Eighteen New Yorkers are dead after an arctic blast, and the political leadership that could have protected them is now scrambling to evade responsibility.
According to Sean Hannity, City Council Speaker Julie Menin captured the moral stakes with painful clarity: These New Yorkers should be alive today and she is demanding an official, independent investigation into who made which decisions, when, and why, as Mayor Zohran Mamdanis administration allowed vulnerable residents to remain outside in lethal cold.
The city Medical Examiner has already confirmed that at least 15 of the dead succumbed to hypothermia, a horrifying toll in a city that spends billions on social services and claims compassion as its guiding principle.
Details are still emerging about the victims, but early reports indicate that some of those who died actually had access to city-provided shelter yet remained outdoors. In those cases, outreach workers either failed to locate them or declined to compel them indoors, even as temperatures plunged to life-threatening levels.
Testimony at a City Council hearing on Tuesday underscored the scale of the failure, revealing that 250 people were left outside because the person has refused services from the mobile outreach response team. In other words, the city treated a verbal refusal from deeply troubled individuals, many of whom are incapable of sound judgment, as a binding decision even when the alternative was freezing to death on the sidewalk.
Mayor Mamdani continues to insist that his hands are tied, claiming that no policy has changed since the Eric Adams administration and that state law bars involuntary removal unless a person faces an imminent deadly threat. That narrative collapses under basic scrutiny, because Adams with senior adviser Diane Savino leading the effort specifically pushed to change that law so authorities could bring vulnerable New Yorkers in from the cold and other life-threatening conditions.
Under that revised legal standard, city workers are empowered to act even before a person is on the brink of death, so long as the physical danger is real and the individual is unable to recognize and meet basic needs. The law was written precisely for those souls so troubled that they cant recognize and meet their own basic needs, a category that plainly includes people insisting on sleeping outside during a Code Blue emergency.
By any reasonable measure, remaining on the streets during a Code Blue qualifies as real danger, and a person who insists on doing so is demonstrating an inability to grasp their own peril. That makes it Mamdanis choice not some legal inevitability to leave them out there anyway, a political decision dressed up as helplessness.
To those who feel more comfortable on the streets . . . I implore you to come inside, the mayor said last Friday, even as he maintained that forcing the homeless off frozen, wind-whipped streets should be a last resort. That posture may sound compassionate in a press release, but on the ground it translates into a cruel passivity that leaves first responders and outreach workers in despair because their hands are tied and they can only implore.
There is also a hard question of basic competence: how much precious time did workers spend imploring the same resistant individuals instead of using that time to locate others in danger. That failure of priorities shows up starkly in the data from 311 calls, where nothing happened as a result of 96% of calls to homeless services during the cold snap, and in 72% of those cases city workers could not even find the person the caller was trying to help.
Mamdani appears to believe he can distance himself from the fallout by hiding behind subordinates, even as he refuses to alter the policies that produced this disaster. Two of the officials dispatched to face the City Council Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol and Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park are already on their way out, yet they were simply executing the mayors directives, which he still will not fully acknowledge or revise.
Real accountability would start with full transparency about what orders came from the mayors office and whether someone else on his ideological team is effectively calling the shots. But the City Councils authority is largely limited to compelling testimony and documents, while the state Legislature is dominated by Mamdanis far-left allies and the governor is politically dependent on his support in a re-election year.
New Yorkers have seen this movie before: Mayor Bill de Blasio demonstrated how toothless the citys Department of Investigation can be when the target is the big boss. Given the billions in federal dollars flowing into New Yorks social-service bureaucracy, it may fall to Congress or the Justice Department to determine whether Washington has the leverage and the will to get to the bottom of this disgrace, because the city and state governments either cannot, or will not, police their own.
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