The reporters designation of "figured out" seems to stem more from the fact that the solution fits his own view than any actual real evidence. There is mention of the difficulties such lax policies has brought to the city, but they are waved away as being "growing pains" toward a new utopia.
I can't say, living here, that I feel that the problem is solved. I view the needles outside my apartment as evidence to the contrary - though I suppose I'm an ignoramus for thinking that.
Simply strolling through Pioneer Square or most parts of International District paints a significantly different picture. One can dine at a Chinese place on Jackson and look out their window and see junkies peddling stolen goods at the bus stop. The non-enforcement of so-called "petty crime" used to fund drug addictions is egregious and continues to undermine the already little sense of community there is in this city of transients.
What I'm trying to say is that while I appreciate the difference in approach from the traditional one, I do believe that there needs to be an honest discussion about the limits of rehabilitation. More research on the subject, as it relates to Seattle, shows that there are many, many, people who take advantage of these lax policies to abuse the system, hurting others who actually need help.
At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.
I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons, but it's not clear to me that there is a definitive consensus that incarceration does not work. See: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html
> "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration."
(The above is from a study conducted by a prominent U Chicago economist and another economist who is now at Princeton.)
It’s really very complicated. One of the macro trends over the last few decades is a massive increase in crime from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, then a decrease since then. Incarceration started increasing in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to that increase in crime. When crime started coming down in the 1990s, incarceration started coming down about ten years behind that in the 2000s.
Nobody really knows why crime started dropping in the 1990s. Some people think that the reduction is attributable to the banning of leaded gasoline. Maybe. But I don’t think studied have ruled out the notion that the reduction is attributable to putting a large number of people in prison. See: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485
> Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion.
It’s not an area where you can point to a definitive consensus, and everyone interprets the data to fit their own political views.
There is also a middle ground, where you can think that drugs should generally be legalized, but incarcerating people for non-drug crimes is a good idea. The problem isn't really people doing drugs. It's people breaking into cars, damaging property left in public, trespassing, assaulting other people, leaving big public piles of trash, things that fall into the "harming other people" category of crime.
At the end of the day though, the people breaking into cars are usually doing so because they have no other reasonable means to sustain themselves, or they are compelled to do so because of drug addiction. The long-term _solution_, is to remove these obstacles.
In other words, middle-class employed people who are safe in their environment don't really commit crimes - why would they? The best way to solve crime In General is to make more people like that.
Now granted, there are some people that would _still_ commit crimes even though they don't need to - this is the place where punitive solutions are appropriate, to make it not worth their while.
> Based on these estimates, the observed 2 percentage point decline in the U.S unemployment rate between 1991 and 2001 can explain an estimated 2 percent decline in property crime (out of an observed drop of almost 30 percent), but no change in violent crime or homicide. The sharp increases in crime in the 1960s—a decade of strong economic growth—further corroborate the weak link between macroeconomics and crime.
Meanwhile, the economy was quite strong until 1969, with unemployment below 4%: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33069.pdf (p. 5). Poverty rates went down about 40% from 1960-1970, and then were stable until about 1980. Over that same period, violent crime tripled. From 1982 to 1990, poverty went down by 15% and unemployment dropped in half, but violent crime increased 36% to historical peaks.
I'm not terribly surprised macro economic number don't show a strong correlation to crime. We're already talking about a group on the margins generally when we're looking at small property crimes and top line numbers like unemployment don't capture people who aren't even looking for work anymore (eg drug addicts).
I made it up. Economist have a big problem with running statistical analysis on unsorted population data. Hence trying to run regressions on fruit baskets.
Drugs get sold for huge markups due to prohibition. A heroin user spending $200 or more a day is, in reality, only using $4 or $5 a day worth in production cost. Even with a huge tax, I'd be $15 or whatever.
You did - I should add that I didn't consider their breakdown sufficient enough:
> In 2013, for example, the average poverty threshold for an individual living alone was $11,888; for a two-person family, $15,142; and for a family of four, $23,834.7
I wasn't alive in 1969, but for 2013, that threshold is quite low - it may make sense for poverty, but it is not a net wide enough to catch a significant portion of (relatively) poor people whose addictions have grown to far outweigh their paychecks.
Exactly! I'm not interested in castigating people for shooting up heroin, but I'm really not OK with them littering needles in our parks and sidewalks.
I love the image of a cop stopping someone who just shot up heroine with their arms crossed being like “well... are you going throw that away? hmmm” and gesturing with their eyes to the trash can.
I'll definitely admin that I'm interpreting the data to fit their own political/moral views but the conclusion "10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity" seems that economically the difference in incarcerating addicts and providing them healthcare is negligible.
If the economic difference is negligible then what reason is there for incarceration over providing healthcare? Crime did drop in the 90s but there's also the reality that those with criminal records are predisposed towards recidivism, a complicated issue on its own, but it seems that incarceration leads itself to staying criminal while healthcare at least has less direct links to criminal recidivism.
The issue is that while they are trying to break the addiction they often relapse and because drugs are expensive and also not conducive to holding a job there is a non-negligible percent of people that would continue to break into cars and steal things to pay for their habits. If they aren't hurting anyone ok fine let them go the rehab route first, but if they demonstrate they are a danger to society then they need to be separated until they cure their addiction. I think we should also reduce the sentencing for drug crimes as often they are overly punative.
I’m extremely against confinement as a punishment but I don’t think this would be unreasonable so long as it was strictly limited to the time needed to detox and you could say with a clear conscience that it was for the addicts benefit. Like they have to leave with an escort but they can hit up Mcdonalds and Yankee candle for their room.
Yea I think the best way is to first heavily restrict their freedom until they normalize and then have an incentives-based system that rewards positive behavior and actions with more freedoms until they can return to a normal life. Unfortunately, drug addiction is always the product of something deeper that's causing self-medication. Personally, I think a lot of addiction is due to a lack of connection with others and a lack of purpose for being. I like the concept of community service in the form of actually interacting with other members of the community instead of picking up trash on the side of the freeway for example.
This feel ill informed. First off, to an addict, nothing is a better positive rewarder than drugs. Secondly, forcing someone to "kick" never works and in fact leads to people trying to use the same amount and overdosing.
I do think mental health services are whats needed.
I think the solution is transforming a segment of incarceration into medical help, or expanding medical conservatorship.
If you smell like crap and can't sustain a life because of drug addictions or mental illness, and your behavior causes problems for society, you need to be helped, and maybe against your will.
The vast majority of homeless are actually not visible and look like and act like normal people. They often get out of being homeless in a few years. It's the chronic homeless who need help, might always need help, that ruin the public space for everyone else.
Respectfully disagree. The invisible homeless need the most help because they could really benefit and return to society for not that much cost. The visible homeless are mostly addicts and mentally ill that are too far gone to be anything more than contained.
They often already get help, and are the segment that help actually helps them. But it's the visibile chronic criminal homeless w/ drug and mental illness problems that make a city worse for everyone, including the invisible homeless.
Agreed, in Seattle some of the activist groups actually actively make the chronic homeless more visible to increase funding to the other group. It’s a very effective strategy actually.
Nobody really knows why crime started dropping in the 1990s. Some people think that the reduction is attributable to the banning of leaded gasoline. Maybe. But I don’t think studied have ruled out the notion that the reduction is attributable to putting a large number of people in prison.
One study shows the decrease in crime was caused by an increase in abortions.
Before everyone starts vilifying the person conducting the study. He said on the podcast that he does not think that his study should influence public policy and that the answer was not to try to convince people to have abortions but to spend more money on children and family services and criminal justice reform that keeps families from being separated because of minor crimes.
Freakonomics makes a case the drop in crime is directly correlated with the passing of Roe VS Wade and the legalization of abortion. This led to the 18 year later drop in unwanted male children now adults. Very interesting read on a very explosive topic :)
"Widely debunked" is factually inaccurate. It has not been debunked at all. It is not popular and leads to a lot of emotional responses, and there was one particular mechnical error in a single table in the original paper (Foote and Goetz); it has been addressed by the authors and did not materially affect the basic analysis or high-level conclusion.
An independent study on the lead/crime hypothesis (impact of childhood lead exposure on criminality) came to a similar conclusion.[0] (Reyes is interviewed in the podcast linked below.) Finally, they recently published a 15-years on follow-up study, which showed continued support for the hypothesis.[1]
You can read a transcript of their most recent podcast on the subject here[2], or just go direct to the source material.
It is a good chapter to read to see their methodology even if you don't agree with the results. For example, comparing stricter/easier gun laws and prison times in different cities and not finding a correlation to the drop in violence since it was across the board.
Oh I've read it and am familiar with their argument, I just disagree. I don't think analyzing gun laws on a city by city basis makes a lot of sense, they're small, in high demand apparently, and easily smuggled from a more permissive locale.
The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have to spell out what's the next step on the road after that. Open white supremacists like Steve Sailer vocally support the abortion argument, for instance
" a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically "
How did you come ot that conclusion? Much simpler option is on the table: parents mostly abort kkids when they know they don;t want them or can;t take care of them.
Kids that are wanted, are much more likely to be properly brought up and not become criminals.
> Kids that are wanted, are much more likely to be properly brought up and not become criminals.
Adopted children (in the US) are much more prone to various failures, like becoming criminals, than are the biological children of their adoptive parents.
It seems unlikely that this is due to the adopted children being unwanted.
Only if you're biased towards accepting those kinds of arguments already. There are social explanations for the effect that, in my opinion, both better explain it and don't suffer from the slightest appearance of racism.
An argument (in this sense) is a particular way of arriving at a conclusion. There could be different arguments for the same conclusion. This Freakonomics abortion thing seems to me an explanation. The 'conclusion' here is the reality of lower-than-expected crime rates - you don't argue for that; you try to explain it.
Your second paragraph is the most naked slippery-slope appeal to fear I've seen. Just repeating "just a pathway", "just a step" doesn't make it so. If the explanation is true, it's true. That some racist believes something or not doesn't affect its truth or falsity. I get a kind of claustrophobic communist-era vibe from your comment - that there is no truth, no reality, outside what the powers-that-be declare to be true. (I guess we call it 'political correctness' - there's no 'correct', only 'politically correct'.)
> Oh I've read it and am familiar with their argument
You do not seem to be familiar with the their conclusions and sentiments, no.
> The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have to spell out what's the next step on the road after that. Open white supremacists like Steve Sailer vocally support the abortion argument, for instance
Not even close.
> LEVITT: I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics. ... what our data suggests is that women are pretty good at choosing when they can bring kids in the world, who they can provide good environments for, okay? The mechanism by which any effects on crime have to be happening here are the women making good choices. And that’s such a fundamental difference — between women making good choices and eugenics, which is about the state, say, or some other entity forcing choices upon people, almost couldn’t be more different.
> ...
> What did Donohue mean by “unwantedness”? He was referring to the expansive social-sciences literature which showed that children born to parents who didn’t truly want that child, or weren’t ready for that child, these children were more likely to have worse outcomes as they grew up — health and education outcomes. But also, these so-called “unwanted” kids would ultimately be more likely to engage in criminal behaviors.
> ...
> The mechanism was pretty simple: unwanted children were more likely than average to engage in crime as they got older; but an unwanted child who was never born would never have the opportunity to enter his criminal prime, 15 or 20 years later. Donohue and Levitt created a tidy syllogism: unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; therefore, abortion led to lower crime.
> DONOHUE: ... presumably the greatest thing that could happen in this domain is if you would eliminate unwanted pregnancies in the first place. But American policy has not been nearly as effective in achieving that goal.
> A country like the Netherlands, which has really tried to reduce unwanted pregnancies, has probably had the right approach in dealing with the issues that our research at least raised. So they have much, much lower rates of abortion even though abortion is completely legal in the Netherlands. But they want to stop the unwanted pregnancies on the front end, and I think almost everyone should be able to agree that that is the preferable way to focus policy if one can.
> ...
> LEVITT: On the other hand, I don’t think anyone who is sensible should use our hypothesis to change their mind about how they feel about legalized abortion. So it really isn’t very [abortion] policy-relevant. If you’re pro-life and you believe that the fetus is equivalent in moral value to a person, well then, the tradeoff is awful.
> ...
> LEVITT: So there are two policy domains for which this research is important. ... the second [policy domain] really does relate to the idea that if unwantedness is such a powerful influencer on people’s lives, then we should try to do things to make sure that children are wanted. You could at least begin to think about how you would create a world in which kids grow up more loved and more appreciated and with brighter futures. And you know, is that better early education? Is that, you know, permits for parents? Or training for parents? Or, you know, minimum incomes? Who knows what the answer really would be. But there’s a whole set of topics I think which are not even on the table.
I just skimmed the chapter again to refresh my memory. It has a clear 'THOSE people [lower income, lower IQ] having abortions reduced the crime rate' angle. I'm sure they may have said something different after the fact, to not appear pro-eugenics (they likely didn't know how popular their book would be when they were writing it!). I invite anyone who disagrees to simply read the source material themselves.
Anyways, seeing as not only do social scientists widely disagree with their hypothesis, but other researchers found flaws in their data sets that Leavitt & Donohue were forced to acknowledge & correct for- it seems irrelevant?
IIRC, that was just one of the potential factors. Another was the phasing out of lead gasoline. The arc of crime is fascinating though. I was in high school during t.
> "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use
I'm not sure I understand that. Surely people in prison are even less productive? Or is this counting the massively underpaid prison labour that sometimes happens in the US?
I think, from reading that abstract, that they’re claiming it causes drug prices to rise and lower the overall rate of drug use. If they don’t mean that, then I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
Having both the serious possibility of prosecution while offering the alternative of entering a drug treatment facility and emerging with a cleared history is a good compromise. People who committed petty crimes due to addiction and were compelled by the state of Rhode Island to go through such a program say that it saved their life.
I had a conversation with someone the other day who made many of the same arguments as you. I agreed with some of it--namely that around safe injection, harm reduction, methadone (et al) clinics, etc.--but I had a hard time stomaching the idea that "housing first" was a good idea, in that if you take a drug addict and put them in a home, they're still a drug addict who can't contribute meaningfully to society.
Would you mind pointing to some of those studies/evidence so I can be a little more informed about the whole thing?
On the flip side, I have a hard time imagining how a homeless drug addict will be able to kick drugs while on the street and then somehow find a house and then become a 'meaningful' member of society without support. They basically have two problems: no house and a drug addiction. Fixing the 'no house' problem without tying it to drug addiction is a step towards normalcy.
I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them?
Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if they use drugs. The result of such framing is vicious savagery as is seen in America, the Philippines, and other places around the world.
You know, I actually paused after those words because I was afraid of a response like this, but I didn't rephrase because I just figured "they'll get what I mean".
In the context of my response, I really just meant it as shorthand for "not doing any of the negative stuff that Seattleites deal with on an everyday basis". Lots of homeless people are already doing that--namely, not putting the general public at risk with violence or needles sitting around--but many of the ones visible to us are making the city worse off.
So again, my OP should really be reframed as: "if you take a dangerous drug addict and put them in a house, they're still a dangerous drug addict".
And I do implicitly mean there that if you take a non-dangerous, knocked-off-their-feet homeless person and put them in a house, you now have a housed person, and that's a very positive thing :)
Yes, nobody says that just putting people into housing will magically fix them. That's why there's 30 other things on the list. Someone in housing is more likely to begin on their road to recovery than someone who has to live on the streets and have their stuff stolen all the time.
How could you possibly battle drug addiction or mental illness while sleeping on concrete exposed to elements and crime? It's constant stress that makes these issues worse, not better, every single day you live on the street.
> At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.
What data are you referring to? Governments in the Seattle area manage to spend over a billion dollars each year on the homeless problem. With about 10,000 people, that’s about $100,000 per person per year (both numbers are 2017). And they only house about 50%, which means $200,000 per person housed in temporary or permanent housing.
Somehow New York City houses 80% of a larger homeless population (60,000) for around $50,000 per person. They are three times more effective with their money.
People should be yelling. The data does suggest that policies on the west coast are expensive and ineffective. They aren’t good for anyone. I think the author of this post [1] makes greats points about the problems of unlimited compassion. Looking at the numbers really changes how I feel about the tent city down the street from me.
“some would prefer to see the police cart drug users off to jail to get them out of the way” (article)
It seems like creating housing projects for these people would be cheaper and more beneficial to society than increasing the prison population. I’d like to see something like dorms with shared restrooms, cafeterias, and such facilities. It’d create work and demand locally while keeping the streets clean.
I am anti housing projects. To me, creating a housing projects is like sweeping the problem under the rug. It concentrates poverty and crime into the area in/around the projects.
A) ghettoization in the form you describe is a zoning problem. Mixed-rate zoning is a thing, even in major cities in the US, and there's no reason social housing needs to be geographically isolated from market rate housing. As you point out, that's really unhealthy. I submit that the US has just implemented public housing extremely poorly, especially on the federal level, and Section 8 vouchers are going to be a much larger bill to pay to the American taxpayer than simply building public housing to begin with.
B) From a healthcare perspective, both housing and rehabilitation are necessary for the person to be able to function stably. I would argue that this type of housing as well as drug decriminalization is necessary to treat the underlying poverty (and resulting crime).
Obviously, we need to make sure NO ONE has any kind of quality of life. Large US cities should keep being shit shows and keep getting worse for everyone until 100% of people, no matter their socioeconomic situation, can live like kings.
Seattle spreads the housing projects around the city. In fact they just opened one in the South Lake Union area last year (just behind the Neptune apartments). They replaced a parking lot with something like 10-15 sheds for housing. They are in the 100-150 sq ft range, have electricity and a shared bathroom(s). I'm a touch fuzzy on the particulars because they also erect a very tall privacy fence around the whole thing, which feels like a good idea if for no other reason than a touch of privacy for its residents.
You can not do partial solutions here. Housing projects will be demolished (cables ripped out by methheads searching for copper).. if there are no constant drugsupply + safe injection, this approach has to fail.
Implement stuff like this half-hearted and you only rile up the tough on crime crowd without results.
To effectively clean up the city. You can’t have tent encampments in cities, which leads to refuse build up, which brings the rats, which spread typhoid. Yes, this is a fact, and yes this is right now a current problem facing Los Angeles. If resources can be distributed outside city limits which are paid for by city taxpayers, city residents can see a return on their taxes with cleaner, safer neighborhoods. For those who are not drug addicts or bums, but need help to get back on their feet, those are the individuals who should be offered beds and resources in the city.
Yep, the argument I've heard is that it legitimizes encampments. Additionally I suspect people are outraged by the notion that homeless people could get trash pickup for free from the city when housed people have to pay for theirs - even though it would be a lot cheaper than sweeps.
I think it’s more of a liability problem. Once the city starts garbage cleaning the city becomes exposed to liability from the encampment because it can be argued that its sanctioned now.
There are people who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, and/or abused. The streets are no place to heal these wounds, they are a place for them to fester. Modern asylums and rehab centers should be built, along with shelter space with counseling and medical services.
Leaving people to rot on the street for even an instant longer is abhorrently inhumane, and the local government officials in charge of our west coast cities should just resign, since they so clearly lack any empathy or rational thinking.
> "attracting" homeless to the city, despite the fact that the data show this trope to be a fiction.
This is incorrect and I think it's constructive to address it.
People talk about numbers, but it's mostly just whatever justifies their bias. Where you draw a line AND when matters when talking about this, so I believe somewhere just under 40% are from outside Seattle. I measure that if you're not from King County (for at least 1 year) before you lost your home, you've moved to it (re: http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/). Either way, homeless people do not move away to cheaper locales, but are drawn toward the city center. This is primarily due to existing support networks, convenient mobility, drug availability, tolerance, and available disposable wealth. Seattle is not special in this regard, as this behavior is see in many metropolitan centers around the world. Does it matter? No. Where people come from isn't the issue as you can't really control for the conditions...what is WA gonna do, prevent global warming from sending climate refugees up the coast? Good luck Inslee.
I have observed how various cities have approached handling the homeless. I spent 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA and a decade in Santa Ana, CA where these same "issues" had been handled differently from Seattle. I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, and I recognize that's all it is.
You know who doesn't have a homeless problem? Irvine, CA. If you have a car with a bunch of caked mud on it and some dents or a blown out window, you get status-profiled (they don't admit to it, and it's not racial, but it's demonstrable) and pulled over. The Irvine Company (a family who owns most of Irvine) leverages or ships undesirables from the city and it stays that way (mostly in Costa Mesa, Laguna, etc) same as Santa Cruz did in the 90s where they would drop repeat offenders on a train to Santa Clara. Luckily(?) when a few people ended up freezing to death in their cars and the streets (over a few winters) in Santa Cruz, it came out as an official public safety policy. Draconian measures work to a degree, it seems, but mostly moving people CONSISTENTLY works.
Mixing unrestricted support systems into metropolitan areas has been applied for over half a century. It sifts those who can be helped, out until you have those who cannot or will not be helped. As unpopular as it seems, I think that a city/county being allowed to export people to unincorporated areas if they break a city/county law and have no residence and aren't able to complete a work program, would solve homelessness in a more humane manner. If you don't want to participate in society, homestead the land or run your way back and start over. Either way, it doesn't fill more jail cells. Yes people may die, just as people die now, but without putting residents at risk.
What data are you talking about? Because there sure is a strong correlation between drug use and homelessness. While I think it's insane to punish people for ingesting substances that might harm them, I still don't think we should just look the other way and silently condone its use when it's actively destroying people's lives.
It's interesting people always point to Portugal to support the idea that decriminalization is the way to address substance abuse. But compare Sweden, which has similar levels of drug dependency to Portugal, but takes a "zero tolerance" approach to drug use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Sweden. While Sweden does include treatment as part of its drug policy, that is a complement to, not replacement for, strict law enforcement.
> According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), in 2005, the rate of drug-related deaths per capita in Sweden was more than twice that of the Netherlands and there were more persons addicted to severe narcotics ("heavy drugs") than in other countries
Whenever someone points out Portugal and you talk to them you find that they think just decriminalization turned Portugal into a beautiful utopia.
In practice decriminalization was 20% of the action. The important 80% was investing heavily in social workers, public health, and temporary housing so that people on drugs could receive treatment.
What other countries fail to appreciate is that people in these conditions are almost always self-medicating or escaping something. So great, you don't put them in jail, but they continue living in a vicious addictive hell with no hope for a better future or of ever regaining their lives. That's not exactly compassionate is it?
The metric to track can't be: "didn't die" or "didn't incarcerate", it should be "regained their life" and "broke their addiction".
I seriously doubt the Swedes 'throw people in jail'. Their social policy in general is very much the other way. Their prison sentances will be 10-30% as long as US ones for comparable offences.
In terms of drugs Norway and Sweden have traditionally not had much drugs - mainly because they are a long way from anywhere.
Portugal is such a strange example to point at. Yes, the heroin use fell after the decriminalization, but it also fell in other countries at the same time. Use of other drugs in Portugal after decriminalization actually rose.
