Stabbing by mad woman in Macys should be a wake-up call to Mamdani and city

Macy’s Herald Square is where I took my kids to sit on Santa’s lap when they were little.So did scores of other moms, often with infants in tow.The toy department decorations are a Winter Wonderland for little kids.That’s why countless families, New Yorkers and tourists alike, have sparkly memories and the pictures to go with them from the “Miracle on 34th Street” store.Anyone who has stood on line for Santa with kids in strollers or a baby in a carrier felt extra horrified to hear that a mom changing her infant daughter’s diaper was stabbed multiple times by a mentally ill homeless person in the rest room at Macy’s.You can picture yourself there.While this horrific crime is not technically on Zohran Mamdani’s watch — he’s not mayor yet — every policing and homelessness policy he has proposed will increase this type of preventable violence.Preventable? Yes!The seriously mentally ill do not have to be left to their own devices to deteriorate in public and harm themselves and others.We can — and in a moral and just society, we must — make sure they are off the streets.The fastest way to do that is to arrest them when they commit crimes (even quality of life offenses) and use the cudgel of incarceration to have them “choose” psychiatric care.Drug-addicted, schizophrenic street homeless simply will not sign up for the mental health treatment they desperately need.We also need in-patient beds to send them to once we have the legal ability to do so: The decades-long effort to rid New York of psychiatric in-patient facilities needs to be immediately halted and reversed.The horrors of psychiatric care abuse in the 1970s were real, and it was a good thing to expose and stop them — but it is a Hobson’s choice to pretend that we must either revert to that model, or have crazed homeless people stabbing tourists in iconic city stores.

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