This is why we can’t have nice things. A deranged homeless woman trashed a quiet Upper East Side block Saturday morning, screaming at the top of her lungs, ripping open plastic bags, smashing glass bottles in the street and throwing garbage everywhere and cops just let her go without taking any action — stunning neighbors who witnessed the mayhem around 7:00 am.
“It woke me up,” Lauren, a neighbor who saw the mentally ill woman’s rampage unfold outside her apartment window, told Upper East Site, “Someone’s just screaming out there — it’s not stopping and I hear her smashing stuff.”
“I was in shock. I was filming it just out of utter shock that someone was acting like this and doing this,” explained the Upper East Side resident who wished to keep her last name private.
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Despite being caught red-handed on video trashing East 89th Street, between First and Second Avenues, and heard saying she was ‘fucking shit up’, even celebrating as cars ran over broken glass, police officers allowed the clearly disturbed woman — who had difficulty standing up and at one point lunged when a man innocently passed her on the sidewalk — to simply walk away to wreak more havoc another day, instead following Mayor Adams’ orders to forcibly hospitalize those who are being a danger to themselves and the public.
The unhinged homeless woman, who identified herself as Anna and still had a strip of shredded paper on her hat, rambled to the four NYPD officers on scene who worked to contain her on Second Avenue, where she kept telling them “she had an appointment and needed to leave,” and was even heard invoking the name of former President Donald Trump, whose name was also handwritten on her sneakers.
While briefly being questioned by cops about the all the trash bags she had ripped open and slung all over the Upper East Side block, leaving sidewalks filled with garbage, Upper East Site heard Anna lie to police officers that it wasn’t just her and that children were playing in it.
FDNY paramedics attempted to ask Anna questions to determine whether she was of sound mind, but she was so out of it that she couldn’t even focus to answer the question and kept trying to walk way from police, until they finally gave up and just allowed her to walk away.
“Everyone was playing! It wasn’t just me!” Anna lied to the police.
“[Officers] said to me she’s done this before, a disturbance similar in nature,” Lauren explained,“basically they were like, next time they’re doing the psychiatric hold, but I said, ‘Wait, she’s done this before?’”
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“The police told me ‘She will strike again,’” Lauren said incredulously, “‘This will happen again,’ and that’s when they will do an involuntary psychiatric hold on her.”
Upper East Site tailed Anna, as she stumbled up Second Avenue talking to herself, periodically stopping to pick things out of the trash and add it to the rolling luggage she was dragging with her, until she eventually took the escalator down into the 96th Street-Second Avenue subway station.
“She’s paranoid, obviously — and crazy,” Lauren told Upper East Site, “they should have taken her right then and there.”
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Upper East Site reached out to the NYPD for an explanation, but did not receive a response to our inquiry.
Back on East 89th Street, a Department of Sanitation crew used brooms and a street sweeper to suck up most of the trash in the roadway, including piles of shredded paper that made it look like roadway was filled with snow — some of which had already spread into the intersection and down Second Avenue.
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Even the sanitation workers who helped building superintendents and maintenance men clean up the massive mess on the sidewalks couldn’t believe that a single person had wreaked havoc at this scale on an Upper East Side block — on purpose.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” one worker told Upper East Site, “not intentionally.”
“Maybe we should throw her in the back of the [garbage] truck!” quipped another.
NYC cops are doing exactly what they’re told, actually, which is do nothing unless someone is about to get hurt. That’s their job here: look the other way unless there’s imminent danger.
And right here is one huge contributor to crime in NYC: Police not doing their jobs, not even following basic protocols. These cops knew this deranged woman had done this before – why does she get a chance to do it again? Why are there no consequences for cops who don’t do their jobs?
Deranged individuals who disturb the peace, threaten others, commit destructive or violent acts, need to be taken off the streets and held in an appropriate facility.
Hgive her community servic we and make her clean up the mess she made