A world of crack, urine and catatonia: Welcome to Washington Square Park

“…#DefundPolice is on the back foot. With a former NYPD officer poised to capture Gotham’s City Hall and Team Biden preposterously claiming that defund was ack-shually a GOP scheme all along, it’s clear mainstream Dems have resolved to ditch the slogan, if not the entire agenda. So what now for true believers of a movement that last year swept up much of the liberal gentry?

You could witness the defunders’ plea for attention in the wee hours of the morning Thursday at Washington Square Park. For more than a month now, the park has been the site of a battle of wills between the NYPD enforcing an on-again-off-again midnight curfew and revelers determined to “reclaim public space,” as an ACLU volunteer monitoring the action told me.

Yet with their ranks diminished, the gathering of mostly white, heavily female and extremely young anti-police militants looked not a little like high school goths protesting the principal’s strict new bathroom pass policy.

The effect was to foreground the misery of the numerous addicts who call the park and nearby streets home: a world bathed in crack smoke, drenched in urine, murmuring with the fragmentary, delusional self-talk of lost souls…”