Environmental Support Lacks Agency

24 April 2026

As hard as it might be to admit it, sometimes the New York Post is right. Last year, in a typical foaming-at-the-mouth-crazy editorial, the paper argued that Zohran Mamdani’s plans for a Department of Community Safety could be expanded to all types of notions of what could constitute “safety,” that the concept could cover a range of activities. Last week saw Renita Francois, the mayor’s newly appointed head of the Office of Community Safety confirm the Post’s worst fears: “community safety,” she argued, involves creating “community-based interventions that focus on supporting the whole person…support[ing] their long-term outcomes and their mental health.”

Two examples from last week made the point that the Post was both right and wrong. First, the indictment of 36 gang members in Brooklyn brought forth the usual list of serious felony charges, along with a straightforward admission from the District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez: “So, literally, when these young men walk out of their housing development and come out of

their homes and cross the street, they’re considered to be on rival territory… This is the work that we’re up against.”

The next day, the Post noted, in a paean to New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Jessica Tisch, that shoplifting complaints are down 20% so far this year (compared to what, they weren’t saying). A prime example of the NYPD’s success was the arrest of a recidivist shoplifter, a homeless man, who has been arrested for shoplifting 40 times in the past two years.

Both examples invoked the environments in which the arrested persons operate. Imagine being a teenager in a housing project and not being able to go to school or to the supermarket without being forced to choose, either join with a gang for protection, or be subject to daily predation? Similarly, imagine being a long-term homeless person, with no job, no money (and no home, obviously), and without the possibility of getting any of those things? Such imagining does not excuse criminal behavior, obviously, but points out that this behavior consists of choices made in a specific environment and, perhaps, something needs to be done about that environment.

After all, once the gang member and the homeless man are released from prison, they only return to the same environment, and have to make the same choices, with the same lack of options. No one stops to think maybe, for instance, this is why the homeless man has 40 arrests in the past two years.

Such considerations reveal what really drives the New York Post bananas — rather than deal with human beings who needs to be met by a broader society, they prefer a world with faceless criminals that need to be put behind bars. The only problem with that approach, however, is that you only create the conditions that ensure that those conditions remain the same, which, at the end of the day, is truly a crazy proposition.