Wars can also be ended by surrender, which Vancouver BC did. I understand Seattle’s approach has been similar: Grant de facto immunity to homeless people committing petty crime, stop all police enforcement of drug laws, and shame everyone who dares to complain.
except governance is not a war, and unlike in a war you are concerned with well-being of your citizen and are not allowed to kill them...
So really, just an empty soundbyte
That's a big problem for those of us still here that would prefer enforcement; our fellow-minded voters have (probably rightly) chosen defect and left the city, rather than stay to vote for change. Suburb living also has twice the greenhouse gas impact as well.
I don't know, Sawant got way less than was expected in the primaries (36.7% [1]), and I think a lot of folks are in the Sawant or anti-Sawant camp whereby all on the non-Sawant primary votes will consolidate to Orion.
Or people blew off the primaries sure that she'd take the general. ️
Those of us still here that prefer empathy would rather you follow your 'fellow-minded' folks and just leave.
Seattle's had this tension between the left and the liberals for a century. Traditionally you lived on the outskirts. You're welcome to go back if the city offends your sensibilities.
"Empathy" is unfortunately becoming code word for "caring to a specific group of people but not others". It's almost never used for "the ability to understand and care about the feelings of people in general".
The people who aren't living in the street but are victims of these petty crimes or have their own quality of life drastically reduced because of all this still matter. And I don't think the solution is to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Especially since even the reasonably well off (dare I say, what's left of the "middle class") frequently has it worse in the US than random people do in other first world countries.
Does there need to be a line drawn here? I don’t think there is a contradiction between empathy and enforcement. For example, I would really like an end to the bike and package theft and I think it is reasonable to enforce laws against it. Do you disagree?
In the world we live in, yes I disagree. Our criminal justice system further entrenches these problems. Before you claim that these petty crimes don't apply, the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations, and these petty crimes are all jailable/revokable offenses for folks on paper.
In America, we put the already marginalized in jail and prison which only further entrenches their marginalization. Empathy means breaking that cycle.
Fear-based rhetoric around crime is not empathy. In fact, it's the exact opposite. And it's rampant in this thread.
>the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations
This is a funny way of saying they're back in prison for more serious original crimes after failing to rehabilitate during the second chance they were already given in the form of probation/parole.
Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets and commit more crimes is not empathy, it is folly. Empathy is protecting the neighborhoods which aren't rich enough to be insulated from these bad actors.
> Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets
That's a funny way of implying that everyone that the justice system imprisons are criminals in a world where we imprison 22% of the global incarcerated population despite accounting for 4% of the global total population[1].
Fear-based rhetoric around crime and the people who commit crimes* is not empathy.
My empathy is reserved for victims. I don't see how siding with antisocial actors and taking a permissive stance on crime is supposed to improve society. I literally can't understand the mindset of such a belief other by applying hipster contrarianism to morality.
My empathy is reserved for victims of the prison industrial complex (that includes your concept of victims, btw). I do see how your sort of hardline dehumanization of undesirables...sorry, 'tough on crime'...approach in the latter half of the 20th century has resulted in many of the problems being discussed in this thread.
I'm a felon that committed a crime and violated my probation a year after my original sentencing (I've since discharged my sentence). My crime was almost killing my passengers and myself in a drunken single-vehicle collision when I was 19. My violation was being a drunk passenger on my 21st birthday, after the designated driver was pulled over for simple lane violations (right/left turns into far lanes). They were let go with a warning, and I was taken to jail. If I didn't come from the privileged background I do, I could very well still be in prison today.
I'm a contrarian hipster, don't get me wrong, but I come by this empathy honestly. I empathize with your fear too, but I'm telling you to get over it because it only makes the problems you fear worse.
Is it empathy that leaves the mentally unwell and drug addicted to rot in the street, harass and endanger passersby, and commit petty crimes with impunity?
I didn't think empathy had much to do with the tough on crime policies that are bearing this fruit today, or the dehumanizing rhetoric rampant in this thread that justifies doubling down on those failed policies.
Time and time again, fear leads to bad counterproductive policies with debateably good intentions.
I'm ignoring the meaningless/unspoken distinction between compassion and empathy in your comment.
Though it's changed recently (and even more recently is swinging back to historical usage), historically the word liberals referred to folks that are generally corporate/free-trade friendly (Reagan famously claimed something to the effect of, 'I'm a liberal, an 18th century liberal'). They also pay lip service to personal freedoms, but that tends to be through the lens of white men being the only people deserving of those, and they're generally against freedom of migration. Or rather that they care about free-trade more than free-migration because it advantages them more, despite the societal benefits of one relying on the other.
In Seattle, the leftists are the AnSyn folks at the unsanctioned May Day celebration, or the WTO protesters two decades back. Further back, they're the folks organizing the general strike[1]. The liberals are the folks that put their No Re-zoning sign next to their BLM sign in the window of their Ballard home. Or more charitably, the folks that see Gates and Bezos as shining examples of what our city is capable of.
In case you need it in song form, this is a song written by a leftist[2].
I heard from a lot of folks in Spokane who moved out because of the city's increasingly boggling policies. They were often quite vocal about the fact that they moved and their reasons for moving; they seemed to care for their old home, but simply could not live there any longer.
Vancouver's homeless have largely fled to the suburbs too! (Maple Ridge, mostly.) I guess the cost of living is so high here that even those who aren't paying rent still can't afford it.
People are downvoting this, but the person has a point. That's exactly how Trump got elected (followed by millions of people wondering how the hell it could happen).
Shame everyone who disagrees with you, cancel them, ban them on your online forums, and then it's like they don't exist. You win! Except they can still vote, and you're no longer in a situation where you can influence them.
Seattle loves to pass new taxes that are "supposed" to go towards certain things (and do for a year or two), but then end up in a general fund. Just like the tobacco tax, the alcohol tax and the marijuana tax. These were all supposed to go towards roads and schools, at one point and, yet didn't.
Is there even a legal structure allowing a government to pass a tax with a particular outflow, in a way that prevents said government from later deciding to redirect the tax's revenue to a different outflow? Like how a trust works for private citizens, but at an organizational level?
You can earmark tax dollars for particular spending, but Seattle has a habit of only doing said earmarks for 2 to 3 years before going into the general fund. I'm not sure if you can make those earmarks indefinite, to be honest.
We need low cost low security jails for people who commit property crimes. Basically just wall off a few square miles and throw them in there left to their own devices.
Many prisons in central and South America are run like this: the prisoners are thrown into a contained environment without guards otherwise, the prisoners themselves (usually visit a gangs) organize the prison economy and otherwise keep the peace (bar for some occasional riots).
I see people shooting up in public places, people walking around naked, doing wheelies on a wheelchair on high traffic roads, drug needles laying on the side walk, etc.
I think enforcing these laws would make Seattle safer and an overall better place to live.
I've heard that it's not legal to force people into rehab. But I can't see why this can't be done under something like the Baker Act.
If you're physically addicted to drugs, you are to some extent not capable of making rational choices, and this means you are a threat to yourself and to those around you. Could this not be a legal pretext to detain someone (humanely) and bring them to rehab treatment? Seems like a better alternative than jail, and certainly a better alternative to letting drug addicts rot on the streets.
I'm also not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about, so feel free to lay into me and let me know why this idea is wrong or even crazy.
Usually how it works is if you break the law (eg, steal something) and get caught, you are arrested, then you get to see a judge. At that point it is up to the judge to push rehab as a punishment or prison. This depends on the laws of the area, the offense, and if this is a repeat offense.
I think you are in the right morally, and legislative position is not relevant - it should be based on morals. Various countries have/had absurd laws, such as making it illegal to insult the supreme leader, suicide is illegal, and having legal slavery, heresy, the list goes on and on.
Today we regard those laws as stupid and cruel, and hopefully one day we will regard persecution of addicts with the same incredulity as we regard witch-hunts
We have safe injection sites up here in Vancouver, you still find used needles lying around everywhere, depending where you go, only you also find the small saline packs and disposable spoons from the injection sites lying around with the used needles.
The police don't really seem to care. I've watched a couple of officers find a small pile of used needles at one of the skytrain stations, they laughed to each other said how they should be cleaning that up, then just left. I know about an hour later, a bunch of school kids take the bus I was waiting for. Calling and reporting it did nothing.
Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters. Even emergency calls about homeless brandishing knives in broad daylight are ignored. (If someone does get stabbed, the police will show.)
Seattle politicians have shown that they have no interest in keeping violent people off the streets, so the police don't waste their time with it.
> Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters.
I've been away from Seattle for a while, so excuse me if it's changed. But I still remember quite well in 2010 when Seattle police gunned down a native american for crossing the street downtown, I think it was off of Howell. That guy used to ask me and my wife for change. His big crime was making a very young officer, I believe a recent arrival from the eastern part of the state, uncomfortable due to his skin color. Shot dead, in the back.
While tragic, the death of JT Williams has nothing to do with the Seattle City Prosecutor and the King County Prosecutor refusing to charge or jail violent homeless junkies.
Seattle has changed. A few weeks ago someone beat a police officer with a sunroof he'd just ripped of a car (after jumping on the other roofs of cars in traffic).
He was released 24 hours later.
On a simpler note I saw someone exposing themselves/defecating on a street corner in downtown. Some officers spoke to him but then they left.
Seattle PD knows this so they take days to file basic reports. If you wanted to report the somebody broke into your car you could be waiting multiple days for someone to take the report.
The police, of course, do seem to care, and they do care. It sucks that people like you try to get away with pulling one over on those who don't know the situation well enough and have to just trust you.
How? Junkies and other folks who throw needles on the street when there’s a trash can like 5 feet away will actually make appointments to stop at these consumption sites? Who pays for this? The city of Seattle makes a mess because of their extremist policies of not enforcing laws so let’s raise taxes to make up for it?
It's always amusing to me to hear people complain about taxes in Seattle. Washington State doesn't have an income tax, y'all. If you haven't figured out that a lot of the weird (and bad) city tax issues arise from that, welp.
To me all of these issues seem like the same ones San Francisco is facing, which leads me to conclude that neither lowering income taxes nor raising income taxes is likely to solve them.
I've lived in both those cities this decade; the results are in some cases similar, but the issues are in fact different. The thing that's similar: both cities are warm enough so that you can reasonably live on the streets year round. Boston's an intensely liberal city and nobody uses it as an example of how liberal cities always have homeless problems.
Similarly, Google "dallas homeless problem" sometime. Warm city, poor coordination of solutions for the homeless -- whoa, homeless populations are rising! But that once more does not fit the narrative, so nobody talks about it in threads like this.
(Houston is doing much better. Houston, unlike Seattle, has put a priority on coordinating efforts to help homeless. HUH.)
That said you're right -- it's not just about taxes. Seattle is low on revenue, but that's only part of why the city has failed to produce a coordinated response to homelessness. Bad organizational skills are not restricted to the right or the left, though.
a) Probably wise not to conflate homelessness with the opioid crisis. I would be a fool to argue that the latter correlates in any way with winter temperatures.
b) Different scale, man. Seattle's issues are way bigger than Methadone Mile. (I've lived in Boston too.)
I downvoted you, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a bot. I did so because failing to lock up people that commit serious crimes is prima facie extremist - no citation is necessary.
Downvoting (from what I gather) is supposed to be used not as a disagree button, but rather as a tool when a comment doesn't add value to a conversation, hence why downvotes are so restricted on HN.
Unfortunately, the people that such initiatives are aimed at happen to be junkies. They will consume whenever and wherever they feel like it, just as many of them will steal from the most convenient target when they need more money for a fix. Further, the optics of state-sanctioned drug use sites are pretty bad, even in the most liberal of cities.
No it wouldn’t. They wouldn’t use them. Junkies reuse needles they find on the ground because they don’t care... they aren’t going to go to a specific place to wait in line to shoot up.
When I was out there last fall, we stayed in Belltown and walked all over. I'm wondering, where was all this squalor you speak of? I came out with a very different impression of the city than you describe. Obviously you would know better, so I'm just wondering, did I get lucky?
The geography of homelessness in Seattle still eludes me, but Belltown just isn't one of the high-concentration areas. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Pioneer Square and the International District are hotspots. This may be due to shelters and missions (places to get food and housing) being more concentrated there.
Homelessness and drug use also comes in very different forms even within Seattle; I live in Ballard, and most of our homeless and drug-addicted community lives in beaten-up RVs parked on the side of the road.
I've lived in Seattle for 1.5 years. I became numb to the hyperbole around the homeless problem here in 6 months. One side is talking facts, experimentation, and trying new things. The other side is talking feelings, fears, and taking every misstep as an opportunity to abandon any notion of solving the problem in an ethical way.
It is really interesting, especially on a site like HN, because the latter is directly contrary to the ethos of most startups.
Isn’t the problem simply overly liberal policy making? It seems moderation has disappeared on the West coast, and these cities basically don’t enforce laws against those pursuing a nomadic drug centric lifestyle on the backs of taxpayer supported land/amenities/services.
The severe wealth stratification that has occurred over the last few decades has left the majority of Americans facing a grim future of low earnings and unstable employment.
Its easy to see how that would make many people depressed and lead to a cycle of addiction to escape this crappy reality.
Are you referring to the global overall rise out of poverty? or specifically the 'west coast cities' as were mentioned higher up in the thread?
Either way, from what I've been witnessing, as the commenter above yours was saying - but in a more specific way, is that many people who once had a fair amount of discretionary spending ability have seen that money sucked up into higher rents and needs for broadband - having more needs for kids and slightly higher expenses for many things all around... it appears that saving to do big things is not an option.
all the while seeing people on instagram living best lives of travel and decadence, many people can't even afford to make healthy choices for food - that once could.
More and more people who were above poverty are finding the higher rents and other expenses taking them into debt with no good way out - more and more people are getting unbanked by fees, and leaning on pawn shops / family and friends to skirt by getting power and water turned back on.
Sometimes they climb back up out of this, but I think more and more people are just simply going without. Going without dental care and healthy food. Skipping meals. There appears to be a bunch of people using dating apps to get free food.
Just that reality is hitting people - and if they can an unexptected larger expense - they are over the edge.
I don't think we have good statistics to show all this. It may seem that poverty is being reduced, and I saw a meme saying the avg household has gained 5k per year lately.. but that's not enough to take care of the basics for most people I see around our growing city that is not on the west coast.
I hear that things like this are even worse elsewhere.
Amusingly, it's entirely possible that the deepest problem is cleanly illustrated by the other two replies to your comment (throwawaysea blaming liberalism and allana blaming wealth inequality) as we talk around one another's preconceived notions of how the world works until we drive off a cliff.
>I do believe that there needs to be an honest discussion about the limits of rehabilitation.
First I think we need to have an honest discussion about actually trying rehabilitation. The criminal justice system is more concerned with retribution than rehabilitation.
Do you think there would be fewer needles outside your apartment if we simply locked these people up? I think there would be more.
I agree that the limits of rehabilitation need to be seriously considered, and that good policy requires a mix of approaches. That said, all of your arguments could be applied to alcoholics during prohibition.
I think if we actually want a sense of community in this city, it starts by treating our neighbors as humans. These drug users are your neighbors. What are you doing to help them?
If my neighbor beat his wife, damaged my car and pissed on my house I would do exactly what ever good neighbor should- call the cops and make sure they have enough evidence to send his ass to jail. The problem is when the cops don’t come then what do you do?
Good neighbors don't act the way junkies act. Good neighbors respect boundaries. Good neighbors don’t: break in cars, break in garages, steal bicycles, threaten customers and staff at restaurants, nod out in the middle if the sidewalk, chase after women waving their dicks, move to your fair city to take advantage of your compassion, etc. (Actual events from this week)
The point really is resort to violence. If people can't get access to guns, I'm confident they can be enterprising enough to find other ways to defend themselves and their property.
Junkies tend to be people with overwhelming problems who can't make their lives work. Throwing people in jail is usually not a means to make their lives suddenly start working.
I think you solve problems like widespread drug use by repairing the tattered social fabric that of this country which has taken such a toll on so many of the people who live here.
What about not ruining everyone else’s lives and the public health issues these people create? Not a fan of conservative ideology, but surely there is some level of personal responsibility and accountability they have towards the public? And when they betray that buy shitting on public areas or leaving needles near playgrounds, I think it’s not only reasonable but necessary to incarcerate them—for their own good and the public’s.
Lack of adequate housing supply is a contributing factor to homelessness. If you are just throwing people in jail and not addressing issues of that ilk, it rapidly becomes unsustainable.
Criminals in jail are a burden on society. Functional, productive, tax paying citizens are assets to society. Rehabilitation is not charity. It's enlightened self interest.
I'm not advocating for kind of bleeding heart "charity" here.
Interesting. Some of the benefits of decriminalizing can probably only be realized if it's done as a national level, so I'm pretty skeptical of just how successful local initiatives can be.
I wonder how Portugal achieved such supposed success in decriminalizing drug use.
The purpose of this article is different - someone will say "the safety situation in Seattle is terrible because of ultra-liberal drug policies". Then you are supposed to reply with this article as a counter. And New York Times beats The Seattle Times, so you've won the argument.
It's all about providing a counter-narrative to prevent cognitive dissonance.
Eventually a junkie will commit a serious crime against one of the tech luminaries that live in and around Seattle. I’m guessing that the lax enforcement environment will be gone within about a day of that incident.
Seattle is playing with fire here. I wouldn’t set foot in a city where hard drug use is tolerated, and seemingly celebrated, by many of the people that live there. Junkies will do whatever is necessary to get their next fix. It seems like a bad idea to be anywhere near a city with policies that both attract and help create them.
I dunno, may be you are right -- that the "right" person hasn't been assaulted, raped or killed yet.
Certainly, the high profile stabbing in front of Nordstroms didn't do much. Nor, did much change when the homeless guy was stopped from throwing a women on her way to work off an I-5 overpass. Or the lady who was raped by the homeless guy at the U-district car dealership after dropping her car off for an oil change on her way to work in the morning.
I assume it would have to be someone connected to the local government. It took about five seconds to change the 2nd Ave bike lanes when a city employee was killed riding her bike down there.
Your last graf implies that there was some nefarious favoritism that gave a turbo boost to Seattle's 2nd Ave bike lane project, due to the connectedness of the woman killed shortly before it took effect.
If you are referring to the well known tragic death of Sher Kung in August 2014, just before the September 2014 scheduled opening of the 2nd Ave bike lane, you are very wrong. The project had been underway long before that.
There was a video of a man in a Seattle target last year.
Guy goes on a 15 min rampage in downtown and nobody shows up to stop him. That’s the state of decriminalization we have hit.
I fully support legalizing all drugs, but don't understand why the latest wave of criminal justice reform tolerates property crimes. Crimes like smash and grabs, purse snatching, bike thefts, vandalism, littering, and shoplifting clearly have defined victims and lower the quality of life for everyone.
It's perfectly possible to be a heroin addict and an upstanding citizen at the same time. The same cannot be said of a bike thief. The vast majority of even hardcore homeless drug addicts do not engage in malicious property crimes. It's only a small fraction, that also tends to be the most violent and socially pathological.
Vigorous enforcement of property crime improves the life for everyone in the city. Doubly so for the otherwise law-abiding drug users, who most often bear the worse brunt of the anti-social property criminals. The best way to sell drug policy reform to law and order conservatives is to redirect those resources to non-victimless crimes. Not just throw your hands up in the air and give up on enforcing any laws whatsoever.
>I fully support legalizing all drugs, but don't understand why the latest wave of criminal justice reform tolerates property crimes.
This so much!
You're not a criminal because you're doing heroin or whatever, you're a criminal because you're stealing everything that isn't nailed down, harassing and threatening people in the neighborhood, attempting to break into houses repeatedly.
This is all happening to my neighbors and I.
But the police do nothing.
Yeah I'm not sure I get it either. The problem was that throwing heroin addicts in prison for 5 years doesn't rehabilitate them or solve anything. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be held liable for crimes they commit while high.
The alternative is often vigilante justice, which is worse for everyone. Apparently the 'coffee throwing guy' was beaten by the child's father after he threw coffee - certainly an understandable reaction from a father who saw his child assaulted. But that's going to leave a mark on everyone - Calderon included
It's like society has forgotten why prisons exist -- to protect the general populous from people who are dangerous.
Imprisoning someone for using drugs is a terrible way to use the prison system, because they're not harming anyone. However, not imprisoning someone who steals, vandalizes, and harms others, is equally faulty.
I would need quote on the 'vast majority' claim. You can't leave a bike for 10 minutes in downtown Seattle for a reason, homeless heroin addicts gets their drug and resource to procure those drug _somewhere_.
I have left my bike unlocked, and even my automobile unlocked with its keys in it, many time and never been burgled. (Once in Boston my bike accessories were stolen off my bike.)
Even if every bike is stolen by an addict, that doesn't mean most addicts are doing the stealing.
Isn't part of the problem here the consequences of charging / jailing / sentencing / imprisoning people in the us? There largely is no rehabilitation / mental health support happening while imprisoned (with jails being worse on average iirc). Being convicted of a crime increases recidivism in a lot of areas (I assume largely due to the fact that it gets much harder to ever get/keep jobs, and due to network effects). Fees and fines (and then fees/fines for not being able to pay them, for financial, organizational, and other reasons) for justice system contacts also have severe effects on a lot of places.
With that in mind not convicting people of some crimes can make more sense (even if surely not right in all).
Property crime is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Consider this: wage theft results in over double the losses of all other property crimes COMBINED, yet we don't throw bosses who rob their workers of earned pay in jail.
Is this a "just asking questions" post? (edit: haha based on the downvotes it suuuuure was.)
It's not about tolerating property crime, it's about recognizing a) property crime is a symptom of the problem b) people suffering from property crime is a super minor problem c) the real, immediate problem is that we have thousands of homeless/addicts/mentally ill people who are suffering way more than someone who lost their bike d) it is known that you can't arrest your way out of this problem.
So, where to put resources? Obviously, spending a lot of resources on constantly arresting people is a massive waste of money and people will just be back out on the streets eventually doing the same shit. So that's not a good use of police / court system / prison system time and taxpayer money. We need to go after the root of the problem -- untreated mental illness, addiction, homelessness, etc. That is why enforcement of petty crimes is a low concern.
... this is probably news to people actually living in Seattle. (Edit: the title was originally, "Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs")
A place where meth heads attack people with pitchforks in the street a few days after being released from prison on a suspended sentence.
I'm all for decriminalization, but Seattle's current approach is to decriminalize not only drugs, but a host of other actual crimes, like public intoxication, public camping, shop lifting, harassment, etc.
When people say things like this, I do have to wonder if they've ever lived in a city before. Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s.
There is just a certain amount of crime and drug use that will always exist in the big city. No amount of 'tough on crime' policing will make it go away.
