Seattle has stopped charging people for personal drug possession

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/no-charges-for-personal-drug-possession-seattles-bold-gamble-to-bring-peace-after-the-war-on-drugs/2019/06/11/69a7bb46-7285-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

259 313 7 years ago

washingtonpost.com

gedy2• 7 years ago

I lean heavily towards giving people the freedom to do what they want, but in 'private' and without burdening public life of others. If people want to light up or shoot up, so be it. But I think a community must have ways to discourage or push people out of the public sphere who practice unwelcome and unsocial behavior. The gov't fully feeding, clothing, and sheltering large groups of addicts is impractical and unviable in most/all places.

wil4213• 7 years ago

If they aren’t going to charge you for drugs surely they could arrest you for public intoxicating or disorderly conduct. Drunk people get arrested frequently. Put them in the drunk tank, sober them up, suggest or provide rehab options, and let them out with a small cash fine. If they want to get into some kind of treatment or non-profit home waive the fine.

The goal is to provide incentives to get sober but not ruin someone’s job prospects forever for being addicted.

sandworm1014• 7 years ago

> Put them in the drunk tank, sober them up, suggest or provide rehab options, and let them out with a small cash fine.

That is Hollywood, not reality. Tossing happy drunks into cells to sober up overnight is not a thing.

(1) There are no happy drunks. The drunks cops arrest are loud and aggressive. Often the physical act of arresting them results in more violent behavior.

(2) "Drunk" is not a thing for cops. They don't know if the person has had too many beers or had just taken LSD, or both. If they assume a person is simply drunk, and that person dies in the cell of an overdose, the cops will be responsible because they isolated that person. Cops are forced to treat intoxicated persons is more like patients than a 'drunks'.

(3) Mental health problems can look like, or at least exacerbate, intoxication. Cops cannot casually lock people up under the assumption they are dunk when in all likelihood they may be a non-drunk person in the middle of an episode. So cops must test people, evaluate them to determine what is at play. That takes time/money.

(4) Police cells are not happy places. They aren't private 8x4s with a soft cot. Spend a night in an LA lockup. You will not be getting much sleep. Casually throwing hundreds of drunk people into that mix will not help.

Assuming this is just about happy drunks, businesses that get people drunk and let them loose on the streets share the responsibility. We cannot allow bars and liquor stores, and their patrons, to rely on a pleasant police force ready to keep drunk people safe after the bar closes. If a bar is going to serve someone to the point of arrest-worthy intoxication they must contribute to the cost of keeping that person safe.

I saw a BBC doc yesterday about drinking in the UK. They have stores selling 3-liter bottles of 7.5% cider for four dollars. That is ridiculous. 3-liter bottles of dirt-cheap alcohol, cheaper than coke, are not bought by happy social drinkers. Any store selling those knows what it is doing.

smileysteve• 7 years ago

Put them in the drunk tank, sober them up, suggest or provide rehab options, and let them out with a small cash fine

Thats sounds great except

1. Accusing the police of questionable arrest tactics, mistreatment, death while in police custody (even from lack of treatment) is already a PR issue that has caused huge public outcry.

2. Overdosing and sobering up isn't strictly safe on alcohol or on opioids. Where drug overdoses are a top killer in society right now.

3. Homeless and drug addled people don't have the cash to pay a small cash fine. They just spent it on their last score, or the only cash they have is stolen or pan handled. And if they don't have the money to pay, you've just criminalized them more or put them further into a debt they will never pay.

4. Denial is the first sign of a problem. Sure, tell a stranger to go to rehab. Thanks to the undoing of forced institutionalizing, that's all you can offer.

aisenik12• 7 years ago

I'm a transgender woman. Applying your thought process seems to me, inevitably, to mean I can't live in society.

I work downtown cooking for a bar (despite my deep involvement in tech as a child/teen and early work programming and some infrastructure stuff, life's challenges haven't enabled me access to significant wealth or appreciable social status). I've found survival, and I deal with drug addicts, mentally ill, the deeply traumatized and abandoned. The biggest thing anyone needs in these circumstances is love and acceptance.

