It was Wednesday, Aug. 13, with the dusk darkening the last daylight outside the Broadway Lights Diner when the young man came into the restaurant after having been stabbed in the neck.
“He wasn’t making noise or groaning or shouting or nothing,” recalled Kevin K., who was at the diner that night playing chess. “All I heard was the waitress saying, ‘Call 911, call 911.’ No one was yelling, no one was freaking out. Maybe some, like, ‘Oh my gods!’”
Kevin’s line of sight to the front door and the cash register was obstructed by a wall, but if he leaned forward over the table, he could see everything he wanted to. Initially, he did lean forward over the table but then he quickly sat back down, explaining he didn’t want the pictures to stay in his head. Still, he could hear everything.
“They kept saying you have to keep pressure on it, the EMTs were on the way, just calm down. There was only one point where the kid — turns out he was 19 — started to kind of freak out before the medics got there. He was kind of like, ‘Oh my god, I need to go to the doctor,’ and all the women, like the owner and the waitress, I don’t know who else, were just saying, just stay calm.”
When first responders arrived shortly after, EMTs told the young man he wasn’t going to die. They prepared him for transport, and away they went.
Kingston police later released a statement that the victim had sustained injuries to his head, neck and face after being cut with a sharp, bladed weapon in midtown Kingston.
Kevin says he’s lived in neighborhoods before where he feared for his safety. He grew up in Oxnard, California, and later in New York, lived in Crown Heights in the early 2000s, when it wasn’t yet hip to do so.
“I wasn’t all that shocked that this sort of thing could happen in Midtown,” he said.
A three-quarter-mile stretch of Broadway Avenue in Midtown Kingston — where many locals have begun to fear to tread — starts approximately at the Restorative Justice Center near the traffic circle and heads downtown past the Ulster Performing Arts Center and under the CSX bridge, ending around City Hall. Day or night, a sort of emotional locus of existential dread has been growing in their imagination. In conversation, it’s most often placed at the corner of Broadway and Liberty, at the small park with tables and umbrellas built out in front of Radio Kingston.
The daily police blotter for the city of Kingston provides a more empirical sketch of alleged criminal behavior in the neighborhood.
Officers responded to burglar alarms activated at the Broadway Bubble Laundromat, to trespassing on Liberty Street, to damaged property on Prospect Street. Gunshots were reported on Elmendorf Street, and a fight broke out next to Matteo’s Pizza on Broadway. A woman was harassed outside the Sunoco gas station on Broadway. A fight broke out on Broadway next to Radio Kingston park. In the blotters, prostitution was not alleged, but the month was young.
Gunshots were the most alarming entry, but reading the incident report shows that no one was injured.
However, exactly a month after the 19-year-old was stabbed and sought help and safety at the Broadway Lights Diner, an 18-year-old was stabbed in his thigh a half-block away, on Liberty between Prospect and Broadway. Described as an assault in the blotter, police believe two assailants — “possibly known to the victim” — were responsible for the attack. At this time, they remain at large and the criminal investigation is ongoing.
Crime and the reactionary struggle to suppress it wherever it appears in Midtown is nothing new. The situation predates even Kingston Police Chief Egidio Tinti joining the force as a rank-and-file police officer.
When Tinti was hired in June 1992, it was the crack epidemic that was winding down. More recently, his officers have been dealing with the fallout from illegally obtained prescription opioids and fentanyl-fueled overdoses from intravenous injections.
“In the old days, you used to arrest them, hold them overnight in some cases and they were off the street — you know, allow them to sober up — and by the time they got in front of the judge, ‘I won’t do it again.’ And that was it, and then they went back on the street.”
Now, police forces operating in Kingston, taking cues from the sheriff’s department, have embraced the use of crisis intervention training for officers to help them recognize and deal effectively with individuals experiencing mental health crises. Juan Figueroa’s sheriff’s office has a dedicated opioid response team known as ORACLE, which the Kingston police force coordinates with — clinical social workers and mental health peer advocates available for crisis intervention.
“Like the sheriff himself used to say, we can’t arrest our way out of this,” Tinti said. “It really has become a last resort to use any level of force. If we can have mobile mental health or crisis teams provide the services, we’ll stand by. But at the end of the day, if they’re not willing to abide by the law, then we have to enforce it, and we’re entrusted with a level of force — reasonable, necessary and justified — to do what we need to do.”
Whether using and abusing chemical compounds deemed to be illegal under New York state or federal law, or committing acts of violence upon person or animal, these behaviors plainly cross the line into the criminal. Regarding homelessness, or the condition of being unhoused, the law is more agnostic.
