{"id":207807,"date":"2021-03-22T02:56:50","date_gmt":"2021-03-21T23:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-broken-windows-policing-couldve-saved-rosalee-sanchezs-life\/"},"modified":"2021-03-22T02:56:50","modified_gmt":"2021-03-21T23:56:50","slug":"how-broken-windows-policing-couldve-saved-rosalee-sanchezs-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-broken-windows-policing-couldve-saved-rosalee-sanchezs-life\/","title":{"rendered":"#How broken-windows policing could’ve saved Rosalee Sanchez’s life"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How broken-windows policing could’ve saved Rosalee Sanchez’s life<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

Rosalee Sanchez, 19, didn\u2019t have to die. She was bludgeoned, stabbed and strangled in Lower Manhattan\u2019s old Fulton Street Fish Market early this month. The teen\u2019s death was preventable, or would have been, if New York hadn\u2019t given up 30 years of crime-prevention knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fish market fits the definition of \u201cbroken windows\u201d disorder. The city moved the market to The Bronx nearly 16 years ago. Since then, its old warehouse has sat idle, abandoned. Various ideas to build everything from more empty supertall condos to a London-style outdoor market, like Covent Garden, have gone nowhere.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The building is covered in graffiti and pocked with, well, broken windows.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the old theory, modeled by the late criminologist George Kelling, goes, when someone breaks a window and nobody fixes it, someone else is tempted to break another window. No one is in charge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what happ<\/a>ened at the city-controlled Seaport, and so the fish market has been plagued with squatters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Among the latest were Sanchez, her boyfriend and her alleged killers, 25-year-old Austin Boehm and 20-year-old Christian Mercado, assisted by 33-year-old Amber Wilson, who allegedly hid the body. All were \u201chomeless,\u201d according to The Post.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The word \u201chomeless\u201d triggers a reflexive response in New York\u2019s aspiring leaders: \u201cHousing first!\u201d This approach assumes all vagrancy is due to a lack of housing and that the city should have given each of these young people an apartment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Except none of them was \u201chomeless\u201d in the mythical way: down on their luck, in need of assistance until they \u201cget back on their feet.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The victim, Sanchez, had a loving home in Newark. \u201cI always tried to keep her safe . . . but when she turned 18, she didn\u2019t want anyone helping her,\u201d her mother,\u00a0Iris Garcia, told The Post. \u201cI said, \u2018Come back.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sanchez was mentally disabled and mentally ill, said her mother, factors exacerbated by pot and alcohol use. She was in no way equipped to live on her own.<\/p>\n

\"Rosalee
Rosalee Sanchez, the teenager found dead in Lower Manhattan in March.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nor would \u201chousing first\u201d have helped her alleged killers. Boehm, Mercado and Wilson also aren\u2019t \u201chomeless\u201d New Yorkers, either. Rather, they are grifters \u2014 all recent newcomers to Gotham, from Pennsylvania, California and Maryland.<\/p>\n

Neighborhood residents and workers told The Post the group was believed to be associated with low-level crimes, from theft to hard-drug use (and, of course, trespassing).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The area has had hundreds of 311 complaints just since December, including 45 for \u201chomeless person assistance,\u201d 32 for \u201chomeless street condition,\u201d 21 for \u201cunsanitary conditions,\u201d seven for \u201cencampments\u201d and 13 for \u201cdirty conditions.\u201d It wasn\u2019t hard for police to find Boehm, Mercado and Wilson\u00a0after<\/em>\u00a0the murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why not before? Shoplifting is a crime, and the perpetrators were accused of stealing clothes from one nearby retailer. So is drug use. Tellingly, none of the perpetrators, or the victim, had any local criminal record\u00a0before\u00a0the murder and corpse-hiding charges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In New York\u2019s new approach to disorder, any drug, shoplifting or trespassing arrest that results in a few days at Rikers and then a release, to repeat the process again, is a sign of a failed system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So now, New York\u2019s criminal-justice system leaves the vagrants be, unless they are convinced, after dozens of social<\/a>-services contacts, that they want to come in for help.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve asked several mayoral candidates what they would do when a persistent drug-using vagrant doesn\u2019t\u00a0want\u00a0<\/em>help \u2014 and only former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said that arrests must be a tool.<\/p>\n

Sanchez didn\u2019t live long enough to come in for help \u2014 but a low-level arrest may have been the stick that her mother needed to persuade her to come home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, persistent arrests for drugs, theft and trespassing \u2014 even\u00a0if\u00a0the users and thieves never did hard time \u2014 may have made the alleged killers\u2019 lives miserable enough that they would have \u201cmoved along,\u201d in the old policing parlance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Might the alleged killers have recreated their drug den somewhere else? Not necessarily.<\/p>\n

\"An
An NYPD van at the scene of where Sanchez was found in Manhattan.<\/figcaption>
William Farrington<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Grifters venue-shop, looking for a neighborhood healthy enough to yield money for drugs through riskless theft and begging but, ironically, still safe enough to sleep. Disrupting such behavior likely would have prevented this senseless murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even if they\u00a0did\u00a0commit their crimes elsewhere, what\u2019s the harm in trying? They allegedly killed someone anyway; it wouldn\u2019t be\u00a0worse\u00a0<\/em>to have the murder happen somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Now\u00a0<\/em>Boehm and Mercado are at Rikers (Wilson was released on no bail). They may not be \u201chomeless\u201d for a while.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nicole\u00a0Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute\u2019s City Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n

Twitter: @nicolegelinas<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#How broken-windows policing could’ve saved Rosalee Sanchez’s life” Rosalee Sanchez, 19, didn\u2019t have to die. She was bludgeoned, stabbed and strangled in Lower Manhattan\u2019s old Fulton Street Fish Market early this month. The teen\u2019s death was preventable, or would have been, if New York hadn\u2019t given up 30 years of crime-prevention knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0 The fish market…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":207808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/south-street-seaport-murder-3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[98728,82776,4998,98799,4953,88416],"class_list":["post-207807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-3-21-21","tag-broken-windows","tag-crime","tag-george-kelling","tag-new-york-city","tag-south-street-seaport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}