Coming from a place of privilege, your leaning to exclude the suffering from society is wildly antisocial and a leading cause of the rise in "eat the rich" mentalities.

malvosenior16• 7 years ago

I don't think you being transgender relates at all to what the parent post was saying. No one wants to watch someone shoot up heroin on the sidewalk (and potentially step on a dirty needle). No one wants to second hand smoke crack. It's a public safety issue to move some of these activities out of public spaces.

I'm not even commenting on whether these things should be legal in private, but there are very good reasons they shouldn't be allowed in public.

throwaway743• 7 years ago

Their keyword is unwelcomed behavior, there was no mention of identity. Unless you're behavior is out of control, this doesn't apply.

fcarraldo• 7 years ago

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

gedy2• 7 years ago

I think you are extrapolating too much from my words and jumping to conclusions I did not make, Especially regarding privileges. My main point was that libertarianism goes both ways, you can’t have live free ethos and do what you please but then expect to socialize the physical costs of the behavior without question.

creycrey• 7 years ago

Then it means you simply don't deserve freedom. Your failure of being able of logical thinking will be your undoing. The context of this article and comment is that people are being arrested and have their live ruined despite them acting as well behaving citizens. The comment you're responding provides a solution to the problem that merely involves a small inconvenience. You then erroneously that this inconvenience must also apply to you by twisting some words in a way that strengthens you argument. However the thing you have failed at is the fact that your initial situation is in no way comparable with those of drug addicts. Nobody is arresting you because you're a transgender woman. If you want the privilege of complaining about this then the only way to make it fair is by being treated the same way as those drug addicts. In other words you're saying it is illegal to be a transgender woman and the proposed solution of allowing to be one in private would still make it illegal to be one in public. Except we are not living in this world. It's not illegal at all. People might still discriminate against you but this isn't even remotely close to the same thing as it being written in the law.

Also your conclusion at the end is completely wrong. Prison excludes people from society. Letting them exist in society by imposing some rules is exactly the opposite.

shaki-dora2• 7 years ago

The US has 500,000 homeless people. Let's say it would cost about $1,500 per month to provide them with basic lodging and basic needs. That's $9 billion per year, or about $30 per citizen.

As a comparison: The F-35 fighter program is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over 55 years. That's $27 billion per year, or about three times as much as it would cost to fix homelessness.

Let's compare with what you're advocating, which appears to be the status quo. The existence of homeless people (not all of whom are drug addicts, by the way) shows that drug criminalisation doesn't work.

Homeless people don't need more suffering to finally get their act together. Life on the streets is plenty uncomfortable and dangerous, and nobody operating according to your simplistic model of sticks & carrots would chose it.

Further criminalising behaviour you don't like such as being badly dressed or prone to shouting random, schizophrenia-induced nonsense seems not just heartless, but rather close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated. Because if you don't think they deserve food or shelter, and you want to drive them out of cities (and, presumably, towns) where are they supposed to go? I want to be as charitable as possible here, but "push[ing] people out of the public sphere" seems to be a euphemism to bus them into the desert and not watch them die.

Being slightly annoyed by homeless people is also the least you can do if you actually believe in the "public sphere" as a community of citizens, and not just the place to get cheap takeout. If others' suffering cuts into your bliss, either through its annoying smells and sounds or because there are remnants of empathy in play, that should be motivation to solve the problem. There are many countries poorer than the US that have far smaller homeless populations, so it is entirely possible.

wang_li3• 7 years ago

Let's say it would cost about $1,500 per month to provide them with basic lodging and basic needs.