I suspect you aren't familiar with NYC from the 70s through the mid 90s. It was as bad then as SF is now. Giuliani completely transformed Manhattan and made the streets and parks usable again, and they stayed that way for a while. It's going downhill fast, though. Penn Station and Port Authority are turning into shooting galleries again, there are encampments growing, bodily waste on the sidewalks, and plenty of harassment. Give it another few years of hands-off policies and it'll be as bad as the west coast cities.
Or Tokyo, for that matter. That's about as urban as you can get on Earth, with none of the 'grittiness' that so many West coast city-dwellers seem to think is inherent to cities. And in a comparable democracy, no less.
This is a pretty important point. Everything wrong with big American cities is normalized. If you don't like it, you're told to just go to the suburb. But it's all solvable and are usually consequences of policies as well as cultural problems. Many cities in the world just don't have these problems.
Suburbs are how America does segregation and separate but equal legally. We have “cities” next to major urban centers that can keep all their taxes dollars locally and shift their problems to urban centers. If you live in a nice neighborhood in the city of Seattle a good chunk of your money goes to fund poor parts of town and the homeless industry. Half a mile away the neighboring town keeps all its money for the local school and sends its homeless people to Seattle.
I feel the same way about Toronto. Over triple the population of SF or Seattle, yet the problems I see described in this article are almost unthinkable here.
That's just objectively wrong. NYC has a higher homeless population both in sheer volume and per 100,000 people. So what is NYC doing to stop the growth of their homeless population beyond making it out of sight and out of mind?
If their homeless population is far less dangerous and destructive to the lives of all the other citizens that live there, then they're doing _something_ right, even if their homeless population is somewhat bigger per capita.
NYC has a right to shelter law. They also have enforcement of basic public space issues like camping and being in parks overnight, or petty street crime.
Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.
I agree, after living in NYC my jaw did drop when I got to Seattle. I found Seattle to be incredibly clean, open, and welcoming – far less dingy and polluted than where I lived in Manhattan. Green everywhere. Never felt unsafe or taken advantage of. Eventually I moved from NYC to Seattle, and I don't think I'd ever move back.
Since I've been here, over the past 8-ish years, the homeless problem hasn't (in my opinion) become much more of a problem so much as it's become much more of a political issue. It's hard for me to tell if drug use and violence are actually up, or if reporting is up. When I visited in 2011, we were looking at an apartment that was listed on 1st Ave in Pioneer Square. We were charmed by the tree-lined street and the quaint shops leading from the Fairmont downtown toward Pioneer Square, but when we turned toward Occidental Sq (maybe 8 or 9am) we were suddenly in a mass of transient/homeless peoples waking up on the cobblestone. There were dozens of people, rolling up sleeping backs, loading backpacks, congregating. This was before the food trucks and the Weyerhauser building and the tied down tables and chairs and open-air ping pong tables displaced them, and even though it was jarring it also felt humane in a weird way that there was a place, out of the way, where they could go and be undisturbed. Pioneer Square also, of course, is where most of the homeless help centers are located (clinics, food banks, shelters).
But as the city has grown denser and real estate developers continue to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of the city, these people have nowhere to go so they are forced out of the margins and into everyone else's line of sight and that's really the problem. In NYC it's not such a big deal, because NYC is already acclimated to this density that the homeless problem there is simply ignored. The indifference I witnessed toward the homeless in NYC was crazy to me when I moved there at first from the 'burbs... people walking around a guy masturbating on the sidewalk as they hopped out of their cabs, moaning about the delays in the subway when a homeless person was killed in a subway tunnel or soiled a car in the middle of summer. If only all of the U.S. cities could just "look past" these people instead of focusing so much on what a drag it is to see someone begging for change on my way to have bottomless mimosas.
"It's better now than it was during the worst crime wave in American history -- the 1980s."
You're not wrong, but you're also not setting a very high bar.
I think it's important that cities be safe, livable places. Seattle still is, for the most part. But ask some of your younger, single female friends where they will and will not go at night, and you may be surprised that it includes a large number of neighborhoods.
I think people are also ignoring the fact the drug use might not correlate with the crimes these people are committing. Perhaps they are just mentally ill, with no access to proper care, and are self-medicating. Jailing them will never solve the problem. Affordable healthcare might, however.
But oh no, then we'd have to pay taxes! We don't want a safe city that badly.
Jailing someone who is committing crimes instantly solves that problem. The perpetrator is off the street, unable to commit more crimes.
Treating criminals like victims, instead of showing empathy for the actual victims of these crimes is disgusting.
Honest people should not be made to suffer at the hands of some junkies who can't control their urges and are compelled to commit crimes to feed their addictions.
And it'll "decline" further after this now that petty theft and shooting heroin in full view of the public is not a crime. Abolish all laws and it'll go down to zero, woo-hoo!
I fear that the secondary effect of this will be to attract even more homeless heroin addicts from places where these things are still crimes.
Honest Q: how is crime rate measured? If police stopped enforcing laws against, say, shoplifting, and the rate of shoplifting did not change, would the crime rate go down?
Yes, most crime rate statistics are based on reported crimes.
This is particularly problematic in Seattle. Because many citizens now understand that police won't respond to minor crimes, especially property crimes, people just don't report them at all.
In the past few years, I've personally experienced someone climbing a fence to enter my back yard, shitting in my alley, stealing property from my porch, pissing on my garage, stealing from my trash (multiple times). None of those will show up on crime statistics even though they are illegal because I didn't call in since I knew the cops didn't have the capacity to do anything.
Yeah since drug use is no longer a crime and since possession is legal the number of crimes is down. We could decrease the numbers even more if we fired the remaining police officers.
This is exactly it. It's almost totally a non-issue. I see orange needle caps and the occasional needle, but these junkies aren't attacking everyone, in fact you can just ignore them. I walk around in a dress downtown and on cap hill with zero issues. Never been attacked, assaulted, nothing. They lay in parks on cardboard and trash, but...so? Are they doing anything illegal?
Comfortable salaried people love to make a big issue about it because Seattle isn't scrubbed clean to perfection and they see a mess every once in awhile, but really the city isn't bad at all and isn't full of rampant crime.
We do steam clean the streets in Downtown Seattle (and have been doing that for decades), its part of why Seattle is so much cleaner than other cities.
I think there are victims for public camping but people will argue about the severity of the victimization. For example, I have to step off the sidewalk into the street in order to get by a set of tents.
By that logic, burning down a forest, defacing a public work of art, building a personal home in the middle of a public park, and dynamite fishing a coral reef are not "actual crimes" either.
A good definition of "crime" needs to be able to include action that indirectly harm a large number of potential people. Otherwise, you are powerless to address the tragedy of the commons.
This implies that you have data around if drug users and non-drug users who commit crimes are punished differently, or that you are just flippantly responding to a well thought out comment. In the spirit of HN, I'll assume it is the former. Can you show that data?
Certain methods of punishment don’t work for people with no assets. So if the city might fine someone with money a couple hundred bucks for urinating on a public building, the city won’t bother with a destitute addict as it’s not going to gain them money and might embarrass government officials. Here is a similar example https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/03/05/25878343/when-a-...
If I park illegally and get towed well tough shit, if van dweller gets towed the city has violated their rights and it’s terrible. So homeless druggies get free pass to commit all sorts of low level offenses that everyone else gets crazy fines for.
Yet "Moms for Seattle" can't be bothered to take a real photo of homelessness affecting Seattle's parks :c
Those advocating for harsher handling of homelessness in Seattle have repeatedly shown themselves to be incompetent and callous. It'd be great if they could make an effort, like actually voting, rather than phoning it in and throwing money at blatantly photoshopped mailers.
Yeah, this minimizing comment and ones like it are one of the reasons I left Seattle to live in Cape Town, a city with one of the highest percentage of homeless people in the world. Guess what? I feel safer in parks here.
Volunteer park is fine, and some of the parks up the hill are fine, but I've seen multiple children get pricked with used needless and I've been threatened by people in the park. I've been on the bus with my son with people openly smoking meth. I've been on the bus with my son where a man was punched in the throat for being Indian.
I don't know how you can live in that city and do anything without being exposed to this.
We have real issues in Seattle, but having frank conversations about it has been quite troublesome, too many people want to talk about feels rather than facts, leading to local satire like this: http://theneedling.com/2019/02/05/magnolia-named-worlds-most...
Taking a picture of a tent is not doxing. They could've even used the tent platform in the playground at gasworks with their own tent but they could not be bothered to lift a finger :c
This article is disingenuous at best. I don’t support the war on drugs, but Seattle’s handling of the situation isn’t close to a model for other cities. As someone who lived here all my life, it’s been a complete disaster. I’m frankly really disappointed in the NYTimes for publishing this garbage.
He doesn’t go into the negatives of what the policies in Seattle has done to the city until so far later in the article. The local officials are very lax on drug use, homelessness.
We have entire tent cities. Petty crime is pretty high. The police won’t bother to respond if you report a car break in, for example. There’s trash littered on practically any street that has tents. Some of these folks are addicts and some aren’t but to say Seattle has solved this problem - you mean we just ignore laws and allow anyone to do whatever they want. Repeat criminal who was arrested last week? Here, we’ll keep you for an hour maybe and you’ll definitely be out by tomorrow.
I’m not advocating jailing all drug use so private prisons get rich, but Seattle’s extreme leftist take on pretending like the problem hasn’t been a disaster for the city is just absurd.
If you think the west coast has insane policies, then you should really try living elsewhere for a bit of perspective.
I've lived in WA, CA, VA and TX. No state has sane policies and the more I've moved, the more I've realized this. WA still ranks at the top of my list for states to live in.
Noted! Though I've lived in NYC before, and I think it has, at a glance, pretty sane policies for a giant diverse city (though I could be totally wrong!). It felt a lot safer there than it does in SF on a day-to-day basis. That's where I was planning on going.
Why can't this person be a serice worker, a gig worker or a white collar worker? What about living in a camper with a generator tells you this person is "a drug dealer, fence or pimp"? Are there not other explanations other than labeling this person/these people as groups you do not like?
Since his camp was isolated (not in a tent city) I figured he would have to stick around all day to prevent the theft of things like his generator. Or, maybe homeless don't steal from each other?
Also, I guess he could be a remote SWE for google or something like that.
> “You’ve got a guy shooting heroin on the street, and the cop is supposed to say, ‘You O.K.?’” grumbled one law enforcement officer in Seattle. (In fact, an officer would typically confiscate the heroin, admonish the user and move on.) Some residents worry that when the city ignores its own laws on the books and tolerates people openly abusing narcotics, it takes a step toward incivility that will eventually result in chaos and crime. There’s also a legitimate argument that the threat of prison is sometimes necessary to motivate users to participate in treatment programs.
What non-drug user would want to live in a town where someone shooting heroin in public is not removed from the street? I know I wouldn't.
I'm not saying lock em up and throw away the key but you can't just move on and pretend nothing happened. If you're going to provide treatment in lieu of jail time then it needs to mandatory.
What does confiscating an addict's heroin accomplish? As far as I can tell, all you've done is make a desperate addict far more desperate than they were a moment ago. The situation is only made worse.
Maybe they would move to somewhere else where they can do their drugs in broad daylight in public without cops bothering them. And where commiting crimes to support their drug habit are unchallenged.
> One could say it incentivizes them to keep it at home, out of view of minors.
Where do you expect homeless (and mentally ill) people to do their drugs?
The issue is far more complicated then that.
I don't think we have the political will to round up a bunch of homeless people and criminals and take care of them in a humane manner. We probably can't even agree on what is considered a humane and ethical way to take care of homeless and mentally ill people who probably don't want to be confined to treatment against their will.
This might break the hacker news civility rules, but fuck this. Heroin has torn my family apart, resulted in multiple deaths (some of entirely unrelated people), and ruined my childhood. These people aren't pity props in some sort of fucked up game, they're humans and they're hurting themselves.
I'm sorry for all of your losses and I agree, they're hurting themselves and others. So let's treat them like humans who need connection & acceptance & healing, instead of animals who need caging, as well as offer healing and protection to those close to them.
Compassion and pity are NOT the same thing. The former is about providing mutual aid and solidarity, the latter is enabling, codependent, and charitable.
I have a 10-month old child. We are raising them very differently from the way a fear-avoidant society might.
As such, this is not the first time I've expressed decisions we're making that someone has suggested or even threatened to call CPS.
We have multiple mandatory reporters closely involved in helping raise our child. We'll be more than happy to take them along with us to learn about various things that are all around them in the world. This will include things like taking our child to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where active drug users may exist, and may excuse themselves to go to the bathroom to shoot up. We will, of course, only be bringing our child into such a context with their consent (which children are definitely able to give in a variety of ways, even if they may not fully comprehend what's happening). It's our job to keep our child safe in these environments, which means first teaching them how to heal from trauma and maybe waiting til they've displayed their ability to do so before taking them.
Regardless, this is a much more careful and well-thought lesson than simply "letting them near active drug users" which we cannot ever be certain of and refuse to pretend as though that's possible. We don't live in denial like that.
I'm an addict of many behaviors and my recovery's going incredibly well. Chemical addictions come with added complications of side effects from the chemicals doing their own rewiring, but it's the behavior of escaping reality that's rewiring the reward center. As a result, there's a lot of overlap between recovering from behavioral and chemical addictions.
Also, please feel free to call CPS on us at any time. My name is my username and I live in Port Townsend, WA. I look forward to developing a working relationship with people who are interested in the well-being of my child* because raising them is an active experiment in applying the sciences of culture hacking, well-being, and learning how to learn in as loving of a manner as possible.
(* Note, I'm not sure if you're actually interested in my child's well-being, as CPS and the foster system are NOTORIOUS for systemically traumatizing children. Yes, there are some systems not harming children or doing so minimally...so in spite of being a system of denying parents and children autonomy, which is a need for thriving...but I'm guessing you didn't look into the state of CPS near me to assess whether or not promoting calling them was actually in my child's interest. If you didn't, would you be willing to do your homework before making similar comments to other parents, as they may not have the emotional intelligence I have cultivated to keep from spiraling into fear? If not, would you be willing to continue making them toward me when you want to do so, so as to at least redirect your potentially harmful behavior? There's a lot of people out there, especially parents, who're suffering from Complex PTSD and undiagnosed because CPTSD is a new diagnosis and official diagnoses require access to certain types of privilege. Let's help educate them and everyone else about CPTSD and how to heal, not threaten them with violence, which is what threatening to call the state on someone is, since the state is designed with violence at its core.)
I think he was alluding to non-injected drug use, like drinking beer or smoking weed.
Of course by the time injecting street drugs into your veins seems like your least-bad option, you're in a pretty desperate place and maybe not someone that kids should be around while you're using.
I thought the post I was replying to was implying that people on drugs are inherently dangerous to be around, so all I was really trying to suggest is that there are a lot of people who appear "respectable" but are hiding a serious drug habit.
it seems that sempron64 meant people who are literally in the act of shooting up. I guess I can understand not wanting a child to see that, although I question whether that's really as bad as we are supposed to think. it can certainly be unsettling to see for the first time, but all it ever suggests to me is that the person has a truly miserable life. I honestly doubt that it's as bad as pervasive images of people drinking, smoking, partying and having a good time. the latter seems a lot more likely to lead an impressionable mind astray.
>What non-drug user would want to live in a town where someone shooting heroin in public is not removed from the street? I know I wouldn't.
I was in Portland and watched a guy shooting up on a bench middle of the day, tons of people around, he was screaming for no one to look at him, police at the other end of the block.
Neither is allowing schizophrenics, petty criminals and drug addicts to harm themselves and others, on the assumption that there's no such thing as normative civil behaviour. So that they might be "healed" by being left to their own devices, someone else needs to be harmed.
That someone is usually the poor naive bougie who thought that by paying property taxes and having a job, he could expect to be able to retain possession of his bike && not have to step over piles of human excrement on the way to the shop down the corner.
Singapore seems to avoid having these problems, as does Shanghai. So, while authoritarianism isn't about healing, that really isn't a primary function of state. Keeping order, maintaining a monopoly on violence, and maybe providing against certain preventable evils is really more why we have governments.
Then maybe it's time for governments to evolve because why AREN'T they being oriented toward collective and individual well-being, which would include healing?
And I never claimed leaving people to their own devices was a healing modality, either.
We need to expand the concept of responsibility to be aligned with reality. I'm at least partially responsible for everything that hapoen to me after this next breath. Same for you and yours. And I am also partially responsible for everything in happening in the world. Same for you.
Let's start from this perspective and redesign government to be something everyone can love and that is loving. Right now, it's a pretty gross construct that harms way more people in much more severe ways than drug addicts, petty criminals, and people struggling with mental issues.
> why AREN'T they being oriented toward collective and individual well-being
Because these are opposing forces. It improves my individual well-being to be able to steal yachts from the marina, drive them around, and set them on fire. But it doesn't improve the collective well-being of the community — including its yacht owners — for me to be able to do that. It improves the collective well-being of a community to take a dangerously mentally ill person and lock them up forever so that they aren't a threat to others. It does not do much that person's well-being.
Obviously, there are good policies that thread the needle. It is not a zero-sum game. But it is absolutely a game where not everyone can get what they want and very hard choices and sacrifices must be made.
> redesign government to be something everyone can love and that is loving.
There are actual serial killers, rapists, child traffickers, and abusers out there. They are in the minority. But a key function of government is to protect the majority from that minority. No government that protects us from those bad actors is going to be loved by those bad actors.
That is lovely sentiment; however, I fear that I will ride a space elevator before I ever have the chance to live in regime managed for the furtherance of my and my neighbors' well-being. It's nice to dream, though.
If it doesn't exist, it's because you haven't created it.
Wanna help me with the task of redesigning government to focus on well-being from the very bottom by rewriting the Declaration of Independence as a Song for Autonomous Interdependence, changing the unrealistic concepts in it?
It'll be easy. I give you a song lyric and you tell me if you think it's a lovely sentiment or not. If so, we're probably on the right track because the things we need can be the hardest to imagine.
> Your perspective promotes traumatizing systems. You are therefore a danger to yourself and society.
> If you are locked up as a result of this, will the reeducation take?
Ha! If offending people was illegal I'd have been in prison a long time ago.
> Thought experiment aside, you don't know what other people need and forcing your ideas onto them is how we get into these messes in the first place.
I'm not forcing my ideas on anyone. These are the laws collectively decided by us and and forefathers. As a group we've decided that we do not want people shooting heroin on our streets and we've made the practice illegal.
> Authoritarianism isn't a healing modality.
I'd argue it authoritarianism to force a law abiding member of society to put up with this craziness in their communities. The people I feel the most sorry for are on the lower end of the income scale that do not have the financial means to vote with their feet.
The commenter is pretty clearly talking about working people who can't up and move somewhere else because they don't work in Big Tech. Eventually those of means will quit this city, if it really does get bad enough, but people just getting by can't.
You get to vote with your thoughts, actions, and words on the daily.
I don't support unjust laws. If you do, cool. It's still authoritarianism.
And nobody's forcing you to put up with it, as evidenced by you holding a mindset of not putting up with it. Acceptance is a choice and you are allowed to not choose it, as you currently demonstrate.
Just because the law makers haven't yet criminalized your lack of compassion doesn't mean it'll be justice if they do and then come for you. So why support unjust laws pointed toward others?
I've seen plenty of people shooting drugs in Seattle. So what? As long as they're not out attacking people or giving it to kids or something, I could care less what they do to themselves.
Seattle has a different mindset, it always has, its just the new Amazon & Tech population is trying to change the culture.
> What non-drug user would want to live in a town where someone shooting heroin in public is not removed from the street? I know I wouldn't.
It really depends on the broader systematic picture.
If drug addicts fear consequences to the point of arming themselves and attacking strangers to avoid arrest and maintain supply, that's bad.
If they're able to demonstrate victimless crime, get their gear confiscated and force to keep it to themselves in their own homes or ask for help from the community without threat of incarceration, that's good.
So we really have to look at how it plays out in reality. It's not enough to make a black or white decision based on a hypothetical scenario. Furthermore, we need to consider the impact of judgement by police and rehab operators. Familiarity with the individuals and difficult-to-quantify details of each scenario may make the decision between admonishment, incarceration and forced rehab.
That said, these don't have to be ambiguous clouds of blurry judgement. We can prototype decision trees and debate about them.
As a resident, Seattle's drug policy seems okay. I think the goal of harm reduction, trust building, and getting people back on track is a laudable goal. People need a pathway back, not to keep being kicked down.
But we need higher standards about the anti-social behaviors that are comorbid to drug use. The problem isn't that people are on narcotics. It's at least _possible_ to be a functional member of society while on opiates, and I don't think someone should be wrung through the legal system for having the wrong things in their blood for a bit.
The problem is tent cities burning trash under the overpass. Lines of disheveled camper vans near the shopping centers draining their sewage into open buckets on the street (thank god they're kind enough to use a bucket) Panhandlers harassing residents at such scale that all but the most resilient citizens grimace at the thought of walking through their city center. Some of these people seem not to have drug problems at all.
I'm okay with low standards about drug policy enforcement, so long as it's coupled with high standards about behavior in the public space.
It's the second half that Seattle has yet to solve.
Seattle needs more public dumpsters and sewage receptacles for non-landowners/land-renters.
When London was covered in rivers of shit in the 19th Century because there was no sanitation infrastructure, was that because the citizens were anti-social criminals? Or was is a societal problem that needed a funded solution?
So same as Portugal has been doing for decades - decriminalise small use and treat it as a public health problem instead of making average citizens into criminals.
Portugal has a lot of bad things to it, but having no war on drugs has made it into one of the most peaceful countries on earth. And marijuana usage is pretty low, Last I checked. Why? Probably because it’s not a special thing.
I’ve always pondered why they only did it there, and I’ve been routinely disappointed to move to the Uk and understand how horrible the drug problem is here. People take ketamine and OD in toilets here.
Portugal's use spiked up in the same way for a few years before ramping down. Most places who legalize experience the same sort of spike then a reduction.
Well my impressions is that they de facto trying to adjust while keeping de jure the same situation. I did not read the whole article however, just skimmed it as fast as I could.
Interesting take on the situation - one key difference is I don’t feel any less safe now than 10 years ago walking around. I DO see more “open” use, and people walking around obviously on something, especially by the homeless (which makes sense even if they’re not using at a higher level). I don’t see the social services much though. IMO they could use more visibility. The prevailing opinion seems like we do “nothing”.
I’d like to see the stats on mortality and quality of life to those that get treatment though. It can’t be worse than locking nonviolent people up.
What are you expecting, naxolone-wielding ninjas? Most social service work happens in offices, shelters, medical facilities and various volunteer orgs.
I certainly agree that we could do with a lot more of it.
The article mentions how it's difficult to reallocate the money saved on the court/prison system to the public health needs. Imagine what could be done if the same amount of money going towards imprisoning someone was instead spent on social services. Instead its easier for our politicians to stay "rah-rah" on punitive action.
Imagine if we funded schools so kids could learn useful skills, and raised a progressive income tax so the working poor could keep more of what they earn!
