Everyone Is Housed On Stolen Land

When a mayoralty starts out as a dorm room thought experiment, you can just make up new definitions of everything, including “mental capacity”:

A mumbling homeless woman was left out in deadly near-zero temperatures on a Manhattan sidewalk overnight — with first responders telling The Post they couldn’t help her under city guidelines.

The unidentified woman was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, slippers and two blankets as she clipped her nails, put lotion on her hands and talked to herself while hunkered down on East 34th Street across from NYU Langone Hospital as temperatures neared 0 degrees early Sunday.

She refused repeated offers for help from EMS workers and cops — who explained to The Post they had to leave the shivering vagrant in the extremely dangerous bone-chilling weather because she could answer basic questions — a factor that helps meet the threshold of Dem Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial homeless policies.

“She knew the year, 2026,” a firefighter told The Post. “She knew where she was: New York, Manhattan. She knew who the president is. Since she has mental capacity, there is nothing we can do. We can’t force her to go inside. We can’t kidnap her.

An EMS worker at the scene added, “I don’t want to leave her out here.

“My hands are tied.”

This is all supposed to make some sort of sense but even Scott Stringer is struggling to understand it:

City Hall officials briefed council members over the weekend, but barely said anything about involuntarily removing people, a council source said.

The mayor’s office threw up their hands, saying they’re bound by the wholly unscientific “last resort” policy currently in place, in which someone can only be forced indoors if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Over in Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott — whom Mamdani once praised for his crime-reduction efforts — late last month called the cold a life-and-death issue and ordered the police department to take people off the streets even if they were refusing services.

“That direction order came from me because we cannot allow folks to be out in this kind of weather,” Scott said.

A City Hall spokeswoman claimed the comparison to Baltimore didn’t work because of differing laws between New York and Maryland.

But former City Comptroller Scott Stringer said the Baltimore mayor’s approach makes sense given the urgency. He noted that the city’s removal policy was highly subjective, and that the mayor has extraordinary power over its interpretation or analysis.

“You bring ’em in, and you worry about the court case later,” he said.

“The question is: is it ideology or incompetence for the lack of action? Saving lives is the most important thing you can do as an elected official. The standard has to be in this extreme weather, ‘can they survive the night?’ And that’s what Baltimore is saying,” Stringer said.

“It’s just not a tough call when people can die in the night. I don’t understand why it’s so complicated.”