Posted on 07/12/2019 5:51:30 PM PDT by simpson96
Seattle is grappling with a crisis of what is sometimes called "visible homelessness" — people who live in the street and struggle with mental illness or drug addiction.
It's a population that often commits small crimes, such as disorderly conduct or shoplifting to pay for drugs. And public frustration is growing.
Some accuse a reform-oriented local criminal justice system of becoming too tolerant.
These critics point to examples such as a man with mental illness who was arrested in March for trying to throw a woman off a bridge. It turned out he'd already been arrested three times in the previous three months for random attacks on strangers and throwing a computer terminal at the library.
He didn't face serious criminal penalties for those previous incidents, in part, because of his mental health status.
In April, body cameras on the Seattle police officers captured an encounter with a man who had claimed a downtown alleyway and was chasing people away with a drain pipe. It took nearly two hours of negotiations involving more than a dozen police officers to safely subdue him.
Public frustration with the "visible homeless" found its voice in a recent hourlong special called "Seattle is Dying," by ABC affiliate KOMO-TV. It focuses on the debris of tent camps near downtown and the behaviors of people with mental illness and drug use.
The video refers to "lost souls who wander the streets, untethered to home, or family, or reality" and city residents who feel compassion, "but who no longer feel safe."
The video was criticized for being melodramatic and exaggerating the problem, but it struck a nerve and has become part of the city's political discussion. Candidates for local office are now routinely asked whether they think Seattle is indeed "dying."
Even a judge weighed in. At
(Excerpt) Read more at eastbaytimes.com ...
We are seeing the direct result of the widespread shut down of mental hospitals that used to take care of these folks.
There just isn’t anything libs cant turn into sh!t
No wonder Seattle is dying.
“Seattle is Dead?”
Ha!
No filthy city ridden with homelessness, AIDS, human feces on sidewalks,
broken schools, alleyways littered with needles, rampant burglary, rape...
Can ever really die...
As long as its denizens still listen to Nina Totenberg, Ira Shapiro, and the rest of the gang on NPR who use our tax dollars to tell us how to live just like Seattle does.
“visible homelessness” ??
visible freeloading degenerate drug addicts that are destroying the city do to leftist government
The Dem(!) DA in Dallas decreed that there would be no punishment for a crime that resulted in less than $750 in loss. Guess how many shoplifters this created?
MeAgain Rapinoe and her girlfriend should demonstrate their skills at City Hall, then deliver soccer/basketball skill training to those living in the homeless camps.
That would lift everyones spirts and clear the fog of depression from the homeless
You are so right. The mentally ill need treatment in a facility, not the “right” to assault and steal.
As Rudy Guiliani proved conclusively in no less a venue than New York City. Colloquially, it is called the "broken window effect".
Every species has its members who cannot function within the social norms of its kind. Humans are no different. Our prosperity and success has created a situation where we have the ‘luxury’ of molly coddling those among us who cannot or do not want to fit in. There will come a time for us to cull the herd. Sad to say, but it will happen if we choose to survive.
Like some of the “gun violence/mass shooting” problems, many are really a problem of how the pendulum of regulations regarding involuntary commitment of persons with mental health problems has swung too far away from making such actions possible and too far towards making them difficult to achieve.
The pendulum swung, for good reasons, away from what was once too easy in getting someone involuntarily committed for treatment of mental health issues. But the changes went too far and the consequences, for decades, have been tons of people for whom society’s public safety would have been much improved if more of certain classes of folks had been involuntarily sent to a mental health institution.
Compassion and sympathy cannot override all other concerns.
What ever happened to midnight basket ball and free tire air pressure gauges?
And the drug dealers largely control the politicians now, certainly in the Democrat party.
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