You can say that, but it's very, very incorrect. Seattle spends $1 billion on services, clean up, housing, and etc. for a homeless population of 12,000.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of...

danenania• 7 years ago

$9 billion per year does sound like a bargain to fix homelessness, but I think it's unfortunately a lot more complicated than that. The poverty line for a single person in the US in 2019 is $12,490 per year, and there are roughly 40 million living in poverty (25 million adults and 15 million children). You'd be offering all these people (and more who are just above the line) a significant increase in income if they call themselves homeless. While it might still be a good idea to do this, you are now looking at numbers closer to $0.5-1 trillion, so it's a very different discussion.

munificent4• 7 years ago

The US has 500,000 homeless people. Let's say it would cost about $1,500 per month to provide them with basic lodging and basic needs.

What happens if you do that and next year discover that now you have 1,000,000 homeless people?

You're responsible for all of the consequences of a program, even the unintended ones. The line between "supporting" and "enabling" is very fine and hard to navigate. It's difficult to help people on the bottom while avoiding incentivizing people to stay on the bottom.

dang• 7 years ago

You have some good points, but please edit out the parts of your comments which are crossing into ideological flamewar and even personal attack For example, this bit breaks the site guidelines:

close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated

As does this bit from another post:

why you seem to be indulging in such fascist revenge fantasies

It's not ok to argue like this on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel, or how wrong someone else is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and commenting more in the spirit of this site, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

MisterTea• 7 years ago

Possession and public use/display are two different things. Do not confuse the two.

It's the same with alcohol, I can legally walk or drive around with a sealed container during transport. If I open that container in public and drink from it, I am breaking the law.

I 100% agree that possession of any drug should not lead to automatic arrest. But public consumption should not go unpunished nor should it be encouraged. Though, what is a good compromise for punishing public consumption? I say confiscate the drugs and paraphernalia while offering help as a good start. Arresting them just wastes time and money as once released they will go right back to doing what got them there in the first place. Jail is useless, they need a complete reboot in life which is extraordinarily difficult. I have no solution for that as there is no one size fits all approach.

leetcrew9• 7 years ago

why does public use have to be punished?

foota• 7 years ago

It's really not though. It would probably cost a couple hundred million tops to do that for everyone in the Seattle area. We'd need to raise a tax to do it for sure, but it'd represent a fairly low burden.

mixmastamyk3• 7 years ago

Agreed, until word got out.

jdavis703• 7 years ago

Earlier this year I was hanging out at Dolores Park in San Francisco. There was a scantily-clad white guy who kept going up to various groups and obviously masturbating.

Nearby was a POC smoking weed. When a cop came through guess who got a ticket? The guy smoking weed — and this is despite that weed is supposed to be the lowest priority crime in SF.

When laws are enforced this arbitrarily it’s no wonder governments are taking enforcement away from beat cops.

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

Its difficult. Everyone's in favour of arresting black people for smoking crack. But the law is supposed to be equal. You have to arrest college kids doing XTC or gays who snort cocaine too. And that will create massive public outrage and a waste of prosecution's time.

mises• 7 years ago

Here's the other important thing: if you want to allow private use and criminalize public abuse, fine. Do that. But don't stop enforcing the law, lest you set (or strengthen) the precedent that the law is bent for political expediency. Change the law, don't just "stop enforcing it". Besides, if the goal is to provide lasting change, it makes more sense: a different enforcer could make a different decision. It's a little more difficult to rebuild support for legislative action (to, say, re-criminalize something) than for an administrator to do it.

elamje• 7 years ago

Some of the discussion in this thread has brought to light some interesting things.

1) Where is the line for what is socially acceptable to do in public?

2) If a line exists, why does it exist where it does?

3) Should there be a standard that society must follow, so we don’t end up with drug litter, litter, and human waste on the streets and around us all of the time?

Some commenters have brought up that maybe there should not be a standard that we strive to achieve with regards to public behavior and cleanliness. I am concerned that slowly we are becoming so individualistic(in the since of other people can do whatever they want), and liberal with standards of behavior, that the worst kinds of behavior will eventually be permitted because that is “their right” to act that way.

