By Jeremy Walsh
The Department of Homeless Services’ action at a Long Island City shelter for veterans in September that spurred reports of mistreatment was a locker search, not a raid, an agency official insisted last week.
Speaking at a meeting of Community Board 2 last Thursday, city DHS official Mary Wilson−Hall said the agency went to the Borden Avenue Veterans’ Residence on the night of Sept. 3 as part of an ongoing effort to change the culture there,.
She said her agency had received complaints of drug abuse in the building, prompting a search that resulted in two arrests.
“It is not unusual for us to conduct searches,” she said. “It is our right to do them.”
Hall also refuted residents’ claims that DHS agents beat them during the search.
Responding to a claim by shelter resident Previn Sanders that DHS agents broke his laptop computer during the search, Hall said they checked the computer afterward and it had not been damaged.
“No one should be treated the way we were treated,” Sanders told the board in September. Calls to his cell phone Friday were met with a message that his number was no longer in service.
CB 2 Chairman Joe Conley said that many of the people who spoke to the community board at September’s meeting had not been at the shelter during the time of the locker search, suggesting the residents there may have heard of what transpired through a “whisper campaign.”
“We’ve heard very little [from residents] since that night in September,” he added.
Hall suggested the Salvation Army, which ran the shelter until the city closed it temporarily in 2007, had “lost its focus” handling the contract, allowing veterans to treat it as permanent housing.
“We have clients who have been there much too long,” she said.
Other improvements at the shelter include celebrating the anniversaries of each branch of the armed forces and some limited clean−up work in the community, she said.
The board also complained in the past that the shelter’s new operating company, the Brooklyn−based Institute for Community Living, would not allow CB 2’s oversight committee on the premises. Hall said the company had provided the board with a spot on a new oversight committee formed with the mayor’s office.
Marvin Jeffcoat, chairman of CB 2’s Veteran Affairs Committee, attended the first meeting last month, she and Conley said.
Jeffcoat was not available for comment by press time Tuesday.
The shelter has a long history of problems and was closed in August 2007 after elected officials called on the city to investigate numerous allegations of violence, drugs and mistreatment of visitors to the shelter.
That summer DHS transformed it from a 410−bed, all−male shelter to a 243−bed, co−ed facility with private rooms. Hall said private rooms did not confer any tenant rights on shelter residents.
Reach reporter Jeremy Walsh by e−mail at jwalsh@timesledger.com or by phone at 718−229−0300, Ext. 154.