We don't have sufficent funding of social services to provide navigation teams and counselors to all of the visibly homeless (those you see on the street), never mind the thousands living in their cars in Seattle (the invisible homeless).
Seattle is doing what it can, but we need state and federal action to go further. We can't single handedly solve the severe wealth stratification that is worsening day by day :c
>I don’t feel any less safe now than 10 years ago walking around
As someone who has trained and trained with police... I can tell you those words are dangerous. So many people who gets their lives upturned by some mostly preventable event has used those words.
Pay attention, no matter where you live. Personally if people are shooting up near me and the police are selectively enforcing the law, “feel safe” isn’t going to be in my vocabulary, but I don’t know you or what your situation is. That’s just my view from being aware of how fast things can go bad.
>Interesting take on the situation - one key difference is I don’t feel any less safe now than 10 years ago walking around.
Exactly. I don't feel unsafe walking around Seattle at all, even with junkies screaming their heads off. You learn that they're in their own universe and don't really care about you.
> In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with hard drugs and more on the public health toolbox.
America's puritanical urges result in more self-harm than anything else. So much of the way our nation is structured is based on some ancient idea that you have to live clean and work hard in order to get to heaven. That is combined with a sense of justified sadism: if we catch someone not living up to these ideals, it is appropriate to punish them, and appropriate to take pleasure in punishing them.
The War on Drugs was never about public health. It was about 1. controlling minorities, and 2. moral superiority. So there's absolutely no surprise that a health-based approach is showing better results than a punishment-based approach.
.. and so further, the pre-determined dualism argues, if you aren't up to being 'perfect', you obvously must be a 'bad person', creating an internal self-shame which can't easily be dealt with, other than conforming to the 'bad' archetype..
If you think there is more drug-related crime and public heroin injections in "puritan" US cities like Seattle vs European cities like Frankfurt or Amsterdam... you must not travel very much.
Anecdotally, I observed daytime public intravenous drug use within my first 3 hours on the ground in Frankfurt a few years ago. I don't know exactly where, but it was within walking radius of the main train station. I think it was in/adjacent to some kind of red-light district.
You understand that the whole point of this article is that Seattle is turning away from the traditional view of drug use - a moral failing that needs to be punished - and toward a more modern view - a medical condition that needs treatment - right?
Punishment of drug use does nothing to prevent drug use. Its only value, therefore, is sadism.
I wasn't replying to the article, I was responding to your claim that this change (as already exists in non-US cities) would lead to better results.
I support decriminalization on purely moral grounds, but am skeptical this will lead to less (and not more) drug-related crime or public use of hard drugs, based on my anecdotal observations in Europe.
That's rather condescending and ignorant. It has nothing to do with puritanical urges, it has to do with personal responsibility and everyone being responsible for their own actions, which results in having to suffer the personal consequences without having the right to impose oneself on others by one's own choices in life.
Unfortunately, this whole drug situation in the USA has gotten, like many things, totally out of hand through gaslighting abusive actions by those who claim to want to "help" and make things better, but instead have nothing but a record and history of making things worse, which they immediately sweep under the rug the second even they can't ignore their constant, repeated, and typical failures.
What this "caring" approach smells of to me is a kind of stasis, where the helper-syndrome types get to feel good about themselves, while getting rich as org directors, and also normalizing drug cartel operations. The Drug cartels and organized drug criminals are actually a real domestic terror and civil threat to society and communities as they kill and destroy lives by the hundreds of thousands and devastate lives by the millions every single year.
I do agree that throwing users in prison is nonsense, even though often ( and I know people who can attest to this ) it is the thing that saves them from the drug and it also leads to users giving up people on the chain towards the sources of the chemical warfare that is waged on the American people.
I also agree, this whole cottage industry of drug related careers and fortunes, whether it's NGOs or DEA, is an utter mess and corrupted. What really should be happening is that all drug producers, smugglers, transporters, and dealers be declared the perpetrators of crimes against humanity that they are and they should be treated like the enemies in war that they are, as they engage in chemical warfare that kills 80,000 people every year and destroys millions of lives and families and pillages billions and trillions of dollars.
It should be a scorched earth tactic against smugglers, dealers, and producers ... a merciless, ruthless, hunt for these people that are then erased as the war criminals and pestilence on humanity they are ... the mass murderers they are.
But that's from someone that actually hates the misery and suffering and death that drugs cause. I do not get the sense that most people actually care one iota about the 80,000 people that die every year, not to count the thousands who commit suicide due to addiction. All those who do not want to end it once and for all with direct, hard, and merciless action are complicit in and guilty of supporting the murders by the drug cartels and criminals against humanity.
> It should be a scorched earth tactic against smugglers, dealers, and producers ... a merciless, ruthless, hunt for these people that are then erased as the war criminals and pestilence on humanity they are ... the mass murderers they are.
What if, instead, we mercilessly and ruthlessly cut off their source of money: the premium people pay for illegal drugs exactly because they are illegal? Bootleggers weren't put out of business by Elliot Ness, they were put out of business by the end of prohibition.
There's strict liability (without legal regulated supply we have essentially zero liability) and there's near-genocide.
"Scorched Earth", "erased as the war criminals and pestilence on humanity they are", further abused, forced into same-sex incarcerated relationships. We've tried this. It hasn't solved yet.
"Just kill them" for climbing without a rope? For risking their long-term health for short-term relief from physical and mental trauma and subsequent addiction, for not violating anyone else's rights but their own, you think you have the right (and moral obligation!) to violate their rights? Because they're inferior. They're an eyesore. "Eliminate the weak!" (who aren't violating the rights of others). Can you think of groups of people in human history who have taken that approach, violated the rights of others, and been cured by subsequent prison?
With the savings from not paying $50,000 a year for learn-to-silently-move-tax-free-contraband-in-cool-school incarceration and attempted concurrent rehabilitation (while the right to address personal health matters is denied), there should be plenty of money to prosecute property crime and littering and biohazards. Let me just reward you with food, a place to stay, gangs, and zero need for personal financial responsibility.
You litter in the street, the park, an alleyway, where f'ing kids play, you spend some of your time cleaning that s' up. For free. Because that's violating the rights of other people.
The War of Drugs, like most things, is abused by the rich and powerful.
But would you seriously look a Black mother or father in their face and tell her that her child is dead (and they are broke) because he freed himself from the oppressive Puritanical culture and enjoyed drugging himself to death and stealing their resources to feed his addiction?
"Still, it shocks many Americans to see no criminal penalty for using drugs illegally"
It only shocks Boomers. Their only answer to 'crime' was to keep making laws harsher until all the jail cells were full. Then to build more jail cells.
There's no need to have criminal penalties for drug use in the first place. What we want less of isn't drug use, it's the anti-social behaviors and health issues that often stem from drug use. Look at the other comments here - no one is upset with the mere ingestion of substances, they are complaining about the behaviors they see on the streets. Behaviors that impact the rest of use negatively. And we all know that a lot of that behavior has nothing to do with drug use in the first place. But it's a lot harder to deal with the behavior issue because then you're dealing with things like mental health issues and large-scale economic issues, on top of drug abuse.
It's so much easier to just use drugs as a scapegoat and start locking people up. Like the Boomers did! But we know that doing so is monumentally stupid and ineffective so we need a different way. Props to Seattle for trying a different way, but just as we've seen here in SF, these half-assed measures do as much to encourage anti-social behavior as they do to mitigate it. I think these West Coast cities being besieged by the nice-weather homelessness epidemic (and associated drug use) are going to have to come up with something a little tougher than what they've found the political will for so far. But we also have to acknowledge that we can't, won't and never should return to the idiotic War on Drugs.
They're living in tents surrounded by rats, garbage, raw sewage and chasing away residents and business. Are these cities gaining taxpayers and businesses, or losing them? How happy are the residents of these cities with these conditions who pay for it all? You're very compassionate allowing people to decay on the streets. Congrats on your "win." What you won, I don't know. I see more misery than ever before. At least they can get their drugs without consequence now. I'm sure they're happy for that while they waste away in front of our eyes. At least you can say you were acting in a compassionate way, even while the results are completely contrary. Brownie points for you.
Yea the ubiquitous property crime, tents on public land/parks, needles on streets/greenspaces/tossed on our lawn, ... Seattle has DEFINITELY figured it out. Is this article satire? Because it seems totally disconnected from reality on the ground in Seattle. This was a beautiful city that is being ruined by progressive policy/selective law enforcement, and it is riding on the coattails of a strong local economy. Right now we are on the fast track to becoming just as trashed up as SF.
Whoa. Using Seattle as a positive story in the war on drugs seems...highly questionable. The city has been essentially destroyed by junkie infestation, enabled by (possibly well-meaning) people.
As much as the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the local Sinclair affiliates might scream that Seattle is wrecked, people and businesses are still moving here, our economy is growing, and massive redevelopment is occuring.
One other place to pay attention to is Shelton, WA, they have a very interesting communal approach to homelessness and providing services, which has built a strong community that wooed some of my friends to buy and retire in Shelton.
>people and businesses are still moving here, our economy is growing, and massive redevelopment is occuring.
Yes, despite these massive social problems. The economic growth is not caused by drug decriminalization, so I'm not sure why you're loosely associating the two. One uncorrelated bad thing is not seen as the "price" for another uncorrelated good thing.
People move here and the economy is growing because of tech. Do any of these employers support the city of Seattle’s policies on allowing people to openly shoot up in the streets?
Its significantly safer than San Diego & Irvine IMO, both of which still criminalize homelessness and have had Hepatitis outbreaks due to these ineffective policies.
Google, Apple, Expedia and Facebook are each building and hiring thousands here in Seattle, our homeless are significantly less aggressive than those I encounter in California.
You sound like you walk around in daylight just seeing people shooting up on every street. Its absolutely not true. Its actually really tough to find someone shooting drugs unless you're really looking at night hours. It's honestly not as big of an issue as Sinclair makes it out to be.
The fact is that visibility is the first step to recovery. You can arrest them, hide them or try to move them around but it doesn't change the fact that they exist. It just makes it so you don't have to look at the problem, which is really the American thing. Better to hide the problem than solve it.
These kind of efforts take time to take root. As people do things like this in public, that means more opportunity for social services to reach out and try to solve the problem. In 10-15 years you'll see drug usage rates drop as addicts can seek help for their problem without vilification or risk to having their lives destroyed.
Wow, Seattle has turned worse over the last few years. At some parts downtown its nearly as bad as SF. I don't think Seattle has figured out anything...
I currently live in pioneer square, close to one of the homeless shelters. Here are some of the things I have seen in the last 1.5 years:
1. People openly shitting on the sidewalk.
2. Ambulances carrying away a junkie that overdosed and
died in a doorwell
3. Having to push a sleeping person out of the way of the doorwell just to leave my apartment
4. random screaming, for hours almost every night
5. my girlfriend gets constantly harrassed
6. I puked in the alley our moving truck was in while moving in because there was so much human feces.
7. A naked person crabwalking down a hill
8. someone ripped a metal garbage can off of its stand,
grabbed a vodka bottle that was inside it and threw it at a passing car, breaking their window
9. mass vandalism and theft of rental bicycles.
10. someone throwing those rental bicycles into the street
11. one homeless person attempted to steal a backpack from another homeless person having a panic attack or overdose WHILE A COP WAS HELPING THEM.
12. bike theft in broad daylight on 1st avenue
13. drug deals and needles. I have a picture of an
abandoned backpack with dozens of needles sprawled around it
14. someone got shot at the 7/11 at night
15. a month later, there was broken glass from a bullet hole at the cherry street cafe.
16. someone using their gun as a pillow
17. tent camping, where i have to walk into the street to get around them.
18. people wandering around in the streets aimlessly, almost getting hit by cars.
19. ive been harrased in restaurants by homeless people that come in and want my food.
20. shopping carts full of trash, parked on the sidewalk every day.
Seattle decriminilizing drugs is one thing. But decriminilizing these kinds of petty crimes has turned pioneer square into something shameful and dangerous.
In my opinion, the city should not decriminilize drugs until AFTER the facilities (rehab and involuntary mental health institutions) are in place.
The non-drug related crimes should not be tolerated either way, and what Dan Satterberg prosecutes/charges with regards to repeat offenders is criminal in itself. His personal agenda is putting the public at risk and he should resign immediately.
I think the ultimate source of Seattle's wishy-washy attitude toward serious crime is summed up nicely by an excerpt from something written by Ilhan Omar:
> The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people — it is the consequence of systematic alienation; people seek violent solutions when the process established for enacting change is inaccessible to them. Fueled by disaffection turned to malice, if the guilty were willing to kill and be killed fighting perceived injustice, imagine the consequence of them hearing, “I believe you can be rehabilitated. I want you to become part of my community, and together we will thrive.” We use this form of distributive justice for patients with chemical dependencies; treatment and societal reintegration. The most effective penance is making these men ambassadors of reform.
Basically, criminals are protestors against the inequity of society. This is a very old idea. Dostoevsky talks about it in Crime and Punishment.
My sense is that, no, people committing crimes are not "protestors" and treating them as such simply doesn't work. Tough love works. Punishment works.
I just hope that, when the pendulum swings back on this nonsense, it doesn't swing back too far the other way. I think it probably will, though.
I'm not a statistical expert. Can someone who is comment on how the population selection exclusions described below may or may not effect the results?
> This evaluation included 318 adults who were suspected of recent violations of the uniform controlled substances act (VUCSA) and/or prostitution offenses and were deemed eligible for LEAD by arresting officers. Individuals were ineligible for participation if any of the following exclusion criteria applied: a) the amount of drugs involved exceeded 3 g (all drug classes were eligible); b) the suspected drug activity involved delivery or possession with intent to deliver and there was reason to believe the suspect was dealing for profit above a subsistence income; c) the individual did not appear amenable to diversion; d) the individual appeared to exploit minors or others in a drug dealing enterprise; e) the individual was suspected of promoting prostitution; f) the individual had a disqualifying criminal history (i.e.,conviction for murder 1 or 2, arson 1 or 2, robbery 1, assault 1,kidnapping, Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act 1, sex offense, or attempt of any of these crimes); g) within the past 10 years, the individual was convicted on a domestic violence offense, robbery 2,assault 2 or 3, burglary 1 or 2, or Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act2;or h) the individual was already involved in King County Drug Diversion Court or Mental Health Court.
lol the passed out addicts I pass every day, the piles of needles, the shit, the broken car windows, and the constant sound of either police or ambulance sirens would beg to differ.
I live in Portland, OR and have been to Seattle many times. This article is disingenuous -- homelessness and hard drug use are blights on these two rapidly growing cities.
I'm deeply critical of our criminal justice system and feel that we need a complete revamping of who and why we criminalize. Instead of stop and frisk like tacits that disproportionately affect minorities we need to refocus our police and penitentiary efforts on bringing these folks into a facility specifically designed to wean them off drugs and rehabilitate.
Optics aside, it seems like the obvious solution is to give people a free supply of safe drugs and a safe place to use them.
Drug users would be better off because their supply would be safe and they wouldn't need to resort to crime to pay for it. Current supervised consumption sites have also been extremely successful at preventing overdose deaths and somewhat successful at directing users who want treatment to the available resources.
The public would be better off because of the same crime reduction, as well as the reduction of violence and disorder stemming from black markets for illegal drugs. Public use would become so much more of a hassle than the legal alternative that it would likely disappear.
The government would be better off because acquiring currently-illegal drugs legally is super cheap (most of them literally grow on trees, or at least plants), and is almost certainly vastly cheaper than the current prohibition strategy.
The obvious problems:
- No one is going to want a consumption site anywhere near their neighborhood.
- Some number of people who would otherwise quit might continue to use if it were cheap and easy.
- Something along the lines of "I'd love to sit around all day watching TV and drinking beer but I have bills to pay and I don't want my taxes paying for some low-life to get high."
Seattle should consider instituting Outpatient Commitment [1] if they haven't already... it could be a good middle ground between throwing addicts in jail and letting them walk free with no obligations.
Drug addiction is a health problem, not a criminal one, but decriminalizing only works in conjunction with a strong mental health care system; judging by the comments here, it sounds like Seattle might be lacking in that area (and they're probably not the only city with this problem).
Deinstitutionalization [2] was a good idea in theory, but the execution seems to have been botched.
Anecdotally, Seattle PD has been more aggressive about going after dealers in the last few months. This has led to more turf wars between gangs and a spike in gun violence in parts of the city as they fight to fill the power vacuum. Not great, but it does indicate that the police have put a dent in the distribution network.
San Francisco beat them to it. People openly shoot up heroin and and smoke meth and nothing happens. I see the same people often right in front of BART escalators selling drugs. It’s created a situation where cops claim crime is going down because the numbers are going down, but that’s because they just ignore the problem and don’t report what’s going on. California legalized hard drugs with Prop 57 and Prop 47 allows people to sell $1000 a day and it’s just a citation. So now there are multiple blocks where tweakers and junkies are selling stole luggage from breaking into rental cars and robbing tourists... Welcome to hell. Cops only give speeding tickets and enforce laws against normal folks. San Francisco is a miserable place for normal folks.
The war on drug users -very profitable for private jailers - certainly failed society. A real 'war on drugs' would mean serious jailtime and fines for kingpins up the supply ladder. Until that becomes palatable, it makes little sense to ruin the lives of their victims.
A recent story in WaPo suggests that ball may be rolling. Author interviewed here:
I am just astounded that this is being spun in such a positive light. It absolutely has had a negative impact on public safety here. They're offered public services, and they refuse them, because many of our "tiny villages" have no-drug-use policies, which they will not abide by.
My city has one of the worst problems with repeat violent drug addicts in the nation (perhaps aside from the Bay) and yet we refuse to jail those who attack members of the public.
Just a few weeks ago we released a known violent repeat offender who four days later tossed a hot coffee on an infant.
Up in Ballard we released a guy who then chased people down with a pitchfork. Another is intent on assaulting the new Park Couriers who's job it is to keep people from open-using heroin in our public parks.
There's a guy down at an I-5 onramp in downtown who keeps trying to throw small women off the overpass. He keeps failing at doing so, and the cops say "Can't do anything, he hasn't actually thrown somebody off". I guess we'll just wait until he succeeds.
Oh well. I guess we'll just keep pointing these people towards social services, which they'll refuse again, lock them up for some token amount of time, and wait for them to harm the public again.
Having had to deal with issues in Seattle myself and having had family members that were the victims of crime in Seattle I'm sympathetic however can't we do a better job of dealing with the violent and deal with addicts without throwing them into an oubliette?
Regarding the idiot trying to throw women over the overpass. Your statement is in error. It's a crime to try to harm people as well and he has in fact been arrested repeatedly.
The problem is they keep dismissing the charges because he is incompetent AND not locking him up for everyone's safety not that they haven't arrested him.
They are currently trying to figure out what to do with him this time now
19-1-02095-1 SEA
STATE OF WASHINGTON VS WILSON, JONATHAN JAMES
Criminal - Active
I think the tough call needs to be made that when someone is obviously mentally ill, homeless and without proper sane supervision, the State should institutionalize them indefinitely.
Someone who is unwell who has committed multiple lesser acts of violence should probably be locked up for at least a little while sufficient for us to figure out if he is going to do it again.
I'd admit my brother if he were doing this. Say what you will about the ghoulish hollywood history of asylums, but surviving on the streets is no environment to improve your mental health.
I truly don't understand the world you inhabit. A prior history of repeated attempts to commit harm are a pretty good predictor of future actions absent a compelling narrative suggesting otherwise.
Ex. Patient A was doing foo harmful behavior until we changed their medication and the devil stopped appearing in their dreams to give them orders.
Patient B had a history of trying to bite nurses noses off but has been well behaved for 2 years now and participating in therapy.
Every first world nation has standards and procedures for detaining people who are unwell and a danger to themselves and others. It usually involves "expert" opinion and bad behavior to get into such a situation and "expert" opinion to get out. There is an entire history of bad behavior and bad science involved here but the substitute for bad science is better science not let people get away with infinite malfeasance because they are nuts.
People are for example sometimes ordered to facilities where they may receive treatment in place of detention in prison or be taken into custody in the process of some bad behavior and be subjected to an evaluation based on their behavior.
What do you suggest we do with the guy trying to throw women into traffic when he is inevitably declared crazy? Dismiss the charges and let him go? Would you rather
-- He get the treatment he so clearly needs.
-- Someone get murdered by him.
-- The citizenry take matters into their own hands and rid themselves of him.
Again, you've added "prior history of violence". In that case we're not incarcerating people because they are disabled, we're incarcerating them for committing crime.
GP post calls for indefinite detention merely for being ill.
> I think the tough call needs to be made that when someone is obviously mentally ill, homeless and without proper sane supervision, the State should institutionalize them indefinitely.
There's nothing in this sentence about violent behaviour.
> Every first world nation has standards and procedures for detaining people who are unwell and a danger to themselves and others. It usually involves "expert" opinion and bad behavior to get into such a situation and "expert" opinion to get out.
> 1. States Parties shall ensure that persons with disabilities, on an equal basis with others:
> a) Enjoy the right to liberty and security of person;
> b) Are not deprived of their liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily, and that any deprivation of liberty is in conformity with the law, and that the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty.
Especially read this bit: "and that the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty."
> III. The absolute prohibition of detention on the basis of impairment
> 6. There are still practices in which States parties allow for the deprivation of liberty on the grounds of actual or perceived impairment.1 In this regard the Committee has established that article 14 does not permit any exceptions whereby persons may be detained on the grounds of their actual or perceived impairment. However, legislation of several States parties, including mental health laws, still provide instances in which persons may be detained on the grounds of their actual or perceived impairment, provided there are other reasons for their detention, including that they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others. This practice is incompatible with article 14; it is discriminatory in nature and amounts to arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
> There is an entire history of bad behavior and bad science involved here but the substitute for bad science is better science not let people get away with infinite malfeasance because they are nuts.
The long history is that people wrongly think mental illness causes violence (it doesn't) or that we can predict violence because of mental illness (we can't). If someone is committing acts of violence you have a criminal justice system that should deal with them, and that may involve forensic hospitals. But they're there because of the violence, not because of the mental illness.
But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that unethical_ban is wrong to call for indeterminate detention of people just because those people are mentally ill.
I don't think the US ever ratified the CRPD and we are talking about Seattle.
Are you seriously arguing that a person of average intelligence can figure out which people wandering around obviously fucked up in the head might hurt them but science can't I don't find this claim credible.
Solving community problems come with community sacrifices. I'm a big proponent of housing first, drug rehab second. It is exponentially harder to get clean without housing and a support network. Decriminalizing drug addiction is a good step in that direction IMO. I think another side of this coin though is we need to bring back institutionalization of mental health care. Implemented today it would be vastly different from the 80's and before because our understanding of therapy has gone from stirring up and injecting memories into people to cognitive behavioral therapy which is very much a feel good form of therapy. I question your statement about the guy on the 1-5 ramp attempting to throw small women off the overpass. How is attempted defined here? Does he grab them? If so he would definitely be arrested for battery charges. I get the impression he is probably chasing them and saying he is going to do it. That seems like a legitimate reason to get someone mental health help but not a legitimate reason to incarcerate someone. As long as we have this gaping hole in our system that just ignores mental health problems or tries to categorize them as criminal we will continue to have this problem.
