The NYPD sergeant who ordered a homeless “sweep” ahead of Mayor de Blasio’s arrival at two subway stations did so at the direction of a boss in NYPD headquarters, The Post has learned.
But Transit Bureau Sgt. James Lynch’s mistake was putting the order in a memo, which he did, sources said, because the mayor only recently started riding the rails.
“Transit is not used to doing that, so when they got the phone call, they put it in writing, which is probably not the smartest thing to do,” one source said.
Lynch had a cop send out the email, which directed transit cops to roust vagrants from the 4th Avenue/9th Street and Jay Street/MetroTech stations Sunday.
The Post obtained the email following a series of City Hall denials that it existed.
But even though de Blasio claimed Wednesday that the email order went against his policy, Lynch won’t face any discipline, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Lynch issued his directive to cops in Transit District 30 on orders from a superior at the Joint Operations Center in NYPD headquarters, sources said.
“This was a direction Lynch was given. There’s a layer above Lynch,” a source said.
Cops have been rousting vagrants to keep them away from de Blasio for years, police sources said. The Post reported a sweep of Washington Square Park two hours before the mayor strolled through en route to a Ramadan event in July 2015, for example.
“They had to clear all the homeless out before he got there,” a source said at the time.
It’s standard practice for cops to crack down on quality-of-life offenses at spots where the mayor is scheduled to visit, sources said.
The clean-up operations typically follow a call to a local precinct from de Blasio’s NYPD “advance team,” sources said.
“They’ll tell us to make sure it’s secure, to make sure it’s clean, free of homeless, anything like that. They say, ‘Make sure it looks presentable,’” one source said.
“Usually, the homeless move on their own because they see so many cops, they don’t want to be bothered.”
The assignments are “kind of a pain in the ass,” a source said, because they pull cops away from patrolling their beats and have little to do with public safety, “The mayor’s got a whole crew of people and a detail that protects him. What we do is not for security,” another source said.
“We’re there so everything looks right. It’s so he looks good, so the area looks good for him. It’s a show, 100 percent. It’s a dog-and-pony show.”
During a news conference Wednesday, de Blasio suggested the order to sweep up the homeless on Sunday was the product of cops “with an ax to grind.”
“If somebody’s doing it because they have an ax to grind, God bless them. But that’s not the policy. The policy is not to do sweeps,” he said.
“Any approach taken to homeless in the subways or any other problem should be the same every single day, regardless of whether I’m around.”