While You Sleep,

And In Your Name.

What if the Mayor and his "reporters" decided to "hunt you down", and count you?"
The City has a need to know how many homeless there are. But since those currently running the City want to keep the "homeless" situation at a managable level, they decide NOT TO LOOK THAT HARD while they do the counting...

The feckless search for the homeless, touted as the "Homeless Outreach Population Survey", is a fine example of how meanspirited people can be. A seemingly benign operation that promotes purposes other than those openly declared.

As covered by the daily papers, there were no surprizes...
... the establishment New York Times sent a reporter out with
the city troops; while the New York Post parked their reporter on
a discarded sofa, along with one of the hunted homeless.

Both stories were valid in their own way, but they missed
the significance of what was being done. It was news, but not having a context from which they report on the homeless they treated the story as a pleasant read, "human interest" filler, a joke.

The real story turned out to be the one about how the media was used to establish false figures into the public record.

"Then there was the human-sized lump draped with blankets under a ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge. The lump did not respond to a wake-up call. Add another."
The Times' story revealed, though did not report on, the cavalier attitude of the city to its citizens and residents.
The story written in the style of a folksy small-town paper,
used phrases like...
...turned out to be a weird, funny and poignant ride.
... dodging snowballs from an irate homeless man.
... crusading against homelessness.
But the story also has a dark and callous undertone that
reveals the heartlessness of the situation. For instance,
what about the "human sized lump draped with blankets"
[who] "did not respond to a wake up call. Add another."
This "Outreach Survey" was conducted during the early pre-dawn hours of a cold and snowy February night. Was this lump alive?

This group of "volunteers" included a minimum of eleven people...
six volunteers
at least one city city official
three people from a television crew
and one crack reporter from the New York Times.
Having been warned to "avoid causing a media circus" by a city press officer, this group proceeded to count the free homeless.

As they went about their humanitarian task...
"People on the street stopped and stared". Not exactly a a circus but certainly a travesty.

After counting
all of the five (5) homeless people they could find
and as a
"...light snow was beginning to fall..." they decided to
"wrap it up an hour early".

Some science!
Commissioner Gibbs likes to travel and talk to the foreign press about "rocket science". Let us hope she doesn't intend to launch any homeless people while she's counting them.

And the New York Times backs this. Let's hope historians can come back and find some traces of the real people that lived here in New York City under her dominion.

What does it mean that during an official scientific tabulation THE NEW YORK TIMES treats it as a joke? REPORTS THAT... in a serious scientific study (an official City measurement), THE HELP DECIDED TO ONLY DO TWO THIRDS OF THE WORK AND LEAVE IT AT THAT...
And nobody complains? If they weren't going to count, why put on the show? Waste some more money on the homeless? Well, maybe not the homeless, what did they get from this exercise?

Oh yes... the New York Post reporter and the homeless guy
spent the night waiting in vain. None of the "army of a thousand volunteers" stumbled across First Ave and 59th street that night.
None caught the side-show in the rich neighborhood.

There were people in this city, who had the misfortune to be asleep in the streets of New York on that snowy winter night.

What about them? The City came and took away something from the homeless; left the homeless they encountered with even less then they had before being counted.

Just one obvious example... the temperature is in the teens, wind chill added to that. You find cardboard, you find a spot that might be safe for the night. You are cold, tired, perhaps drunk so as to to be numb against the cold and to pass out as quickly as possible. Having arranged everything as best a you can manage, you are finally asleep.

At two in the morning along come a bunch of self centred and uncaring people to wake you and ask you stupid questions. What do you mean, "Am I homeless???" What is this unfortunate person in rags likely to say to these well dressed "volunteers", "If I knew you were coming I would have baked a cake."? I can think of a number of things I might say in that situation, none would be considered sociable.

The city got it's count, what did the "human sized lump" get? Most likely not even a dollar for a cup of coffee in the morning. Even those considered to have nothing of economic value can have something to loose.
The workers got money, the newspaper got it's story, and the city got credit for a task they did not do.

The homeless guy lost energy, could you get back to sleep if the New York Times, a TV crew, and a bunch of city bureaucrats along with their pork barrel volunteers, woke you at two A.M.? What if it wasn't your bed in a warm bedroom, but you were on cardboard... brought back to feel the cold and then to struggle again,
to sleep... seeking
to return to the warmth of the unconscious.
The city took something. The counted homeless lost something.

What was the Commissioner up to?

