Clean Up the Shelter Mess, N.Y. Times, February 18, 1997, at A18.

Shamed by accounts of widespread wrongdoing at a New York City-run shelter for battered women, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has ordered changes at the facility and vows to keep a closer watch. A quick cleanup of the mess at the New Day shelter is the least the city owes to women who fled abuse only to be subjected to the same coarse mistreatment in what was supposed to be a safe haven.

City and state officials had oversight responsibility and should have discovered long ago that the shelter was badly managed. They now need to conduct a vigorous investigation of what went wrong, and that, of course, means examining their own appalling inattention. More broadly, the city must urgently review the way it is delivering services to battered women generally and come up with ways to improve those services. 

 Demand for domestic-violence services in New York vastly exceeds the supply. While Mr. Giuliani has expanded shelter space for victims by about 30 percent, advocates for victims say the city's current capacity of 1,110 beds satisfies only about half the need. On any given day, only a handful of those beds are available, while the city's domestic-violence hot line registers as many as 90 calls a day from women seeking shelter.

Most of the shelters are run by nonprofit agencies under contract with the city. New Day Safe Haven, a two-building complex located in the Bronx, is the only shelter run directly by the city. With about 200 beds, it is also the largest and is considered a shelter of last resort. Many of its occupants not only suffer from the effects of domestic violence but also struggle with substance abuse, mental illness and a criminal past.

Clearly, a large facility with a troubled population demanded careful supervision. But this seems not to have been clear to the bureaucracy. The shelter did not have a full-time director during its four-year existence. According to the victims, they were abused by staff workers and treated rudely by guards from the security agency the city hired to police the place -- an agency that had already become notorious for abusing people at other homeless shelters. Staff personnel allegedly used drugs and alcohol on the job, and security was so lax that former partners were allowed to sneak in at night, destroying the victims' refuge. Finally, some women had been at the shelter for a couple of years, when the goal is to move women out within 90 days.

City officials have now been moved to act. The shelter's entire 44-member staff has been removed. But these actions, and even the Mayor's forthright assumption of responsibility, should not be allowed to obscure the city's obvious failure to administer the facility properly and protect its unfortunate occupants from terrible harm.

Mr. Giuliani promises more rigorous screening of employees and a general review of services for battered women. But his first priority should be an investigation of what went wrong at the shelter and the agency responsible, the Human Resources Administration. That investigation should be conducted quickly and its findings made public.