I am curious if other people feel that we are not very far from being a society that keeps saying “everything is permissible, because anyone has the right to do as they please.” Or I might be extremely alone in this regard.

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

Good policies can reduce the number of addicts to the minimum (there will always be a subset of the population that will fall into addiction but it can be low enough to not be a public health concern). Practically everything America does, from extreme inequality, normalised predatory capitalism, no public healthcare, rent seeking drugs companies who push opioids on vulnerable patients, terrible social policies and pathetic public schooling etc etc is counter productive to reducing the number junkies.

Tsubasachan2• 7 years ago

In a healthy society very few people find the junkie lifestyle appealing so that's not really much of a problem.

TheOperator• 7 years ago

You can still charge people for disorderly conduct and public intoxication. This is just taking away charging people for having fentanyl in their purse.

The gov't fully feeding, clothing, and sheltering large groups of addicts is impractical and unviable in most/all places.

It's completely viable it's just impractical. There are not THAT many homeless people. However there are diminishing returns for everything... Some people are on the street because they trash any home they're given access to. Also the better you take care of this population the more homeless people move to your progressive enlightened area. It's viable but nobody wants to pay for that shit when there are other social goods you could be doing.

ariehkovler• 7 years ago

These experiments tend to work at reducing secondary crimes etc.

However, they also are usually unpopular at the same time, leading to a backlash and a drug clampdown again. It's the drug policy circle of life.

merpnderp3• 7 years ago

These conditions are exactly what prompted the drug war's start in the first place. Neighborhoods were tired of the addicts and petty (and sometimes not so petty) crime which plagued their day-to-day lives.

I wouldn't be shocked if 10 years from now, these coastal cities are leading the charge on a tough on drugs reversal.

fzeroracer2• 7 years ago

Well, not quite. The reason why the drug wars got started wasn't because of addicts or petty crimes. It was a form of class warfare because they wanted the dirty poors and minorities to stop using their poor drugs.

The history behind the War on Drugs is very explicitly a one divided on racial grounds and a cursory look at things like the legality of marijuana or mandatory minimums tells the full tale.

dogmatic_di2• 7 years ago

As someone living there right now the article really doesn't properly cover the discontent in the city.

There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). "Tent City" has spread so far that it's getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it's getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There's shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into).

Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it's a cautionary tale.

CodeMage3• 7 years ago

Could someone please explain what it means to "encourage homelessness"? At a first glance, it looks like a passive aggressive implication that homeless people, if they just tried harder, wouldn't be homeless. Can anyone help me see what I'm missing?

SkyBelow4• 7 years ago

Maybe attracting homeless would be a better way of putting it. Homeless people aren't inherently irrational. Given an option, many of them will choose a place they like better than one they don't. Add in politicians who see a chance to solve the issue by encouraging the homeless to move somewhere better for them (which lets them even sell the measure as a benefit for the homeless), it means that places that make it much better to be homeless see homeless from other areas moving in.

dogmatic_di2• 7 years ago

I can elaborate. Enforcement of basic car camping and drug possession/use laws has basically gone to zero and as a result there is a sense that Seattle has opened itself up as a "Risk Free Zone" for homelessness. Stories like https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/just-sickeni... have created a sentiment that people are moving to Seattle because of this.

While I can't speak to the truth of the belief that people are actively moving to Seattle, I can say that there's little incentive for someone to follow basic property or drug laws in this city.

EDIT: To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense.

dahdum• 7 years ago

One example is decriminalizing possession of heroin / crack, which makes it far easier and safer for dealers (who can hold below the limits and resupply frequently), which then increases the availability and drives down the price (less risk) of those drugs. Ignoring petty crime increases it as well.

Important to note that it’s often a funnel, homelessness -> addiction, so you have to work on both sides.

I don’t have the perfect solution, nobody seems to, but Seattle and a few other cities seem to be going down the wrong path with vigor.

sdfsafsafas8• 7 years ago

If you permit the assumption that homeless are more likely to engage in criminal activity [0], the city of Seattle has significantly reduced enforcement of crime, including violent crime.