Housing first is effective for people who want our idea of a 'normal lifestyle'
I think people in this thread are asking you to question your assumption- do you think every drug addict on the west coast wants to hold down a job and live our normal life?
People don't want to be drug addicts and live a poor existence to feed a habit. They have problems, they use the drugs to medicate or fit in, the problems compound with drug use, so they use more to deal with the problems more. They are also ostracized by communities which nobody likes as we are social creatures. The level of that social exclusion probably depends a lot on their current level of wealth. People like having shelter and their physical needs met and while they might not necessarily want normal either, I'd argue a big part of that is more that they have poor coping strategies and don't now how to cope with normal. There will always be people who don't fall into certain strategies for combating homelessness and drug addiction, but this is a much better approach than doing what amounts to nothing.
I definitely disagree. The oscillation is not out of actually wanting to be addicts, it is because they lack the coping skills to deal with trying to get clean and dealing with the world on someone's terms other than their own. There is a big difference between wanting to be something and feeling like you have no other alternatives other than to become that something.
I'm pretty sure that for a lot of these people, their "dream life" would be one in which they're a productive member of society and use drugs all day, and the drugs just happen to have no negative side-effects.
People don't want to live like drug addicts; but nor do they want to stop using drugs.
To reverse the timeline of an obvious example: the people on the street addicted to heroin, would much rather just become people working regular jobs who are prescribed heroin.
These people probably they got addicted to heroin because of chronic pain, and probably that chronic pain hasn't gone away. So any time the heroin is wearing off, the pain comes back, and that decreases the amount of energy/willpower they have to do anything besides the simplest, shortest-term thing they can do to stave off the pain: buy more street heroin.
You might wean them off heroin, but you aren't gonna make them not take some painkiller, because they still have chronic pain. They'll always be "a drug addict" in a technical sense; they need painkillers the same way people with diabetes need insulin.
Why are you assuming that giving a person a house means they have to have a normal life? Can't they live in the house and continue not to have a job and continue living a non-normal life and get clean too?
> do you think every drug addict on the west coast wants to hold down a job and live our normal life?
That's not the relevant question. Is it better for the rest of us if that drug addict is on the side walk or living inside? In the latter case, there's a better chance of treatment success, but it's also better when they remain addicts.
For the people you describe, there are basically no social services. The typical cycle is:
1 - police arrest them
2 - if they seem psychotic or mentally troubled they get dropped off at an ER
3 - the social workers at the ER (mostly) unsuccessfully try to find a place for them at a mental health provider
4 - eventually they get released by court order
5 - cycle repeats
I have friend that is on the front line as a social worker. Any time one of these prominent incidents occurs, I make sure to ask if she knows the perp. And about 50% of the time they are a former patient that she couldn't find a spot for at a mental institution.
Yeah I mean, without statistics his anecdotes are meaningless. It's a common thing to complain here in Seattle, but having lived in the Midwest for most of my life I know what true violence looks like and feels like. I don't hear guns every night like I did in KC. There aren't 600 murders a year like in Chicago. I'm not saying Seattle is perfect but I've never felt safer.
And I live in the Central District, which is one of the more violent neighborhoods.
It wasn’t this bad in the 90s or 80s, when crime was higher everywhere else. Relatively speaking, Seattle is worse off than it was before, which is a bit sad for the non transplants.
I moved to Seattle in 1994 and it's not clear to me that it's worse now than then. Clearly many neighborhoods are not worse, there's been a huge amount of gentrification over the 25 years I've been here. Homelessness and drug issues were big problem back then, too.
I've lived mainly on Capitol Hill and it's a safer and "nicer" place than it was back in the 90's. I had drug deals happening on corner outside my house back then, the neighborhood is great now. I also lived downtown, where Pike St. between 1st and 2nd Aves was horrendous with homelessness and drug use. Clearly much nicer now. The Central District (the other neighborhood I'm most familiar with) has also undergone huge level of gentrification since then, is much "nicer" place to live than it was in the 90's.
Yes, homelessness, and drug use and mental health issues are big problems, and I'm not sure the city has taken best approach to them. But it's easy to criticize without having better answer. The sensationalist ranting I hear sometimes in media and in personal anecdotes seems pretty misleading.
I dunno, the common refrain I hear from native Seattleites is that many places -- like Fremont, Ballard, and West Seattle, were truly awful in the 80s & 90s. Usually just at the mention of where I live, which is one of those neighborhoods.
Compared to Orlando and Salt Lake City, Seattle feels about on par to me with regards to safety and the homeless problem (adjusted for the much higher population & density). Which is useless information because it is an anecdote, but the best way to bring data into a conversation is a lot of useless competing anecdotes.
I lived in all three of those places in the early 90s (as a UW student and with my aunt near Alaska Junction in West Seattle). No, at least then, they weren’t as bad, or bad at all.
Ballard? I’m not even sure where it being dangerous would come from, maybe getting run down by a bad Norwegian driver? Checkout Cops in Ballard: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hGlDVmBLibg
I was mugged multiple time in the u-district in the 90s. The ave in general is far less sketchy than it used to be.
Ballard is much worse. It's gone from an enclave of retired scandy fishermen to hip neighborhood with a thriving walkable main drag. Because much of the street parking is still free the homeless living out of barely functional vans and rvs can live without hassle and attempt to panhandle on the drag. I imagine that at least some of those vehicles are also essentially drug emporiums further concentrating the homeless population that is hooked. ... Still not as sketchy as the u-district in the 90s though.
Exactly this. Transplants are part of the problem though - they’ve brought their political culture/voting habits/policies with them, and are ruining a formerly effectively managed city without asking why it was attractive to move here in the first place.
The homeless problem wasn’t as large in the 80s, violent crime was maybe higher, but property crime seems to have been lower.
I worked at 3rd and pine McDonald’s in 94-95 (one of the main hangouts for Seattle’s homeless population back then), and downtown was a lot more sane back then. The policing was much more aggressive than it is today, which I think had a large part to do with that.
I agree, when I lived in Seattle it was just... normal. There are more homeless people than in most other places but by and large there were no issues I ran into. I saw needles a couple times and was harassed by someone who was almost certainly schizophrenic, but that happens in all medium-large cities.
Although I never experienced it and don't know many people who have, I will say that property crimes need to be prosecuted. The only common case I've really heard of is getting bikes stolen (which, again, happens pretty much everywhere) and I assume there is probably some shoplifting too. That's not really even that bad either, and again is par for the course in major cities, but it definitely should be prosecuted when possible.
I agree that a lot of people are simply bothered by having to walk past homeless people and don't want to see or think about them, ever. It's just not really an issue that will affect you very often, on average.
I live in Seattle (Central District), and was harassed by a homeless person a half hour ago, had our bike stolen last week, saw a homeless person peeing 40 feet from my house an hour ago, and had three car break-ins and one car theft in the last year. All my neighbors have very similar experiences, and the above list is far from comprehensive for the last year. It's genuinely scary and disturbing living here, and I do regularly think about moving because of the level of crime.
Exactly, conservatives try to paint Seattle as hell because they have to deal with people throwing coffee... They really don't want to see poor people on the streets, that's all. And the police exists to fight real crimes, not the imagined crimes that conservatives fear everyday: walking the streets while being poor.
No such thing was done. You can find instances of awful stuff happening in any city- anywhere in the world. This is exactly what makes statistics useful.
This is not a partisan issue, it's a miscommunication.
There's a large chunk of people who think that "Let's take repeat violent offenders off the streets" translates to "Let's take away offered social programs and criminalize being poor", which is not a fruitful dialog.
Amy time you ask to lock up dangerous individuals the response is always that you hate the homeless, you lack empathy and that criminal justice doesn’t work. It’s worse than the gun debate
> He keeps failing at doing so, and the cops say "Can't do anything, he hasn't actually thrown somebody off".
How does that play out such that they can't get him on some type of assault / harassment? Is he politely asking these women if they would like to be thrown off the overpass and politely walking off when they demur?
> Charges for the first three assaults were dismissed by the City of Seattle because of mental health concerns, prosecutors said in the charging papers.
Jesus, WTF? If he is attacking people because of mental illness, why isn't he locked up in a mental hospital? "Sorry, you attacked people but you're crazy, so have a nice day!" And why is trying to throw someone off an overpass charged with assault and not with attempted murder?
Does Seattle / Washington not have anything? I live in one of those "poor Red states", and we absolutely do. I know a few folks who have been forcefully committed, though the common denominator seemed self-harm as opposed to harming passerby.
Seems very odd Wilson managed to dodge both mental facilities and prisons.
Not odd at all in Seattle. Repeat homeless/junkie offenders around these parts have dozens of prior arrests or convictions. They have been arrested so many times that they know how to work the system. They are untouchable.
The guy who stabbed people at 10am in front of the Nordstroms downtown flagship store, took several steps to evade capture, hide weapons, etc. All indications that he knew he was committing a crime when he stabbed his victims.
Then when the jig was up (as police closed in on him) he stripped his clothes off so we get the "naked man" headline.
Why would he strip his clothes off? Sounds like he was taking deliberate steps to increase the likelihood of being found mentally incompetent knowing that local prosecutors tend to dismiss such cases.
Also, Seattle's city prosecutor and head public defender jointly and publicly admonished a judge that refused to release one of these career criminals when requested to by the prosecutor.
I know that in Vancouver our municipal and provincial government both repeatedly chose to de-fund and close long-term mental-health care facilities, effectively dumping the patients in them onto the street. It's a large part of our current homeless population.
> I know a few folks who have been forcefully committed
Long term? After the deinstitutionalization movement in the US, it's possible to get people forcibly committed for short term evaluations (a 72 hour "Baker Act" evaluation), but long term involuntary commitment is quite rare.
"An individual cannot legally be prosecuted in the criminal justice system if they are not competent because they will not be able to assist in their own defense. When a Mental Health Evaluation determines that an individual is not competent, prosecutors may move for competency restoration. In the three Seattle Municipal Court cases involving Mr. Wilson, the prosecutor did not request competency restoration."
> And why is trying to throw someone off an overpass charged with assault and not with attempted murder?
"The filed charge is Attempted Assault in the First Degree. That crime requires proof of intent to inflict great bodily harm. Attempted Murder in the Second Degree would require proof of intent to actually cause death. Because these are “attempted” crimes, the critical difference between them is the defendant’s actual intent. We are aware from indications in prior case dockets that the defendant has a history of mental health issues. Given that history, the fact that we are early in the investigation, and that the victim thankfully suffered only minor injuries, we chose to file the case conservatively. We can always consider adding Attempted Murder as the case proceeds towards trial. "
The short of it is that society mentally ill criminals are in the middle of a justice system that requires mental health, and a mental health system that refuses to hold people by force, and isn't funded to its expensive needs.
It's one of the many logical inconsistencies of law, and the cost of emphasizing compassion over general safety.
Before you say "emphasize safety more", realize that this leads to giving the State a long leash to use on citizens who might not be mentally nor criminal, but merely accused as such by the state.
In short, this is why we can't have nice things. The risk of harm from a mentally ill person on a bridge is the price society pays for not being able to field a trustworthy government.
Once you voluntarily make the claim, "I am too insane for the criminal justice system to apply to me," things seem more clear cut. If you feel you're innocent and sane, choose a different defense?
Just looked up the hot coffee case. It could only happen in a city with strict gun laws. In Texas someone would have enacted his sheriff fantasies on this perpetrator a long time ago.
Seattle, part of Washington, actually has concealed carry as legal. There is no duty to retreat either, no real different than any "gun friendly" state. So your point is invalid. Anyone can have loaded carry pistol, this shows you to be pointless in this example.
I assume you're just trying to troll and failing badly.
Yes, but Seattle being Seattle it is not populated by the kind of people who will pack heat. That's like saying "well Austin is part of Texas so why doesn't everyone wear a cowboy hat and go hog hunting on the weekend." Both those cities are basically San Fransisco demographically speaking.
And just because concealed carry legal doesn't mean the process is constructed in such a way that normal people can actually do it (see CA, MA, NYC and NJ for examples of this) though I'm not sure about Seattle specifically.
It is currently, but Nick Haneaur and the I-1639 crowd are doing everything they can to not so gradually chip away at gun rights for law abiding WA residents.
Probably. IIRC most states are. Pretty much nobody who isn't a security guard or armored car employee who's actively working open carries not on their own property in any state.
What about all the people who aren't running around with pitchforks who have been diverted out of the addiction to prison pipeline?
Would you rather be paying $100,000+ a year/person to judge and jail them for the crime of being addicted while poor? (I've yet to see people entering that pipeline for the crime of being addicted while rich.)
I concur. its easy to feel sympathy for these addicts till you have to deal with them day by day. In the end I left san Francisco because of the constant badgering from homeless people and the waste they would leave everywhere. This is also an issue I've only really seen in America, the homeless in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur that I encountered were super polite and conscientious by comparison.
You replied to a post complaining that the policy also seemed to be giving violent individuals a pass, and accused them of "think[ing] that non-violent addicts should be put into prison". Which was neither said nor (as you claim) implied. The comment was explicitly bemoaning a perceived plague of "repeat violent drug addicts"
The policy being shilled by the article in question is about non-violent addicts.
Whatever problems the commenter in question has with violent criminals has absolutely nothing to do with it - but they chose to attack the non-violent policy (And then get defensive about how their points are being misconstrued. What are those points, then? Violent crime is bad, and should be dealt with? I don't think anyone disagrees with that one. What does it have to do with a diversion of non-violent addicts?)
It's like complaining that standards on organically-grown produce aren't preventing contaminated meat from ending up at your grocery store. Whatever problems you have with contaminated meat have nothing to do with the produce policy.
False dilemma. We can mandate them by court order to attend treatment programs. There are ways of helping petty criminals that don't involve locking them in a box 24/7.
Sure you can, but do we? And are there sufficient facilities to do so? A judge also mandated that the federal government house migrant children in a humane way but how well is that working out...point being that you can’t mandate something that there are no resources to do.
There is a lot going on in these comments. I feels like I've stepped back into /r/seattle (where redditors of Seattle seem to just hate all homeless people).
There is a lot going on here. First, there are a lot of homeless. Housing is sky rocketing and many people cannot afford to live anywhere close to where they can find work. The tech community there basically waves there hands and just says, "You can't afford to live here as a barista, well then you just gotta do the 1~2 hour bus/car commute in order to make me coffee. Sucks to be you."
Many of the other issues people are listing, aren't about drugs. They are about the homeless.
Second, people are talking about the other petty crime that goes with drugs: people stealing to get money for drugs. Violent crime and theft certainly don't need to be normalized. Chicago's recent DA's office has been criticized of not being hard enough on kids who commit crimes; which leads to more things like carjackings and even more violent stuff (knowing they might not face charges). That's a different issue -- although tangentially related and can't be ignored.
Portugal is a great example of a country where they try real treatment and help for people struggling with addiction. It's a better example of what happens with these policies long term. From what I've read and heard, it's mostly positive.
I personally knew people in my home town who stood in line at 5am on Mondays to get their methadone for the week. Treatment programs/rehab are for the rich -- often costing $2k ~ $5k out of pocket. Movie stars go to treatment. There need to be more treatment options that are affordable for those most in need of them. Drug treaming in America is just as shameful as the rest of our totally broken health care system.
Seattle is a poster child city for what NOT to do. Your politicians need to take their experiments someplace else. I was horrified at how terrible that city has become since I last was there.
Now, if i go there, you are allowing these drugged out zombies to steal from me and harass me? I don’t understand, I really do not.
Hmm, a headline with an extreme claim that seems completely unbelievable to anyone in the Pacific Northwest? I'm sure this is a legitimate article headline and not just clickbait, so I'm going to move my mouse cursor right on up there, expecting a rewarding, enlightening, and satisfying use of my time.
> “You’ve got a guy shooting heroin on the street, and the cop is supposed to say, ‘You O.K.?’” grumbled one law enforcement officer in Seattle.
As progressive as some are here, the NIMBYism (see other locals that this opinion piece has riled up in the thread) and bad apples on the police force spoiling the whole bunch are just as bad as anywhere else.
Another anecdote to add to the quote: walking up 12th Ave (Cap Hill) midday on a Sunday, some friends and I passed by a dude sleeping or passed out on the sidewalk and two oncoming walking cops simultaneously. One looked down and asked, "rough night?" and laughed with his partner.
In case it's not clear, this wasn't a friendly offer of assistance, this was a drive by insult (they didn't break stride at all) that made it clear that if it weren't for progressive laws about occupying public space they'd be violently removing the guy from the sidewalk.
For folks down this far, the prevailing hive mind in this thread is why when someone asks what I do for work here I try to distance myself from the rest of you as far as I can.
What's especially insane about it is that most of the folks commenting and voting are members of the working class.
Sure, they might have ill-gotten capital in the form of a deed (ignoring the likelihood that there's a lien on that deed) on a tiny parcel of stolen/colonized land or vested stock in the monopolist they work for, but that's a pittance in the scheme of things. They still need to sell their labor in order to meet their needs for food, shelter, community participation, etc.
We need to find a way to reach these folks. Because this thread is evidence that they think they're significantly different from the people without housing they see on the street here every day.
In the USSR, not working while being able was a crime that, although rarely enforced, carried huge social stigma; and, if you were an "undesirable" on the level of the subset of the drug addicted homeless in Seattle, neither the police nor the class-conscious workers would treat you like a human being. You'd be in forced treatment or jail (after being beat up, possibly) in a blink. An attempted clear delineation of the working class and the underclass (based on the class consciousness where the "parasites" group isn't only composed of the rich), is one of the few good things about "real leftism"... I wish the American leftists picked it up. In the USSR you could have observed a lot of different people in the same exact circumstances (or as close as the government could get them to be - standard apartments, jobs, education, ...) making completely different life choices, to really appreciate that. There were much fewer oppression/inequality/... excuses, but the result was much the same.
There's no need to have empathy towards the underclass silenced by tech money, or whatever. I never had it to start with and never will; and I feel like lots of the people you are trying to "reach" are like that to a large degree, it's just not a fashionable thing to articulate clearly these days. I personally feel completely fine voting for Sanders and other economic progressives, supporting free healthcare, public education, low-income housing, etc. while simultaneously having negative empathy towards habitual criminals and underclass in general. These are not mutually exclusive, as far as I'm concerned they are mutually reinforcing.
> Sure, they might have ill-gotten capital in the form of a deed (ignoring the likelihood that there's a lien on that deed) on a tiny parcel of stolen/colonized land or vested stock in the monopolist they work for, but that's a pittance in the scheme of things. They still need to sell their labor in order to meet their needs for food, shelter, community participation, etc.
I agree with you in spirit, that most people in SV and the tech industry in general are truly workers. However, I think the monopolists have been quite clever in offering just enough capital to those workers that they feel like an integral part of the system. Especially as they gain additional seniority, or work long enough to pay off their house, that mindset engrains itself. Add to this the democrats willingness to go after the middle/upper-middle class rather than the true elites to fund social programs, and you end up with an individualistic and anti-democratic mindset.
In a way, 'startup culture' and YC contribute to that perception, giving the workers the idea they can make it big as an entrepreneur, no matter how unlikely that really is. It's manufacturing the consent of the average wage-worker in SV for a system only truly benefits elite VC firms and a very very small number of very very lucky or very very well connected entrepreneurs.
> We need to find a way to reach these folks. Because this thread is evidence that they think they're significantly different from the people without housing they see on the street here every day.
There are a ton of tech workers ripe for class consciousness in the gaming industry, so I think that's a good place to start. I've also had a lot of luck encouraging collective action on individual teams that suffer under incompetent management. Combining a discussion of bad management with the trap of mortgage payments and immigration law has netted me a lot of progress with encouraging a more leftist worldview.
I can't say, living here, that I feel that the problem is solved. I view the needles outside my apartment as evidence to the contrary - though I suppose I'm an ignoramus for thinking that.
Simply strolling through Pioneer Square or most parts of International District paints a significantly different picture. One can dine at a Chinese place on Jackson and look out their window and see junkies peddling stolen goods at the bus stop. The non-enforcement of so-called "petty crime" used to fund drug addictions is egregious and continues to undermine the already little sense of community there is in this city of transients.
What I'm trying to say is that while I appreciate the difference in approach from the traditional one, I do believe that there needs to be an honest discussion about the limits of rehabilitation. More research on the subject, as it relates to Seattle, shows that there are many, many, people who take advantage of these lax policies to abuse the system, hurting others who actually need help.
> "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions associated with such incarceration."
(The above is from a study conducted by a prominent U Chicago economist and another economist who is now at Princeton.)
It’s really very complicated. One of the macro trends over the last few decades is a massive increase in crime from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, then a decrease since then. Incarceration started increasing in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to that increase in crime. When crime started coming down in the 1990s, incarceration started coming down about ten years behind that in the 2000s.
Nobody really knows why crime started dropping in the 1990s. Some people think that the reduction is attributable to the banning of leaded gasoline. Maybe. But I don’t think studied have ruled out the notion that the reduction is attributable to putting a large number of people in prison. See: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/089533004773563485
> Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion.
It’s not an area where you can point to a definitive consensus, and everyone interprets the data to fit their own political views.
There is also a middle ground, where you can think that drugs should generally be legalized, but incarcerating people for non-drug crimes is a good idea. The problem isn't really people doing drugs. It's people breaking into cars, damaging property left in public, trespassing, assaulting other people, leaving big public piles of trash, things that fall into the "harming other people" category of crime.
In other words, middle-class employed people who are safe in their environment don't really commit crimes - why would they? The best way to solve crime In General is to make more people like that.
Now granted, there are some people that would _still_ commit crimes even though they don't need to - this is the place where punitive solutions are appropriate, to make it not worth their while.
> Based on these estimates, the observed 2 percentage point decline in the U.S unemployment rate between 1991 and 2001 can explain an estimated 2 percent decline in property crime (out of an observed drop of almost 30 percent), but no change in violent crime or homicide. The sharp increases in crime in the 1960s—a decade of strong economic growth—further corroborate the weak link between macroeconomics and crime.
Violent crime rates started trending up in the 1960s, more than doubling by 1971: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/U0YlrTTCYi550Z4py1MNVenNt-...
Meanwhile, the economy was quite strong until 1969, with unemployment below 4%: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33069.pdf (p. 5). Poverty rates went down about 40% from 1960-1970, and then were stable until about 1980. Over that same period, violent crime tripled. From 1982 to 1990, poverty went down by 15% and unemployment dropped in half, but violent crime increased 36% to historical peaks.
