NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — The Sergeants Benevolent Association is launching its own initiative to combat quality-of-life issues.

In a letter to its members, union president Ed Mullins urged officers while off duty to snap pictures of quality-of-life offenders to document what he says is “a city in decline.”

“New York City has become a permissive place,” Mullins told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer on Monday. “We are an open invitation to come here because it’s okay to smoke marijuana; it’s okay to urinate in public; it’s okay to remain homeless in the street.”

Quite simply, the union wants to document what it sees as the decline of the city that has led to the homeless clogging the streets and doing things like bathing in the fountain at Columbus Circle.

Mullins blames Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council, which wants to decriminalize several quality-of-life offenses, Kramer reported.

“I want them to stop with the phony policies that exist,” Mullins said. “What they are doing is they are jerking the public around.”

Bob Ganley, the vice president of the SBA, told 1010 WINS’ Glen Schuck, “You can’t have aggressive panhandling going on in the City of New York. The amount of homeless people that are begging on the streets of the city, people urinating and defecating in places that they shouldn’t be. It’s not fair to the people that we represent, people that we serve.”