” City Councilwoman Diana Ayala (D-Bronx) told Politico.
“I have been told there will be no sweeps, there will be no arrests. We will infuse the area with more service workers to provide more outreach.”
But City Hall and police officials denied any raid had been planned, much less called off.
“You can’t shoot up in parks and not face the possibility of arrest. That said, we take a health-first approach and send in outreach workers tasked with connecting people with drug treatment and help so they can avoid arrest and get their lives back on track,” said City Hall spokeswoman Marcy Miranda.
“Does that mean there will never be another arrest in these parks? Certainly not. But it’s not our goal. It’s our last resort.”
The de Blasio administration has placed locked bins in South Bronx parks to get drug users to safely dispose of needles rather than leave them on the ground.
But last month, The Post reported that the effort had diverted only about 11 percent of the needles from the ground.
The success rate was even lower at St. Mary’s Park, where only 163 out of the 21,434 needles collected there between May and October 2018 had been discarded in the bins.
The Post saw people openly shooting up in the park, and some said the receptacles gave an impression that the city was giving them permission to get high.
Asked about the situation in late December, de Blasio said he wouldn’t tolerate it.
“I don’t accept what’s going on in that park. I don’t accept it from a health point of view or from a policing point of view,” he said. “I can say from a quality-of-life point of view, what’s happened in that park is not acceptable to me, and you’re going to see a variety of changes quickly.”
Additional reporting by Tina Moore