I wouldn’t expect homicide to meaningfully drop in an economic boom since the reasons for murder are so varied.
This seems impossible to solve without considering which people were actually experiencing this growth.
> In 2013, for example, the average poverty threshold for an individual living alone was $11,888; for a two-person family, $15,142; and for a family of four, $23,834.7
I wasn't alive in 1969, but for 2013, that threshold is quite low - it may make sense for poverty, but it is not a net wide enough to catch a significant portion of (relatively) poor people whose addictions have grown to far outweigh their paychecks.
A little silly but also nice.
If the economic difference is negligible then what reason is there for incarceration over providing healthcare? Crime did drop in the 90s but there's also the reality that those with criminal records are predisposed towards recidivism, a complicated issue on its own, but it seems that incarceration leads itself to staying criminal while healthcare at least has less direct links to criminal recidivism.
I do think mental health services are whats needed.
If you smell like crap and can't sustain a life because of drug addictions or mental illness, and your behavior causes problems for society, you need to be helped, and maybe against your will.
The vast majority of homeless are actually not visible and look like and act like normal people. They often get out of being homeless in a few years. It's the chronic homeless who need help, might always need help, that ruin the public space for everyone else.
One study shows the decrease in crime was caused by an increase in abortions.
http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...
Before everyone starts vilifying the person conducting the study. He said on the podcast that he does not think that his study should influence public policy and that the answer was not to try to convince people to have abortions but to spend more money on children and family services and criminal justice reform that keeps families from being separated because of minor crimes.
I personally find the lead/crime argument to be much more convincing
An independent study on the lead/crime hypothesis (impact of childhood lead exposure on criminality) came to a similar conclusion.[0] (Reyes is interviewed in the podcast linked below.) Finally, they recently published a 15-years on follow-up study, which showed continued support for the hypothesis.[1]
You can read a transcript of their most recent podcast on the subject here[2], or just go direct to the source material.
[0]: https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/get_the_lead_o...
[1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_201975.pd...
[2]: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have to spell out what's the next step on the road after that. Open white supremacists like Steve Sailer vocally support the abortion argument, for instance
Adopted children (in the US) are much more prone to various failures, like becoming criminals, than are the biological children of their adoptive parents.
It seems unlikely that this is due to the adopted children being unwanted.
Your second paragraph is the most naked slippery-slope appeal to fear I've seen. Just repeating "just a pathway", "just a step" doesn't make it so. If the explanation is true, it's true. That some racist believes something or not doesn't affect its truth or falsity. I get a kind of claustrophobic communist-era vibe from your comment - that there is no truth, no reality, outside what the powers-that-be declare to be true. (I guess we call it 'political correctness' - there's no 'correct', only 'politically correct'.)
You do not seem to be familiar with the their conclusions and sentiments, no.
> The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have to spell out what's the next step on the road after that. Open white supremacists like Steve Sailer vocally support the abortion argument, for instance
Not even close.
> LEVITT: I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics. ... what our data suggests is that women are pretty good at choosing when they can bring kids in the world, who they can provide good environments for, okay? The mechanism by which any effects on crime have to be happening here are the women making good choices. And that’s such a fundamental difference — between women making good choices and eugenics, which is about the state, say, or some other entity forcing choices upon people, almost couldn’t be more different.
> ...
> What did Donohue mean by “unwantedness”? He was referring to the expansive social-sciences literature which showed that children born to parents who didn’t truly want that child, or weren’t ready for that child, these children were more likely to have worse outcomes as they grew up — health and education outcomes. But also, these so-called “unwanted” kids would ultimately be more likely to engage in criminal behaviors.
> ...
> The mechanism was pretty simple: unwanted children were more likely than average to engage in crime as they got older; but an unwanted child who was never born would never have the opportunity to enter his criminal prime, 15 or 20 years later. Donohue and Levitt created a tidy syllogism: unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; therefore, abortion led to lower crime.
> DONOHUE: ... presumably the greatest thing that could happen in this domain is if you would eliminate unwanted pregnancies in the first place. But American policy has not been nearly as effective in achieving that goal.
> A country like the Netherlands, which has really tried to reduce unwanted pregnancies, has probably had the right approach in dealing with the issues that our research at least raised. So they have much, much lower rates of abortion even though abortion is completely legal in the Netherlands. But they want to stop the unwanted pregnancies on the front end, and I think almost everyone should be able to agree that that is the preferable way to focus policy if one can.
> ...
> LEVITT: On the other hand, I don’t think anyone who is sensible should use our hypothesis to change their mind about how they feel about legalized abortion. So it really isn’t very [abortion] policy-relevant. If you’re pro-life and you believe that the fetus is equivalent in moral value to a person, well then, the tradeoff is awful.
> ...
> LEVITT: So there are two policy domains for which this research is important. ... the second [policy domain] really does relate to the idea that if unwantedness is such a powerful influencer on people’s lives, then we should try to do things to make sure that children are wanted. You could at least begin to think about how you would create a world in which kids grow up more loved and more appreciated and with brighter futures. And you know, is that better early education? Is that, you know, permits for parents? Or training for parents? Or, you know, minimum incomes? Who knows what the answer really would be. But there’s a whole set of topics I think which are not even on the table.
Anyways, seeing as not only do social scientists widely disagree with their hypothesis, but other researchers found flaws in their data sets that Leavitt & Donohue were forced to acknowledge & correct for- it seems irrelevant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
I'm not sure I understand that. Surely people in prison are even less productive? Or is this counting the massively underpaid prison labour that sometimes happens in the US?
A huge amount of drug users are very productive and go to work every day, but when they get caught up in the legal system they may lose their job.
I think, from reading that abstract, that they’re claiming it causes drug prices to rise and lower the overall rate of drug use. If they don’t mean that, then I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
Intervention works and it can be done humanely.
Would you mind pointing to some of those studies/evidence so I can be a little more informed about the whole thing?
EDIT: Found one further down, but would love to see any others you have: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4...
Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if they use drugs. The result of such framing is vicious savagery as is seen in America, the Philippines, and other places around the world.
In the context of my response, I really just meant it as shorthand for "not doing any of the negative stuff that Seattleites deal with on an everyday basis". Lots of homeless people are already doing that--namely, not putting the general public at risk with violence or needles sitting around--but many of the ones visible to us are making the city worse off.
So again, my OP should really be reframed as: "if you take a dangerous drug addict and put them in a house, they're still a dangerous drug addict".
And I do implicitly mean there that if you take a non-dangerous, knocked-off-their-feet homeless person and put them in a house, you now have a housed person, and that's a very positive thing :)
What data are you referring to? Governments in the Seattle area manage to spend over a billion dollars each year on the homeless problem. With about 10,000 people, that’s about $100,000 per person per year (both numbers are 2017). And they only house about 50%, which means $200,000 per person housed in temporary or permanent housing.
Somehow New York City houses 80% of a larger homeless population (60,000) for around $50,000 per person. They are three times more effective with their money.
People should be yelling. The data does suggest that policies on the west coast are expensive and ineffective. They aren’t good for anyone. I think the author of this post [1] makes greats points about the problems of unlimited compassion. Looking at the numbers really changes how I feel about the tent city down the street from me.
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness
It seems like creating housing projects for these people would be cheaper and more beneficial to society than increasing the prison population. I’d like to see something like dorms with shared restrooms, cafeterias, and such facilities. It’d create work and demand locally while keeping the streets clean.
B) From a healthcare perspective, both housing and rehabilitation are necessary for the person to be able to function stably. I would argue that this type of housing as well as drug decriminalization is necessary to treat the underlying poverty (and resulting crime).
EDIT: wording.
- Dealing with petty crime that makes everyone miserable is insensitive to the homeless/addicts/etc who are stealing people's stuff and selling it.
- We should send people to provide garbage pickup to people occupying spaces that don't belong to them, but make sure that they aren't disturbed.
- We should be housing first, but not with housing projects.
What would you suggest be done?
Implement stuff like this half-hearted and you only rile up the tough on crime crowd without results.
Really?
Q: What should we do about this homeless encampment? The options are:
1. Provide it with free trash pickup so that it's a slightly nicer place to live and to be around
2. Shut it down, remove the tents as well as the trash, make the inhabitants move elsewhere
And then I would expect the "tough on crimes" crowd would prefer option #2 to option #1.
I read it as “opposed to trash pick-up in general” and then thought “who the hell would be opposed to that?”
Leaving people to rot on the street for even an instant longer is abhorrently inhumane, and the local government officials in charge of our west coast cities should just resign, since they so clearly lack any empathy or rational thinking.
Last week I saw 2 people shooting up on the brand new deck of pike place market, essentially the biggest tourist attraction in Seattle.
Are you honestly claiming that if only they had a safe injection site and some housing that allowed drug use that that wouldn't happen?
Drug addicts don't care about any of that stuff, they want to get it in their veins asap, and now that its effectively legal they can do this 24/7.
This is incorrect and I think it's constructive to address it. People talk about numbers, but it's mostly just whatever justifies their bias. Where you draw a line AND when matters when talking about this, so I believe somewhere just under 40% are from outside Seattle. I measure that if you're not from King County (for at least 1 year) before you lost your home, you've moved to it (re: http://allhomekc.org/king-county-point-in-time-pit-count/). Either way, homeless people do not move away to cheaper locales, but are drawn toward the city center. This is primarily due to existing support networks, convenient mobility, drug availability, tolerance, and available disposable wealth. Seattle is not special in this regard, as this behavior is see in many metropolitan centers around the world. Does it matter? No. Where people come from isn't the issue as you can't really control for the conditions...what is WA gonna do, prevent global warming from sending climate refugees up the coast? Good luck Inslee.
I have observed how various cities have approached handling the homeless. I spent 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA and a decade in Santa Ana, CA where these same "issues" had been handled differently from Seattle. I'm not an expert, but I have an opinion, and I recognize that's all it is.
You know who doesn't have a homeless problem? Irvine, CA. If you have a car with a bunch of caked mud on it and some dents or a blown out window, you get status-profiled (they don't admit to it, and it's not racial, but it's demonstrable) and pulled over. The Irvine Company (a family who owns most of Irvine) leverages or ships undesirables from the city and it stays that way (mostly in Costa Mesa, Laguna, etc) same as Santa Cruz did in the 90s where they would drop repeat offenders on a train to Santa Clara. Luckily(?) when a few people ended up freezing to death in their cars and the streets (over a few winters) in Santa Cruz, it came out as an official public safety policy. Draconian measures work to a degree, it seems, but mostly moving people CONSISTENTLY works.
Mixing unrestricted support systems into metropolitan areas has been applied for over half a century. It sifts those who can be helped, out until you have those who cannot or will not be helped. As unpopular as it seems, I think that a city/county being allowed to export people to unincorporated areas if they break a city/county law and have no residence and aren't able to complete a work program, would solve homelessness in a more humane manner. If you don't want to participate in society, homestead the land or run your way back and start over. Either way, it doesn't fill more jail cells. Yes people may die, just as people die now, but without putting residents at risk.
(Swedes are very anti-drug. While a narrow majority of even Republicans in the US support legalization of cannabis, 83% of Swedes support keeping it illegal: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-cannabis/in-anti-d...)
It doesn't seem to be working that well, does it?
In practice decriminalization was 20% of the action. The important 80% was investing heavily in social workers, public health, and temporary housing so that people on drugs could receive treatment.
What other countries fail to appreciate is that people in these conditions are almost always self-medicating or escaping something. So great, you don't put them in jail, but they continue living in a vicious addictive hell with no hope for a better future or of ever regaining their lives. That's not exactly compassionate is it?
The metric to track can't be: "didn't die" or "didn't incarcerate", it should be "regained their life" and "broke their addiction".
Gee, you are making it very difficult to choose which policy I prefer!
In terms of drugs Norway and Sweden have traditionally not had much drugs - mainly because they are a long way from anywhere.
And then watch at they turn on you by quietly voting for your opponents in greater and greater numbers as the problem worsens.
Or people blew off the primaries sure that she'd take the general. ️
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/City_elections_in_Seattle,_Washingto...
Seattle's had this tension between the left and the liberals for a century. Traditionally you lived on the outskirts. You're welcome to go back if the city offends your sensibilities.
The people who aren't living in the street but are victims of these petty crimes or have their own quality of life drastically reduced because of all this still matter. And I don't think the solution is to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Especially since even the reasonably well off (dare I say, what's left of the "middle class") frequently has it worse in the US than random people do in other first world countries.
In the world we live in, yes I disagree. Our criminal justice system further entrenches these problems. Before you claim that these petty crimes don't apply, the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations, and these petty crimes are all jailable/revokable offenses for folks on paper.
In America, we put the already marginalized in jail and prison which only further entrenches their marginalization. Empathy means breaking that cycle.
Fear-based rhetoric around crime is not empathy. In fact, it's the exact opposite. And it's rampant in this thread.
This is a funny way of saying they're back in prison for more serious original crimes after failing to rehabilitate during the second chance they were already given in the form of probation/parole.
Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets and commit more crimes is not empathy, it is folly. Empathy is protecting the neighborhoods which aren't rich enough to be insulated from these bad actors.
That's a funny way of implying that everyone that the justice system imprisons are criminals in a world where we imprison 22% of the global incarcerated population despite accounting for 4% of the global total population[1].
Fear-based rhetoric around crime and the people who commit crimes* is not empathy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
I'm a felon that committed a crime and violated my probation a year after my original sentencing (I've since discharged my sentence). My crime was almost killing my passengers and myself in a drunken single-vehicle collision when I was 19. My violation was being a drunk passenger on my 21st birthday, after the designated driver was pulled over for simple lane violations (right/left turns into far lanes). They were let go with a warning, and I was taken to jail. If I didn't come from the privileged background I do, I could very well still be in prison today.
I'm a contrarian hipster, don't get me wrong, but I come by this empathy honestly. I empathize with your fear too, but I'm telling you to get over it because it only makes the problems you fear worse.
Compassion is a much better path.
Time and time again, fear leads to bad counterproductive policies with debateably good intentions.
I'm ignoring the meaningless/unspoken distinction between compassion and empathy in your comment.
google is your friend here since you don't know the difference:
https://www.google.com/search?q=compassion+vs+empathy
In Seattle, the leftists are the AnSyn folks at the unsanctioned May Day celebration, or the WTO protesters two decades back. Further back, they're the folks organizing the general strike[1]. The liberals are the folks that put their No Re-zoning sign next to their BLM sign in the window of their Ballard home. Or more charitably, the folks that see Gates and Bezos as shining examples of what our city is capable of.
In case you need it in song form, this is a song written by a leftist[2].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_General_Strike
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nFvhhCulaw
Shame everyone who disagrees with you, cancel them, ban them on your online forums, and then it's like they don't exist. You win! Except they can still vote, and you're no longer in a situation where you can influence them.
If your solution is drug treatment programs, great, but then don't argue against raising taxes to pay for them.
You're suggesting making a fucking ghetto for homeless people? Are you serious?
This thread has confirmed my suspicion that HN cares way more about money and their material interests than any sense of morality or ethics.
I think enforcing these laws would make Seattle safer and an overall better place to live.
If you're physically addicted to drugs, you are to some extent not capable of making rational choices, and this means you are a threat to yourself and to those around you. Could this not be a legal pretext to detain someone (humanely) and bring them to rehab treatment? Seems like a better alternative than jail, and certainly a better alternative to letting drug addicts rot on the streets.
I'm also not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about, so feel free to lay into me and let me know why this idea is wrong or even crazy.
The police don't really seem to care. I've watched a couple of officers find a small pile of used needles at one of the skytrain stations, they laughed to each other said how they should be cleaning that up, then just left. I know about an hour later, a bunch of school kids take the bus I was waiting for. Calling and reporting it did nothing.
Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters. Even emergency calls about homeless brandishing knives in broad daylight are ignored. (If someone does get stabbed, the police will show.)
Seattle politicians have shown that they have no interest in keeping violent people off the streets, so the police don't waste their time with it.
I've been away from Seattle for a while, so excuse me if it's changed. But I still remember quite well in 2010 when Seattle police gunned down a native american for crossing the street downtown, I think it was off of Howell. That guy used to ask me and my wife for change. His big crime was making a very young officer, I believe a recent arrival from the eastern part of the state, uncomfortable due to his skin color. Shot dead, in the back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_T._Williams
"Police accuse King County prosecutors of declining cases, not charging felons" https://www.kiro7.com/news/tonight-at-5-30-pm-police-accuse-...
He was released 24 hours later.
On a simpler note I saw someone exposing themselves/defecating on a street corner in downtown. Some officers spoke to him but then they left.
Similarly, Google "dallas homeless problem" sometime. Warm city, poor coordination of solutions for the homeless -- whoa, homeless populations are rising! But that once more does not fit the narrative, so nobody talks about it in threads like this.
(Houston is doing much better. Houston, unlike Seattle, has put a priority on coordinating efforts to help homeless. HUH.)
That said you're right -- it's not just about taxes. Seattle is low on revenue, but that's only part of why the city has failed to produce a coordinated response to homelessness. Bad organizational skills are not restricted to the right or the left, though.
[1]https://apps.bostonglobe.com/graphics/2016/07/methadone-mile...
[2]https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/08/21/boston-common-jewel-...
b) Different scale, man. Seattle's issues are way bigger than Methadone Mile. (I've lived in Boston too.)
You had a viable argument right up until that point!
Edit: Thanks for the bot downvotes! Going from +2 to -1 in the span of a minute on two separate comments is a bit of a red flag :P
Two of my comments saw 3 downvotes in the span of a minute, the latter of which was much further down than this comment.
dang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858
PG - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
Downvoting as a tool to show disagreement has always been standard practice here. Mini-modding on the other hand...
sadly, me and other taxpayers like me in Seattle.
Homelessness and drug use also comes in very different forms even within Seattle; I live in Ballard, and most of our homeless and drug-addicted community lives in beaten-up RVs parked on the side of the road.
1. A person OD'd (presumably dead) at a bus stop
2. Someone passed out, face down in the gutter
3. Multiple people shooting up (usually pants down, shooting into leg)
4. A guy that would regularly walk around shouting and gesturing angrily, making everyone near by visibly anxious
5. One guy literally rolling around in the middle of the street during rush hour, holding up busses and cars
6. A fight, fortunately broken up caused by a homeless guy spitting on another guy
7. People selling stolen goods in the open
8. Finally, some guy got shot in an alley in the middle of broad daylight on like, a Tuesday a couple weeks back.
Not offering suggestions, merely documenting my experiences. I am genuinely glad you had a good trip to Seattle, though
It is really interesting, especially on a site like HN, because the latter is directly contrary to the ethos of most startups.
There's obviously a much deeper problem.
Its easy to see how that would make many people depressed and lead to a cycle of addiction to escape this crappy reality.
Either way, from what I've been witnessing, as the commenter above yours was saying - but in a more specific way, is that many people who once had a fair amount of discretionary spending ability have seen that money sucked up into higher rents and needs for broadband - having more needs for kids and slightly higher expenses for many things all around... it appears that saving to do big things is not an option.
all the while seeing people on instagram living best lives of travel and decadence, many people can't even afford to make healthy choices for food - that once could.
More and more people who were above poverty are finding the higher rents and other expenses taking them into debt with no good way out - more and more people are getting unbanked by fees, and leaning on pawn shops / family and friends to skirt by getting power and water turned back on.
Sometimes they climb back up out of this, but I think more and more people are just simply going without. Going without dental care and healthy food. Skipping meals. There appears to be a bunch of people using dating apps to get free food.
Just that reality is hitting people - and if they can an unexptected larger expense - they are over the edge.
I don't think we have good statistics to show all this. It may seem that poverty is being reduced, and I saw a meme saying the avg household has gained 5k per year lately.. but that's not enough to take care of the basics for most people I see around our growing city that is not on the west coast.
I hear that things like this are even worse elsewhere.
First I think we need to have an honest discussion about actually trying rehabilitation. The criminal justice system is more concerned with retribution than rehabilitation.
I agree that the limits of rehabilitation need to be seriously considered, and that good policy requires a mix of approaches. That said, all of your arguments could be applied to alcoholics during prohibition.
I think if we actually want a sense of community in this city, it starts by treating our neighbors as humans. These drug users are your neighbors. What are you doing to help them?
It's an opinion piece.
I think you solve problems like widespread drug use by repairing the tattered social fabric that of this country which has taken such a toll on so many of the people who live here.
Criminals in jail are a burden on society. Functional, productive, tax paying citizens are assets to society. Rehabilitation is not charity. It's enlightened self interest.
I'm not advocating for kind of bleeding heart "charity" here.
I wonder how Portugal achieved such supposed success in decriminalizing drug use.
It's all about providing a counter-narrative to prevent cognitive dissonance.
Seattle is playing with fire here. I wouldn’t set foot in a city where hard drug use is tolerated, and seemingly celebrated, by many of the people that live there. Junkies will do whatever is necessary to get their next fix. It seems like a bad idea to be anywhere near a city with policies that both attract and help create them.
Certainly, the high profile stabbing in front of Nordstroms didn't do much. Nor, did much change when the homeless guy was stopped from throwing a women on her way to work off an I-5 overpass. Or the lady who was raped by the homeless guy at the U-district car dealership after dropping her car off for an oil change on her way to work in the morning.
I assume it would have to be someone connected to the local government. It took about five seconds to change the 2nd Ave bike lanes when a city employee was killed riding her bike down there.
If you are referring to the well known tragic death of Sher Kung in August 2014, just before the September 2014 scheduled opening of the 2nd Ave bike lane, you are very wrong. The project had been underway long before that.
It sure seemed to me that after her tragic death the call for bike safety was turned up to 11.
We haven't reached that point yet re homeless/junkie assaults. It will take the right person to get killed or raped for that to happen.
https://youtu.be/KA3KQCYI17U
It's perfectly possible to be a heroin addict and an upstanding citizen at the same time. The same cannot be said of a bike thief. The vast majority of even hardcore homeless drug addicts do not engage in malicious property crimes. It's only a small fraction, that also tends to be the most violent and socially pathological.
Vigorous enforcement of property crime improves the life for everyone in the city. Doubly so for the otherwise law-abiding drug users, who most often bear the worse brunt of the anti-social property criminals. The best way to sell drug policy reform to law and order conservatives is to redirect those resources to non-victimless crimes. Not just throw your hands up in the air and give up on enforcing any laws whatsoever.
This so much! You're not a criminal because you're doing heroin or whatever, you're a criminal because you're stealing everything that isn't nailed down, harassing and threatening people in the neighborhood, attempting to break into houses repeatedly.
This is all happening to my neighbors and I. But the police do nothing.
It's pretty frustrating.
Imprisoning someone for using drugs is a terrible way to use the prison system, because they're not harming anyone. However, not imprisoning someone who steals, vandalizes, and harms others, is equally faulty.
Even if every bike is stolen by an addict, that doesn't mean most addicts are doing the stealing.