"In order to end street homelessness, you have to understand how many people are out there and where they are." said Commissioner Linda I. Gibbs.

So the commissioner wants to end "street homelessness".
Simple enough, find the people that cause this outrage and take them away. Maybe she can't find them for a reason. Having been abused and hounded by one administration after another they have learned to hide when they see the minions of the city coming.
to be continued...

This is incomplete, needs more work

Fictitious Numbers/ How much more is less anyway?

What does Commissioner Linda Gibbs think this statement has to do with counting the number of homeless living in the street without official shelter.
"What you measure is what you manage, and by measuring this issue, we are committing to really challenging the status quo."
"Challenging" the status quo?
Along with the police and social bureaucracy,
SHE IS THE STATUS QUO!
Anyway, what is the point of measuring issues? If she can't manage the issues, what can she manage? She certainly can't count the homeless! We shall show that, as her statement implies, the city has no need to count the homeless.
They already know how many they want. Her intention was obviously not to measure the number of homeless, for it it was,
it would have been done in a professional manner, with serious intent. But as the acctual number is irrelavent to their policy, they need only to establisdh the appearence, notr the substance, of taking constructive action. The purpose of all this bureaucratic bullshit is to keep the system supplied with dollars to perpetuate their employment.
And I cannot let this moment pass without asking... Why say "really challenging"? Is this like "But, seriously folks,...?
There sits an interesting story... why would someone go through the trouble of drawing media attention and publicly failing to perform the stated task?
What kind of City sends its agents into the night to catch unsuspecting residents? And for what purpose is this charade played out.

How much butter did the volonteers get? When you say volunteers, the assumption is that they did not get paid, is this true? If they got paid they should give the money back!

Understanding of the situation. The City has declared that there are 1,780 (but not 1,783? 2001? 1668?) homeless single adults living on the streets and in the transportation system.
They have arrived at this figure by sending 1000 volunteers into the streets of Manhattan to find the homeless.
After finding only 594 actual homeless people, they decided that a total of 1,780 actual and suspected*homeless single adults were living in the streets and in the subways.
Subway stations, parks and other public spaces were checked, but not subway trains (ride the E train on any cold night!)
or buildings (how many "Korean" delis" and McDonalds had a homeless or two dozing that night?).
Why does the city claim there are more homeless than
they can find? Do they have homeless that they are not declaring? If so, what would be the legal grounds on which to demand that they turn those homeless over to the public?
*suspected homeless : This is the great problem we encounter here, the "suspected homeless". Do they exist or don't they? If they do, where were they that night? The definition of "living on the street and...etc." is "On The Street And...Etc." means on the street. (Oh yeah, ESTIMATES... What competance has City Hall demonstrated handling those? How many billions of suspected dollars were in the budget surplus?) But we are assuming that this time they are right , sooooooo...
wHERE WERE THE PEOPLE of THE STREET????refer to heisenbergs uncertainty pricipalpage

If you were homeless would these words from Mayor Bloomberg bring cheer and comfort to your heart?
Mayor Bloomberg said he is determined to improve conditions in the shelter system, but says he will not tolerate sleeping in the streets. Mayor Bloomberg: "We're not going to let people sleep on the streets. The court order the other day allows us to remove people from the sidewalks, and we will do that." [ Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press.]
"The survey findings were surprising in that they showed homeless people living on the streets all over the borough, not just in certain areas", Gibbs said. "I did not expect to see the number of individuals that were on their own and spread throughout the city," she said.
There are some very simple explanations for this mystery of the evenly distributed homeless. Some of which havebeen created by the Commissioners own policies.
Her very choice of words is revealing. The homeless "spread" could be a page of it's own. Questions to be examined are. Why are the hoimeless spreading? Are the homeless spreading? Do more homeless replace the ones that spread? Do they spread evenly in all directions?

While You Sleep, And In Your Name.

"Then there was the human-sized lump draped with blankets under a ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge. The lump did not respond to a wake-up call. Add another."

Some science! Commissioner Gibbs likes to travel and talk to the foreign press about "rocket science". Let us hope she doesn't intend to launch any homeless people while she's counting them.

And the New York Times backs this. Let's hope historians can come back and find some traces of the real people that lived here in New York City under her dominion.

What was the Commissioner up to?

to be continued...

While You Sleep,

And In Your Name.

Some science!
Commissioner Gibbs likes to travel and talk to the foreign press about "rocket science". Let us hope she doesn't intend to launch any homeless people while she's counting them.