Most property in Kingston is privately owned, and what public spaces are left — like beaches and parks — are only nominally public. Rules that dictate in which fashion the parks can be enjoyed must be followed. From dusk to dawn, the parks and beaches are out of bounds.
With nowhere to go, day after night after day, the unhoused must at least keep up the appearance that they are going somewhere. Loitering, even in a public space, is a crime.
The parklet on Broadway that the NoVo Foundation funded — and which, since its completion in 2024, has been perceived as the source of trouble for many — was always intended to be a community space and hub for all, regardless of housing status. A public bathroom facility was also built.
With limited places to loiter, much less to toilet, NoVo’s parklet has acted as a magnet for — if not the most disenfranchised in the community — then certainly the most unstable.
“That a private entity is offering the park to these individuals to use is incredibly gracious,” Tinti said. “But after a certain hour it shuts down and they’ve got to go. So where do they go? Back in the city street. Back on the roadways, to wherever they’re sleeping.”
Putting aside for the moment the legal jeopardy faced by the unhoused, for Kingston residents interacting with them on Broadway Avenue, the most pressing issue is the often mentally, emotionally or chemically imbalanced behaviors many exhibit.
Take the sun-tanned, bearded fellow who often attempts to raise money at the intersection of Pine Grove and Broadway, on the corner by the YMCA. He will be singing or screaming or silently sitting in turns. Unable to predict the significance of the behavior the man on the sidewalk is exhibiting, any cautious person could reasonably worry about violence without meaning or warning.
Laura Ward, a dance instructor who’s been coming to the city since the ’90s, mostly avoids walking Broadway by the Radio Kingston park. “I guess it depends on the time of day, but if I found myself down there, I probably would walk on the other side of the street.”
“Obviously, when we talk about the unsheltered or homeless population,” said Tinti, “one of the concerns is allowing them to get the resources they need. But if you’re looking at the actual criminal activity, the homeless population aren’t really the ones committing the criminal activity. Are they committing violations of the law? Yeah. Open container, things of that nature. But when you’re talking about violent offenses, that is not the case that we’ve seen here.”
Erica Brown, community engagement coordinator for Radio Kingston, made it clear that on the topic of perception of danger from the unhoused or emotionally troubled hanging out at the Radio Kingston park, she was speaking for herself and not the organization.
“I have never felt the experience of fear in the [Radio Kingston] park,” Brown said. “I can understand how others could. There’s room for fear to be perceived differently amongst different people. My perception of fear is someone who seems to be physically threatening me — coming toward me aggressively.”
Answering questions while she walks, Brown leads a path down the sidewalk of Elmendorf Street, down the stairs to the Midtown Linear Park, stopping to check the level of Narcan supplies available in the emergency box and closing the panel firmly before continuing on. She waves to an assortment of characters along the way. Many who loiter along the linear park pathway are either just careless in their fashion choices and hygiene or give the impression they are no strangers to substance abuse.
“Let’s just think about the fact that there are native Kingstonians who are in this neighborhood community,” Brown said. “Who are houseless, because not everyone is houseless who hangs out around the Radio Kingston park or here along the linear park. That’s a misconception, by the way. But some of us call them our neighbors. That’s just who they are. Some definitely have some mental challenges going on or whatever it might be.”
If there now seem to be more people on Broadway struggling with emotional, chemical and mental issues than in years past, it may be recalled that up until April 2020, a 60-bed inpatient psychiatric and detox ward operated on Broadway Avenue at the Kingston Hospital next to City Hall.
Westchester Medical Health, owner of HealthAlliance Hospital, vacated the ward during the pandemic, ostensibly to prepare for a potential influx of COVID-19 patients. They never arrived, and the inpatient ward never reopened.
More than four years later, harried by the unrelenting haranguing of community activists and political leaders — as well as an investigation by the state attorney general, for which they paid a settlement — HealthAlliance Hospital and WMCHealth celebrated the opening of a slimmed-down inpatient psychiatric ward at their HealthAlliance St. Mary’s campus. The only inpatient psychiatric ward in all of Ulster County — population 182,977 — HealthAlliance Hospital now provides 20 beds for the mentally, emotionally and chemically disturbed.
Brown acknowledges the possibility that those unhoused and otherwise struggling members of society typically relegated to the shadows — now that they are on display on the side of the busiest thoroughfare in Kingston — have been invested with the fear and loathing generated by the dramatic incidents of crime reported over the last month.
In order to center the conversation properly, Brown offers a question she said she would ask to every person in the Kingston community if she could.
“Who do you consider to be deserving of the designation of community members?” asks Brown.
Join the family! 