With that in mind not convicting people of some crimes can make more sense (even if surely not right in all).
It's not about tolerating property crime, it's about recognizing a) property crime is a symptom of the problem b) people suffering from property crime is a super minor problem c) the real, immediate problem is that we have thousands of homeless/addicts/mentally ill people who are suffering way more than someone who lost their bike d) it is known that you can't arrest your way out of this problem.
So, where to put resources? Obviously, spending a lot of resources on constantly arresting people is a massive waste of money and people will just be back out on the streets eventually doing the same shit. So that's not a good use of police / court system / prison system time and taxpayer money. We need to go after the root of the problem -- untreated mental illness, addiction, homelessness, etc. That is why enforcement of petty crimes is a low concern.
A place where meth heads attack people with pitchforks in the street a few days after being released from prison on a suspended sentence.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/man-accused-...
Not to mention our random piles of used syringes, which are often found in parks where kids play.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/more-than-3...
Here's a syringe pile after cleaning up a homeless camp north of Seattle:
https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
I'm all for decriminalization, but Seattle's current approach is to decriminalize not only drugs, but a host of other actual crimes, like public intoxication, public camping, shop lifting, harassment, etc.
There is just a certain amount of crime and drug use that will always exist in the big city. No amount of 'tough on crime' policing will make it go away.
For me visiting LA, SF or Seattle is jaw dropping. I totally reject this idea that these situations are just inevitable.
Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.
Since I've been here, over the past 8-ish years, the homeless problem hasn't (in my opinion) become much more of a problem so much as it's become much more of a political issue. It's hard for me to tell if drug use and violence are actually up, or if reporting is up. When I visited in 2011, we were looking at an apartment that was listed on 1st Ave in Pioneer Square. We were charmed by the tree-lined street and the quaint shops leading from the Fairmont downtown toward Pioneer Square, but when we turned toward Occidental Sq (maybe 8 or 9am) we were suddenly in a mass of transient/homeless peoples waking up on the cobblestone. There were dozens of people, rolling up sleeping backs, loading backpacks, congregating. This was before the food trucks and the Weyerhauser building and the tied down tables and chairs and open-air ping pong tables displaced them, and even though it was jarring it also felt humane in a weird way that there was a place, out of the way, where they could go and be undisturbed. Pioneer Square also, of course, is where most of the homeless help centers are located (clinics, food banks, shelters).
But as the city has grown denser and real estate developers continue to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of the city, these people have nowhere to go so they are forced out of the margins and into everyone else's line of sight and that's really the problem. In NYC it's not such a big deal, because NYC is already acclimated to this density that the homeless problem there is simply ignored. The indifference I witnessed toward the homeless in NYC was crazy to me when I moved there at first from the 'burbs... people walking around a guy masturbating on the sidewalk as they hopped out of their cabs, moaning about the delays in the subway when a homeless person was killed in a subway tunnel or soiled a car in the middle of summer. If only all of the U.S. cities could just "look past" these people instead of focusing so much on what a drag it is to see someone begging for change on my way to have bottomless mimosas.
You're not wrong, but you're also not setting a very high bar.
I think it's important that cities be safe, livable places. Seattle still is, for the most part. But ask some of your younger, single female friends where they will and will not go at night, and you may be surprised that it includes a large number of neighborhoods.
But oh no, then we'd have to pay taxes! We don't want a safe city that badly.
Treating criminals like victims, instead of showing empathy for the actual victims of these crimes is disgusting.
Honest people should not be made to suffer at the hands of some junkies who can't control their urges and are compelled to commit crimes to feed their addictions.
And it'll "decline" further after this now that petty theft and shooting heroin in full view of the public is not a crime. Abolish all laws and it'll go down to zero, woo-hoo!
I fear that the secondary effect of this will be to attract even more homeless heroin addicts from places where these things are still crimes.
This is particularly problematic in Seattle. Because many citizens now understand that police won't respond to minor crimes, especially property crimes, people just don't report them at all.
In the past few years, I've personally experienced someone climbing a fence to enter my back yard, shitting in my alley, stealing property from my porch, pissing on my garage, stealing from my trash (multiple times). None of those will show up on crime statistics even though they are illegal because I didn't call in since I knew the cops didn't have the capacity to do anything.
Someone else says the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780632
Not sure which one is correct...
And most cities are worlds better to live in than they were in the 1980s. Why would you want to go back?
Comfortable salaried people love to make a big issue about it because Seattle isn't scrubbed clean to perfection and they see a mess every once in awhile, but really the city isn't bad at all and isn't full of rampant crime.
Our new Park Ambassadors are here to help make the parks more inviting to be in: https://downtownseattle.org/about/careers/park-ambassador-pa...
The root issue, severe wealth stratification leading to hopelessness and escapism via drugs is something no city can address on its own.
We need national policy change to provide opportunities for the majority of Americans. Short of that, this problem will continue :c
> public intoxication not an "actual crime"
> public camping seeking shelter is not an "actual crime"
> shop lifting is an "actual crime"
> harassment is an "actual crime"
Agreed on public intoxication.
A good definition of "crime" needs to be able to include action that indirectly harm a large number of potential people. Otherwise, you are powerless to address the tragedy of the commons.
If I park illegally and get towed well tough shit, if van dweller gets towed the city has violated their rights and it’s terrible. So homeless druggies get free pass to commit all sorts of low level offenses that everyone else gets crazy fines for.
Is there a specific name for this particular type of generalization where a one-time event gets represented as a greater-than-one quantity?
Fixed that up for you - don't pluralize individual incidents to suit your narrative.
Those advocating for harsher handling of homelessness in Seattle have repeatedly shown themselves to be incompetent and callous. It'd be great if they could make an effort, like actually voting, rather than phoning it in and throwing money at blatantly photoshopped mailers.
Volunteer park is fine, and some of the parks up the hill are fine, but I've seen multiple children get pricked with used needless and I've been threatened by people in the park. I've been on the bus with my son with people openly smoking meth. I've been on the bus with my son where a man was punched in the throat for being Indian.
I don't know how you can live in that city and do anything without being exposed to this.
Seattle Parks & Recreation has started adding Park Ambassadors to address what you experienced, and it has significantly improved the downtown parks: https://downtownseattle.org/about/careers/park-ambassador-pa...
He doesn’t go into the negatives of what the policies in Seattle has done to the city until so far later in the article. The local officials are very lax on drug use, homelessness.
We have entire tent cities. Petty crime is pretty high. The police won’t bother to respond if you report a car break in, for example. There’s trash littered on practically any street that has tents. Some of these folks are addicts and some aren’t but to say Seattle has solved this problem - you mean we just ignore laws and allow anyone to do whatever they want. Repeat criminal who was arrested last week? Here, we’ll keep you for an hour maybe and you’ll definitely be out by tomorrow.
I’m not advocating jailing all drug use so private prisons get rich, but Seattle’s extreme leftist take on pretending like the problem hasn’t been a disaster for the city is just absurd.
I've lived in WA, CA, VA and TX. No state has sane policies and the more I've moved, the more I've realized this. WA still ranks at the top of my list for states to live in.
Also, I guess he could be a remote SWE for google or something like that.
But you are right, I am making an assumption.
What non-drug user would want to live in a town where someone shooting heroin in public is not removed from the street? I know I wouldn't.
I'm not saying lock em up and throw away the key but you can't just move on and pretend nothing happened. If you're going to provide treatment in lieu of jail time then it needs to mandatory.
Someplace like Seattle.
Where do you expect homeless (and mentally ill) people to do their drugs?
The issue is far more complicated then that.
I don't think we have the political will to round up a bunch of homeless people and criminals and take care of them in a humane manner. We probably can't even agree on what is considered a humane and ethical way to take care of homeless and mentally ill people who probably don't want to be confined to treatment against their will.
Where they used to do it before the current decade (under freeway overpasses and in the bushes alongside freeways).
How is "view of minors" relevant?
Because minors shouldn't be exposed to certain things. Like public urination, drug use, or fornication.
I prefer to teach kids how to find compassion for people in such situations.
Compassion and pity are NOT the same thing. The former is about providing mutual aid and solidarity, the latter is enabling, codependent, and charitable.
As such, this is not the first time I've expressed decisions we're making that someone has suggested or even threatened to call CPS.
We have multiple mandatory reporters closely involved in helping raise our child. We'll be more than happy to take them along with us to learn about various things that are all around them in the world. This will include things like taking our child to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where active drug users may exist, and may excuse themselves to go to the bathroom to shoot up. We will, of course, only be bringing our child into such a context with their consent (which children are definitely able to give in a variety of ways, even if they may not fully comprehend what's happening). It's our job to keep our child safe in these environments, which means first teaching them how to heal from trauma and maybe waiting til they've displayed their ability to do so before taking them.
Regardless, this is a much more careful and well-thought lesson than simply "letting them near active drug users" which we cannot ever be certain of and refuse to pretend as though that's possible. We don't live in denial like that.
I'm an addict of many behaviors and my recovery's going incredibly well. Chemical addictions come with added complications of side effects from the chemicals doing their own rewiring, but it's the behavior of escaping reality that's rewiring the reward center. As a result, there's a lot of overlap between recovering from behavioral and chemical addictions.
Also, please feel free to call CPS on us at any time. My name is my username and I live in Port Townsend, WA. I look forward to developing a working relationship with people who are interested in the well-being of my child* because raising them is an active experiment in applying the sciences of culture hacking, well-being, and learning how to learn in as loving of a manner as possible.
(* Note, I'm not sure if you're actually interested in my child's well-being, as CPS and the foster system are NOTORIOUS for systemically traumatizing children. Yes, there are some systems not harming children or doing so minimally...so in spite of being a system of denying parents and children autonomy, which is a need for thriving...but I'm guessing you didn't look into the state of CPS near me to assess whether or not promoting calling them was actually in my child's interest. If you didn't, would you be willing to do your homework before making similar comments to other parents, as they may not have the emotional intelligence I have cultivated to keep from spiraling into fear? If not, would you be willing to continue making them toward me when you want to do so, so as to at least redirect your potentially harmful behavior? There's a lot of people out there, especially parents, who're suffering from Complex PTSD and undiagnosed because CPTSD is a new diagnosis and official diagnoses require access to certain types of privilege. Let's help educate them and everyone else about CPTSD and how to heal, not threaten them with violence, which is what threatening to call the state on someone is, since the state is designed with violence at its core.)
Of course by the time injecting street drugs into your veins seems like your least-bad option, you're in a pretty desperate place and maybe not someone that kids should be around while you're using.
it seems that sempron64 meant people who are literally in the act of shooting up. I guess I can understand not wanting a child to see that, although I question whether that's really as bad as we are supposed to think. it can certainly be unsettling to see for the first time, but all it ever suggests to me is that the person has a truly miserable life. I honestly doubt that it's as bad as pervasive images of people drinking, smoking, partying and having a good time. the latter seems a lot more likely to lead an impressionable mind astray.
I was in Portland and watched a guy shooting up on a bench middle of the day, tons of people around, he was screaming for no one to look at him, police at the other end of the block.
I appreciated that I was just visiting.
Does your squeamishness about seeing someone use an intravenous delivery method really justify the cost of state intervention?
If you are locked up as a result of this, will the reeducation take?
-----------------
Thought experiment aside, you don't know what other people need and forcing your ideas onto them is how we get into these messes in the first place.
Authoritarianism isn't a healing modality.
That someone is usually the poor naive bougie who thought that by paying property taxes and having a job, he could expect to be able to retain possession of his bike && not have to step over piles of human excrement on the way to the shop down the corner.
Singapore seems to avoid having these problems, as does Shanghai. So, while authoritarianism isn't about healing, that really isn't a primary function of state. Keeping order, maintaining a monopoly on violence, and maybe providing against certain preventable evils is really more why we have governments.
And I never claimed leaving people to their own devices was a healing modality, either.
We need to expand the concept of responsibility to be aligned with reality. I'm at least partially responsible for everything that hapoen to me after this next breath. Same for you and yours. And I am also partially responsible for everything in happening in the world. Same for you.
Let's start from this perspective and redesign government to be something everyone can love and that is loving. Right now, it's a pretty gross construct that harms way more people in much more severe ways than drug addicts, petty criminals, and people struggling with mental issues.
Because these are opposing forces. It improves my individual well-being to be able to steal yachts from the marina, drive them around, and set them on fire. But it doesn't improve the collective well-being of the community — including its yacht owners — for me to be able to do that. It improves the collective well-being of a community to take a dangerously mentally ill person and lock them up forever so that they aren't a threat to others. It does not do much that person's well-being.
Obviously, there are good policies that thread the needle. It is not a zero-sum game. But it is absolutely a game where not everyone can get what they want and very hard choices and sacrifices must be made.
> redesign government to be something everyone can love and that is loving.
There are actual serial killers, rapists, child traffickers, and abusers out there. They are in the minority. But a key function of government is to protect the majority from that minority. No government that protects us from those bad actors is going to be loved by those bad actors.
Wanna help me with the task of redesigning government to focus on well-being from the very bottom by rewriting the Declaration of Independence as a Song for Autonomous Interdependence, changing the unrealistic concepts in it?
It'll be easy. I give you a song lyric and you tell me if you think it's a lovely sentiment or not. If so, we're probably on the right track because the things we need can be the hardest to imagine.
> If you are locked up as a result of this, will the reeducation take?
Ha! If offending people was illegal I'd have been in prison a long time ago.
> Thought experiment aside, you don't know what other people need and forcing your ideas onto them is how we get into these messes in the first place.
I'm not forcing my ideas on anyone. These are the laws collectively decided by us and and forefathers. As a group we've decided that we do not want people shooting heroin on our streets and we've made the practice illegal.
> Authoritarianism isn't a healing modality.
I'd argue it authoritarianism to force a law abiding member of society to put up with this craziness in their communities. The people I feel the most sorry for are on the lower end of the income scale that do not have the financial means to vote with their feet.
I don't support unjust laws. If you do, cool. It's still authoritarianism.
And nobody's forcing you to put up with it, as evidenced by you holding a mindset of not putting up with it. Acceptance is a choice and you are allowed to not choose it, as you currently demonstrate.
Just because the law makers haven't yet criminalized your lack of compassion doesn't mean it'll be justice if they do and then come for you. So why support unjust laws pointed toward others?
Seattle has a different mindset, it always has, its just the new Amazon & Tech population is trying to change the culture.
It really depends on the broader systematic picture.
If drug addicts fear consequences to the point of arming themselves and attacking strangers to avoid arrest and maintain supply, that's bad.
If they're able to demonstrate victimless crime, get their gear confiscated and force to keep it to themselves in their own homes or ask for help from the community without threat of incarceration, that's good.
So we really have to look at how it plays out in reality. It's not enough to make a black or white decision based on a hypothetical scenario. Furthermore, we need to consider the impact of judgement by police and rehab operators. Familiarity with the individuals and difficult-to-quantify details of each scenario may make the decision between admonishment, incarceration and forced rehab.
That said, these don't have to be ambiguous clouds of blurry judgement. We can prototype decision trees and debate about them.
But we need higher standards about the anti-social behaviors that are comorbid to drug use. The problem isn't that people are on narcotics. It's at least _possible_ to be a functional member of society while on opiates, and I don't think someone should be wrung through the legal system for having the wrong things in their blood for a bit.
The problem is tent cities burning trash under the overpass. Lines of disheveled camper vans near the shopping centers draining their sewage into open buckets on the street (thank god they're kind enough to use a bucket) Panhandlers harassing residents at such scale that all but the most resilient citizens grimace at the thought of walking through their city center. Some of these people seem not to have drug problems at all.
I'm okay with low standards about drug policy enforcement, so long as it's coupled with high standards about behavior in the public space.
It's the second half that Seattle has yet to solve.
When London was covered in rivers of shit in the 19th Century because there was no sanitation infrastructure, was that because the citizens were anti-social criminals? Or was is a societal problem that needed a funded solution?
Portugal has a lot of bad things to it, but having no war on drugs has made it into one of the most peaceful countries on earth. And marijuana usage is pretty low, Last I checked. Why? Probably because it’s not a special thing.
I’ve always pondered why they only did it there, and I’ve been routinely disappointed to move to the Uk and understand how horrible the drug problem is here. People take ketamine and OD in toilets here.
I doubt we will ever reach Portugal's low levels of use, but people can lead happy & productive lives while having chemical dependencies.
The UK's war on drugs and party culture surrounding ket and others is kinda sad to watch :c
The article is about just not enforcing the law. Portugal changed their laws.
I’d like to see the stats on mortality and quality of life to those that get treatment though. It can’t be worse than locking nonviolent people up.
What are you expecting, naxolone-wielding ninjas? Most social service work happens in offices, shelters, medical facilities and various volunteer orgs.
I certainly agree that we could do with a lot more of it.
Seattle is doing what it can, but we need state and federal action to go further. We can't single handedly solve the severe wealth stratification that is worsening day by day :c
As someone who has trained and trained with police... I can tell you those words are dangerous. So many people who gets their lives upturned by some mostly preventable event has used those words.
Pay attention, no matter where you live. Personally if people are shooting up near me and the police are selectively enforcing the law, “feel safe” isn’t going to be in my vocabulary, but I don’t know you or what your situation is. That’s just my view from being aware of how fast things can go bad.
Exactly. I don't feel unsafe walking around Seattle at all, even with junkies screaming their heads off. You learn that they're in their own universe and don't really care about you.
America's puritanical urges result in more self-harm than anything else. So much of the way our nation is structured is based on some ancient idea that you have to live clean and work hard in order to get to heaven. That is combined with a sense of justified sadism: if we catch someone not living up to these ideals, it is appropriate to punish them, and appropriate to take pleasure in punishing them.
The War on Drugs was never about public health. It was about 1. controlling minorities, and 2. moral superiority. So there's absolutely no surprise that a health-based approach is showing better results than a punishment-based approach.
Punishment of drug use does nothing to prevent drug use. Its only value, therefore, is sadism.
I support decriminalization on purely moral grounds, but am skeptical this will lead to less (and not more) drug-related crime or public use of hard drugs, based on my anecdotal observations in Europe.
Unfortunately, this whole drug situation in the USA has gotten, like many things, totally out of hand through gaslighting abusive actions by those who claim to want to "help" and make things better, but instead have nothing but a record and history of making things worse, which they immediately sweep under the rug the second even they can't ignore their constant, repeated, and typical failures.
What this "caring" approach smells of to me is a kind of stasis, where the helper-syndrome types get to feel good about themselves, while getting rich as org directors, and also normalizing drug cartel operations. The Drug cartels and organized drug criminals are actually a real domestic terror and civil threat to society and communities as they kill and destroy lives by the hundreds of thousands and devastate lives by the millions every single year.
I do agree that throwing users in prison is nonsense, even though often ( and I know people who can attest to this ) it is the thing that saves them from the drug and it also leads to users giving up people on the chain towards the sources of the chemical warfare that is waged on the American people.
I also agree, this whole cottage industry of drug related careers and fortunes, whether it's NGOs or DEA, is an utter mess and corrupted. What really should be happening is that all drug producers, smugglers, transporters, and dealers be declared the perpetrators of crimes against humanity that they are and they should be treated like the enemies in war that they are, as they engage in chemical warfare that kills 80,000 people every year and destroys millions of lives and families and pillages billions and trillions of dollars.
It should be a scorched earth tactic against smugglers, dealers, and producers ... a merciless, ruthless, hunt for these people that are then erased as the war criminals and pestilence on humanity they are ... the mass murderers they are.
But that's from someone that actually hates the misery and suffering and death that drugs cause. I do not get the sense that most people actually care one iota about the 80,000 people that die every year, not to count the thousands who commit suicide due to addiction. All those who do not want to end it once and for all with direct, hard, and merciless action are complicit in and guilty of supporting the murders by the drug cartels and criminals against humanity.
It's not what this site is for, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What if, instead, we mercilessly and ruthlessly cut off their source of money: the premium people pay for illegal drugs exactly because they are illegal? Bootleggers weren't put out of business by Elliot Ness, they were put out of business by the end of prohibition.
"Scorched Earth", "erased as the war criminals and pestilence on humanity they are", further abused, forced into same-sex incarcerated relationships. We've tried this. It hasn't solved yet.
"Just kill them" for climbing without a rope? For risking their long-term health for short-term relief from physical and mental trauma and subsequent addiction, for not violating anyone else's rights but their own, you think you have the right (and moral obligation!) to violate their rights? Because they're inferior. They're an eyesore. "Eliminate the weak!" (who aren't violating the rights of others). Can you think of groups of people in human history who have taken that approach, violated the rights of others, and been cured by subsequent prison?
With the savings from not paying $50,000 a year for learn-to-silently-move-tax-free-contraband-in-cool-school incarceration and attempted concurrent rehabilitation (while the right to address personal health matters is denied), there should be plenty of money to prosecute property crime and littering and biohazards. Let me just reward you with food, a place to stay, gangs, and zero need for personal financial responsibility.
You litter in the street, the park, an alleyway, where f'ing kids play, you spend some of your time cleaning that s' up. For free. Because that's violating the rights of other people.
have 3 examples throughout modern history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Connection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaloa_Cartel#Allegations_of_...
But would you seriously look a Black mother or father in their face and tell her that her child is dead (and they are broke) because he freed himself from the oppressive Puritanical culture and enjoyed drugging himself to death and stealing their resources to feed his addiction?
America sees addiction as a moral failing which can be flagellated away, not as a medical condition requiring treatment.
It only shocks Boomers. Their only answer to 'crime' was to keep making laws harsher until all the jail cells were full. Then to build more jail cells.
There's no need to have criminal penalties for drug use in the first place. What we want less of isn't drug use, it's the anti-social behaviors and health issues that often stem from drug use. Look at the other comments here - no one is upset with the mere ingestion of substances, they are complaining about the behaviors they see on the streets. Behaviors that impact the rest of use negatively. And we all know that a lot of that behavior has nothing to do with drug use in the first place. But it's a lot harder to deal with the behavior issue because then you're dealing with things like mental health issues and large-scale economic issues, on top of drug abuse.
It's so much easier to just use drugs as a scapegoat and start locking people up. Like the Boomers did! But we know that doing so is monumentally stupid and ineffective so we need a different way. Props to Seattle for trying a different way, but just as we've seen here in SF, these half-assed measures do as much to encourage anti-social behavior as they do to mitigate it. I think these West Coast cities being besieged by the nice-weather homelessness epidemic (and associated drug use) are going to have to come up with something a little tougher than what they've found the political will for so far. But we also have to acknowledge that we can't, won't and never should return to the idiotic War on Drugs.
One other place to pay attention to is Shelton, WA, they have a very interesting communal approach to homelessness and providing services, which has built a strong community that wooed some of my friends to buy and retire in Shelton.
Yes, despite these massive social problems. The economic growth is not caused by drug decriminalization, so I'm not sure why you're loosely associating the two. One uncorrelated bad thing is not seen as the "price" for another uncorrelated good thing.
Google, Apple, Expedia and Facebook are each building and hiring thousands here in Seattle, our homeless are significantly less aggressive than those I encounter in California.
These kind of efforts take time to take root. As people do things like this in public, that means more opportunity for social services to reach out and try to solve the problem. In 10-15 years you'll see drug usage rates drop as addicts can seek help for their problem without vilification or risk to having their lives destroyed.
1. People openly shitting on the sidewalk.
2. Ambulances carrying away a junkie that overdosed and died in a doorwell
3. Having to push a sleeping person out of the way of the doorwell just to leave my apartment
4. random screaming, for hours almost every night
5. my girlfriend gets constantly harrassed
6. I puked in the alley our moving truck was in while moving in because there was so much human feces.
7. A naked person crabwalking down a hill
8. someone ripped a metal garbage can off of its stand, grabbed a vodka bottle that was inside it and threw it at a passing car, breaking their window
9. mass vandalism and theft of rental bicycles.
10. someone throwing those rental bicycles into the street
11. one homeless person attempted to steal a backpack from another homeless person having a panic attack or overdose WHILE A COP WAS HELPING THEM.
12. bike theft in broad daylight on 1st avenue
13. drug deals and needles. I have a picture of an abandoned backpack with dozens of needles sprawled around it
14. someone got shot at the 7/11 at night
15. a month later, there was broken glass from a bullet hole at the cherry street cafe.
16. someone using their gun as a pillow
17. tent camping, where i have to walk into the street to get around them.
18. people wandering around in the streets aimlessly, almost getting hit by cars.
19. ive been harrased in restaurants by homeless people that come in and want my food.
20. shopping carts full of trash, parked on the sidewalk every day.
Seattle decriminilizing drugs is one thing. But decriminilizing these kinds of petty crimes has turned pioneer square into something shameful and dangerous.
In my opinion, the city should not decriminilize drugs until AFTER the facilities (rehab and involuntary mental health institutions) are in place.
The non-drug related crimes should not be tolerated either way, and what Dan Satterberg prosecutes/charges with regards to repeat offenders is criminal in itself. His personal agenda is putting the public at risk and he should resign immediately.
> The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people — it is the consequence of systematic alienation; people seek violent solutions when the process established for enacting change is inaccessible to them. Fueled by disaffection turned to malice, if the guilty were willing to kill and be killed fighting perceived injustice, imagine the consequence of them hearing, “I believe you can be rehabilitated. I want you to become part of my community, and together we will thrive.” We use this form of distributive justice for patients with chemical dependencies; treatment and societal reintegration. The most effective penance is making these men ambassadors of reform.
Basically, criminals are protestors against the inequity of society. This is a very old idea. Dostoevsky talks about it in Crime and Punishment.
My sense is that, no, people committing crimes are not "protestors" and treating them as such simply doesn't work. Tough love works. Punishment works.
I just hope that, when the pendulum swings back on this nonsense, it doesn't swing back too far the other way. I think it probably will, though.
> This evaluation included 318 adults who were suspected of recent violations of the uniform controlled substances act (VUCSA) and/or prostitution offenses and were deemed eligible for LEAD by arresting officers. Individuals were ineligible for participation if any of the following exclusion criteria applied: a) the amount of drugs involved exceeded 3 g (all drug classes were eligible); b) the suspected drug activity involved delivery or possession with intent to deliver and there was reason to believe the suspect was dealing for profit above a subsistence income; c) the individual did not appear amenable to diversion; d) the individual appeared to exploit minors or others in a drug dealing enterprise; e) the individual was suspected of promoting prostitution; f) the individual had a disqualifying criminal history (i.e.,conviction for murder 1 or 2, arson 1 or 2, robbery 1, assault 1,kidnapping, Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act 1, sex offense, or attempt of any of these crimes); g) within the past 10 years, the individual was convicted on a domestic violence offense, robbery 2,assault 2 or 3, burglary 1 or 2, or Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act2;or h) the individual was already involved in King County Drug Diversion Court or Mental Health Court.
Source: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/6f124f_f4eed992eaff402f88ddb4...
From a layman's perspective, my question is would the exclusions shown above favor inclusion of people less likely of recidivism?
I'm deeply critical of our criminal justice system and feel that we need a complete revamping of who and why we criminalize. Instead of stop and frisk like tacits that disproportionately affect minorities we need to refocus our police and penitentiary efforts on bringing these folks into a facility specifically designed to wean them off drugs and rehabilitate.
Drug users would be better off because their supply would be safe and they wouldn't need to resort to crime to pay for it. Current supervised consumption sites have also been extremely successful at preventing overdose deaths and somewhat successful at directing users who want treatment to the available resources.
The public would be better off because of the same crime reduction, as well as the reduction of violence and disorder stemming from black markets for illegal drugs. Public use would become so much more of a hassle than the legal alternative that it would likely disappear.
The government would be better off because acquiring currently-illegal drugs legally is super cheap (most of them literally grow on trees, or at least plants), and is almost certainly vastly cheaper than the current prohibition strategy.
The obvious problems:
- No one is going to want a consumption site anywhere near their neighborhood. - Some number of people who would otherwise quit might continue to use if it were cheap and easy. - Something along the lines of "I'd love to sit around all day watching TV and drinking beer but I have bills to pay and I don't want my taxes paying for some low-life to get high."
Drug addiction is a health problem, not a criminal one, but decriminalizing only works in conjunction with a strong mental health care system; judging by the comments here, it sounds like Seattle might be lacking in that area (and they're probably not the only city with this problem).
Deinstitutionalization [2] was a good idea in theory, but the execution seems to have been botched.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpatient_commitment
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
A recent story in WaPo suggests that ball may be rolling. Author interviewed here:
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jmaxj7/this-new-england-t...
This link above might bypass the paywall.
My city has one of the worst problems with repeat violent drug addicts in the nation (perhaps aside from the Bay) and yet we refuse to jail those who attack members of the public.
Just a few weeks ago we released a known violent repeat offender who four days later tossed a hot coffee on an infant.
Up in Ballard we released a guy who then chased people down with a pitchfork. Another is intent on assaulting the new Park Couriers who's job it is to keep people from open-using heroin in our public parks.
There's a guy down at an I-5 onramp in downtown who keeps trying to throw small women off the overpass. He keeps failing at doing so, and the cops say "Can't do anything, he hasn't actually thrown somebody off". I guess we'll just wait until he succeeds.
Oh well. I guess we'll just keep pointing these people towards social services, which they'll refuse again, lock them up for some token amount of time, and wait for them to harm the public again.
Regarding the idiot trying to throw women over the overpass. Your statement is in error. It's a crime to try to harm people as well and he has in fact been arrested repeatedly.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/man-arrested-for-trying-to-...
The problem is they keep dismissing the charges because he is incompetent AND not locking him up for everyone's safety not that they haven't arrested him.
They are currently trying to figure out what to do with him this time now
19-1-02095-1 SEA STATE OF WASHINGTON VS WILSON, JONATHAN JAMES Criminal - Active
https://dja-prd-ecexap1.kingcounty.gov/?q=node/405/2696881/F...
Lets hope they decide to do something smarter this time.
If someone has committed acts of violence you lock them up for those acts.
>There's a guy down at an I-5 onramp in downtown who keeps trying to throw small women off the overpass.
This is what we are discussing.
How do you get out of hospital?
What you're asking for is detention of people with a disability because they have a disability. That's not allowed under the UN CRPD.
Ex. Patient A was doing foo harmful behavior until we changed their medication and the devil stopped appearing in their dreams to give them orders.
Patient B had a history of trying to bite nurses noses off but has been well behaved for 2 years now and participating in therapy.
Every first world nation has standards and procedures for detaining people who are unwell and a danger to themselves and others. It usually involves "expert" opinion and bad behavior to get into such a situation and "expert" opinion to get out. There is an entire history of bad behavior and bad science involved here but the substitute for bad science is better science not let people get away with infinite malfeasance because they are nuts.
People are for example sometimes ordered to facilities where they may receive treatment in place of detention in prison or be taken into custody in the process of some bad behavior and be subjected to an evaluation based on their behavior.
What do you suggest we do with the guy trying to throw women into traffic when he is inevitably declared crazy? Dismiss the charges and let him go? Would you rather
-- He get the treatment he so clearly needs.
-- Someone get murdered by him.
-- The citizenry take matters into their own hands and rid themselves of him.
Option A is surely infinity preferable.
GP post calls for indefinite detention merely for being ill.
> I think the tough call needs to be made that when someone is obviously mentally ill, homeless and without proper sane supervision, the State should institutionalize them indefinitely.
There's nothing in this sentence about violent behaviour.
> Every first world nation has standards and procedures for detaining people who are unwell and a danger to themselves and others. It usually involves "expert" opinion and bad behavior to get into such a situation and "expert" opinion to get out.
You may want to read article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UN CRPD). https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
> 1. States Parties shall ensure that persons with disabilities, on an equal basis with others:
> a) Enjoy the right to liberty and security of person;
> b) Are not deprived of their liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily, and that any deprivation of liberty is in conformity with the law, and that the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty.
Especially read this bit: "and that the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty."
Now read what the committee for CRPD say about detaining mentally ill people because they are mentally ill: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CRPD/GC/GuidelinesA...
> III. The absolute prohibition of detention on the basis of impairment
> 6. There are still practices in which States parties allow for the deprivation of liberty on the grounds of actual or perceived impairment.1 In this regard the Committee has established that article 14 does not permit any exceptions whereby persons may be detained on the grounds of their actual or perceived impairment. However, legislation of several States parties, including mental health laws, still provide instances in which persons may be detained on the grounds of their actual or perceived impairment, provided there are other reasons for their detention, including that they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others. This practice is incompatible with article 14; it is discriminatory in nature and amounts to arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
> There is an entire history of bad behavior and bad science involved here but the substitute for bad science is better science not let people get away with infinite malfeasance because they are nuts.
The long history is that people wrongly think mental illness causes violence (it doesn't) or that we can predict violence because of mental illness (we can't). If someone is committing acts of violence you have a criminal justice system that should deal with them, and that may involve forensic hospitals. But they're there because of the violence, not because of the mental illness.
But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that unethical_ban is wrong to call for indeterminate detention of people just because those people are mentally ill.
Are you seriously arguing that a person of average intelligence can figure out which people wandering around obviously fucked up in the head might hurt them but science can't I don't find this claim credible.
Source on housing first being effective: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.4...
I think people in this thread are asking you to question your assumption- do you think every drug addict on the west coast wants to hold down a job and live our normal life?
Non-addicts don't. Addicts do. Addictive people are stuck in the middle oscillating.
Free will + mind-altering drugs is a fundamentally hard problem.
People don't want to live like drug addicts; but nor do they want to stop using drugs.
To reverse the timeline of an obvious example: the people on the street addicted to heroin, would much rather just become people working regular jobs who are prescribed heroin.
These people probably they got addicted to heroin because of chronic pain, and probably that chronic pain hasn't gone away. So any time the heroin is wearing off, the pain comes back, and that decreases the amount of energy/willpower they have to do anything besides the simplest, shortest-term thing they can do to stave off the pain: buy more street heroin.
You might wean them off heroin, but you aren't gonna make them not take some painkiller, because they still have chronic pain. They'll always be "a drug addict" in a technical sense; they need painkillers the same way people with diabetes need insulin.
That's not the relevant question. Is it better for the rest of us if that drug addict is on the side walk or living inside? In the latter case, there's a better chance of treatment success, but it's also better when they remain addicts.
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/crime/article/Charge-Man-att...
So he only
* pepper sprayed someone
* punched multiple people in the face
This wasnt enough for him to be charged.
I have friend that is on the front line as a social worker. Any time one of these prominent incidents occurs, I make sure to ask if she knows the perp. And about 50% of the time they are a former patient that she couldn't find a spot for at a mental institution.
And I live in the Central District, which is one of the more violent neighborhoods.
I've lived mainly on Capitol Hill and it's a safer and "nicer" place than it was back in the 90's. I had drug deals happening on corner outside my house back then, the neighborhood is great now. I also lived downtown, where Pike St. between 1st and 2nd Aves was horrendous with homelessness and drug use. Clearly much nicer now. The Central District (the other neighborhood I'm most familiar with) has also undergone huge level of gentrification since then, is much "nicer" place to live than it was in the 90's.
Yes, homelessness, and drug use and mental health issues are big problems, and I'm not sure the city has taken best approach to them. But it's easy to criticize without having better answer. The sensationalist ranting I hear sometimes in media and in personal anecdotes seems pretty misleading.
Compared to Orlando and Salt Lake City, Seattle feels about on par to me with regards to safety and the homeless problem (adjusted for the much higher population & density). Which is useless information because it is an anecdote, but the best way to bring data into a conversation is a lot of useless competing anecdotes.
Ballard? I’m not even sure where it being dangerous would come from, maybe getting run down by a bad Norwegian driver? Checkout Cops in Ballard: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hGlDVmBLibg
(Yes, that is Bill Nye)
Ballard is much worse. It's gone from an enclave of retired scandy fishermen to hip neighborhood with a thriving walkable main drag. Because much of the street parking is still free the homeless living out of barely functional vans and rvs can live without hassle and attempt to panhandle on the drag. I imagine that at least some of those vehicles are also essentially drug emporiums further concentrating the homeless population that is hooked. ... Still not as sketchy as the u-district in the 90s though.
I worked at 3rd and pine McDonald’s in 94-95 (one of the main hangouts for Seattle’s homeless population back then), and downtown was a lot more sane back then. The policing was much more aggressive than it is today, which I think had a large part to do with that.
Although I never experienced it and don't know many people who have, I will say that property crimes need to be prosecuted. The only common case I've really heard of is getting bikes stolen (which, again, happens pretty much everywhere) and I assume there is probably some shoplifting too. That's not really even that bad either, and again is par for the course in major cities, but it definitely should be prosecuted when possible.
I agree that a lot of people are simply bothered by having to walk past homeless people and don't want to see or think about them, ever. It's just not really an issue that will affect you very often, on average.
There's a large chunk of people who think that "Let's take repeat violent offenders off the streets" translates to "Let's take away offered social programs and criminalize being poor", which is not a fruitful dialog.
No arrest, no statistics. When they do arrest someone, the city and county prosecutors often refuse to press charges. No charge, no statistics.
The needling is also not working from data...
This was linked in that Needling article.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/mean-world-sy...
How does that play out such that they can't get him on some type of assault / harassment? Is he politely asking these women if they would like to be thrown off the overpass and politely walking off when they demur?
But I'm not holding my breath for them to actually put him away, given their past decisions to not separate him from the public.
> Charges for the first three assaults were dismissed by the City of Seattle because of mental health concerns, prosecutors said in the charging papers.
Jesus, WTF? If he is attacking people because of mental illness, why isn't he locked up in a mental hospital? "Sorry, you attacked people but you're crazy, so have a nice day!" And why is trying to throw someone off an overpass charged with assault and not with attempted murder?
Seems very odd Wilson managed to dodge both mental facilities and prisons.
The guy who stabbed people at 10am in front of the Nordstroms downtown flagship store, took several steps to evade capture, hide weapons, etc. All indications that he knew he was committing a crime when he stabbed his victims.
Then when the jig was up (as police closed in on him) he stripped his clothes off so we get the "naked man" headline.
Why would he strip his clothes off? Sounds like he was taking deliberate steps to increase the likelihood of being found mentally incompetent knowing that local prosecutors tend to dismiss such cases.
Also, Seattle's city prosecutor and head public defender jointly and publicly admonished a judge that refused to release one of these career criminals when requested to by the prosecutor.
Long term? After the deinstitutionalization movement in the US, it's possible to get people forcibly committed for short term evaluations (a 72 hour "Baker Act" evaluation), but long term involuntary commitment is quite rare.
"An individual cannot legally be prosecuted in the criminal justice system if they are not competent because they will not be able to assist in their own defense. When a Mental Health Evaluation determines that an individual is not competent, prosecutors may move for competency restoration. In the three Seattle Municipal Court cases involving Mr. Wilson, the prosecutor did not request competency restoration."
competency restoration is putting a defendant in hospital pending return of competency: https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/fixing-the-system/fe...
> And why is trying to throw someone off an overpass charged with assault and not with attempted murder?
"The filed charge is Attempted Assault in the First Degree. That crime requires proof of intent to inflict great bodily harm. Attempted Murder in the Second Degree would require proof of intent to actually cause death. Because these are “attempted” crimes, the critical difference between them is the defendant’s actual intent. We are aware from indications in prior case dockets that the defendant has a history of mental health issues. Given that history, the fact that we are early in the investigation, and that the victim thankfully suffered only minor injuries, we chose to file the case conservatively. We can always consider adding Attempted Murder as the case proceeds towards trial. "
The short of it is that society mentally ill criminals are in the middle of a justice system that requires mental health, and a mental health system that refuses to hold people by force, and isn't funded to its expensive needs. It's one of the many logical inconsistencies of law, and the cost of emphasizing compassion over general safety.
Before you say "emphasize safety more", realize that this leads to giving the State a long leash to use on citizens who might not be mentally nor criminal, but merely accused as such by the state.
In short, this is why we can't have nice things. The risk of harm from a mentally ill person on a bridge is the price society pays for not being able to field a trustworthy government.
I assume you're just trying to troll and failing badly.
And just because concealed carry legal doesn't mean the process is constructed in such a way that normal people can actually do it (see CA, MA, NYC and NJ for examples of this) though I'm not sure about Seattle specifically.
But I see you're the type of person who will just shift arguments instead of having an honest discussion so I'm done with you.
Would you rather be paying $100,000+ a year/person to judge and jail them for the crime of being addicted while poor? (I've yet to see people entering that pipeline for the crime of being addicted while rich.)
I said that these violent addicts are refusing offered social services, yet we let them walk around and continue to harm the public.
No, it's not.
What you said, in response to the article was:
> I am just astounded that this is being spun in such a positive light.
The implication here is that redirecting non-violent addicts off the addiction --> prison pipeline was a policy mistake.
I ask why you think that non-violent addicts should be put into prison. You tell me I'm grossly misrepresenting your point of view.
Which point of view do you actually hold? Do you think that non-violent addicts should be provided with help, or prison? Pick one, and own it.
I don't care one whit about your opinions on violent people in public spaces. I doubt they differ from mine, and it's not an interesting conversation.
Whatever problems the commenter in question has with violent criminals has absolutely nothing to do with it - but they chose to attack the non-violent policy (And then get defensive about how their points are being misconstrued. What are those points, then? Violent crime is bad, and should be dealt with? I don't think anyone disagrees with that one. What does it have to do with a diversion of non-violent addicts?)
It's like complaining that standards on organically-grown produce aren't preventing contaminated meat from ending up at your grocery store. Whatever problems you have with contaminated meat have nothing to do with the produce policy.
There is a lot going on here. First, there are a lot of homeless. Housing is sky rocketing and many people cannot afford to live anywhere close to where they can find work. The tech community there basically waves there hands and just says, "You can't afford to live here as a barista, well then you just gotta do the 1~2 hour bus/car commute in order to make me coffee. Sucks to be you."
Many of the other issues people are listing, aren't about drugs. They are about the homeless.
Second, people are talking about the other petty crime that goes with drugs: people stealing to get money for drugs. Violent crime and theft certainly don't need to be normalized. Chicago's recent DA's office has been criticized of not being hard enough on kids who commit crimes; which leads to more things like carjackings and even more violent stuff (knowing they might not face charges). That's a different issue -- although tangentially related and can't be ignored.
Portugal is a great example of a country where they try real treatment and help for people struggling with addiction. It's a better example of what happens with these policies long term. From what I've read and heard, it's mostly positive.
I personally knew people in my home town who stood in line at 5am on Mondays to get their methadone for the week. Treatment programs/rehab are for the rich -- often costing $2k ~ $5k out of pocket. Movie stars go to treatment. There need to be more treatment options that are affordable for those most in need of them. Drug treaming in America is just as shameful as the rest of our totally broken health care system.
https://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-...
0. https://mynorthwest.com/1458667/seattle-offender-coffee-todd...
That's pretty rad.
Now, if i go there, you are allowing these drugged out zombies to steal from me and harass me? I don’t understand, I really do not.
As progressive as some are here, the NIMBYism (see other locals that this opinion piece has riled up in the thread) and bad apples on the police force spoiling the whole bunch are just as bad as anywhere else.
Another anecdote to add to the quote: walking up 12th Ave (Cap Hill) midday on a Sunday, some friends and I passed by a dude sleeping or passed out on the sidewalk and two oncoming walking cops simultaneously. One looked down and asked, "rough night?" and laughed with his partner.
In case it's not clear, this wasn't a friendly offer of assistance, this was a drive by insult (they didn't break stride at all) that made it clear that if it weren't for progressive laws about occupying public space they'd be violently removing the guy from the sidewalk.
What's especially insane about it is that most of the folks commenting and voting are members of the working class.
Sure, they might have ill-gotten capital in the form of a deed (ignoring the likelihood that there's a lien on that deed) on a tiny parcel of stolen/colonized land or vested stock in the monopolist they work for, but that's a pittance in the scheme of things. They still need to sell their labor in order to meet their needs for food, shelter, community participation, etc.
We need to find a way to reach these folks. Because this thread is evidence that they think they're significantly different from the people without housing they see on the street here every day.
There's no need to have empathy towards the underclass silenced by tech money, or whatever. I never had it to start with and never will; and I feel like lots of the people you are trying to "reach" are like that to a large degree, it's just not a fashionable thing to articulate clearly these days. I personally feel completely fine voting for Sanders and other economic progressives, supporting free healthcare, public education, low-income housing, etc. while simultaneously having negative empathy towards habitual criminals and underclass in general. These are not mutually exclusive, as far as I'm concerned they are mutually reinforcing.
I agree with you in spirit, that most people in SV and the tech industry in general are truly workers. However, I think the monopolists have been quite clever in offering just enough capital to those workers that they feel like an integral part of the system. Especially as they gain additional seniority, or work long enough to pay off their house, that mindset engrains itself. Add to this the democrats willingness to go after the middle/upper-middle class rather than the true elites to fund social programs, and you end up with an individualistic and anti-democratic mindset.
In a way, 'startup culture' and YC contribute to that perception, giving the workers the idea they can make it big as an entrepreneur, no matter how unlikely that really is. It's manufacturing the consent of the average wage-worker in SV for a system only truly benefits elite VC firms and a very very small number of very very lucky or very very well connected entrepreneurs.
> We need to find a way to reach these folks. Because this thread is evidence that they think they're significantly different from the people without housing they see on the street here every day.
There are a ton of tech workers ripe for class consciousness in the gaming industry, so I think that's a good place to start. I've also had a lot of luck encouraging collective action on individual teams that suffer under incompetent management. Combining a discussion of bad management with the trap of mortgage payments and immigration law has netted me a lot of progress with encouraging a more leftist worldview.