Therefore, ppl who would otherwise being in jail for crimes are living on the streets.

There was a documentary about this done by a local Seattle TV station. I don't know how reliable it is, but at the end it actually gave fairly humanitarian and progressive solution to the problem, despite spending most of the show arguing lax and progressive policing attitudes created the problem to begin with [1]

[0] by, a criminal being more likely to become homeless, or by desperation driving the homeless to crime

[1] Their proposed solution, inspired by a program in RI (? maybe ME), is to treat drug addiction as a disease to be treated by having effective programs.

moduspol5• 7 years ago

We had a post here last week about soda taxes in Philadelphia and it seemed like common sense that by making sugary drinks more expensive, you are encouraging people to consume it less, which results in fewer people drinking it.

We can discuss this with no implication that there's a static amount of soda consumption in the world, or that people want to be obese from consuming it. We understand life is a series of choices, "when to consume sugary drinks" makes up some of them, and that by disincentivizing that choice, people are more likely to choose a different beverage.

Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.

privateSFacct• 7 years ago

There are different approaches here.

One approach includes both reward / consequence. In this model, things like theft, various forms of violence particularly in shelter or public housing violence, even taking over extremely large areas of public space (ie, 3-4 tents plus dogs plus...) results in consequences, while avoiding issues along the above lines results in rewards (ie, eligibility for service or additional service). In addition, these approaches tend to also consider impact on the non-homeless (ie, prison time linked arguably with a reduced risk of property crime)

Other models are focused primarily on making life as bearable as possible for the homeless - basically the straight service model. Under this model, resources are provided and consequences are reduced in the event to solve homelessness.

Some folks going through the tougher love systems (ie, jail vs rehab etc) say good things, other folks ask how can homelessness be criminalized and focus primarily on reducing risk of govt involvement (this can also save money in some cases - prison is expensive, rehab is expensive etc).

malandrew• 7 years ago

Human beings are motivated both intrinsically and extrinsically.

Adding support for an activity provides extrinsic motivation for doing something.

Basically, cities get what they pay for. If you pay for homelessness you get it.

That said, I'm not saying we shouldn't help people, but that we should make sure that whatever support we provides guides people towards self sufficiency and not dependence.

“The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber, ... To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR 1935

itslennysfault2• 7 years ago

You're not missing anything. A lot of people just want the problem gone and somehow think that being tougher on the already downtrodden is a viable solution. You can fine and jail the homeless and it's not going to make them any less homeless.

The only solution is exactly the kind of thing this article is talking about. Providing consoling / rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one by one. There is no blanket solution.

CaptainZapp6• 7 years ago

Sounds a bit like Zurich in the 80s and 90s[1]

The problem was, while not solved, massively improved by providing heroin to hardcore addicts[2]

The only argument against it, really, is that it's morally wrong to hand out drugs to addicts. Leaving this argument aside the approach was (and is) widely successful. Not only for the city, as such, but also for the addicts who get a chance to stabilize their lifes, are much healthier and actually can hold down appartments and jobs.

[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletraum...

[2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zuri...

tempguy99996• 7 years ago

Further <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/05/the-case-for-prescriptio...

A short read, a couple of pages. Extract:

" The [heroin] addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself. As a group, you couldn’t tell.

Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’. In the clinic, as Russell Newcombe tells me, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations ‘drug war wounds’. So Dr Marks began to wonder: if prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more? He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400.

The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’

One day a young mother called Julia Scott came into Dr Marks’s surgery and explained she had been working as a prostitute to support her habit. He wrote her a prescription, and she stopped sex work that day. "

Just a perspective, not saying right or wrong.

Edit: added this:

" And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts. "

14• 7 years ago

I completely agree. I have told this to people for years. You have this population addicted to this drug we would produce for pennies and instead of working with them we make it illegal and challenge them through theft, prostitution, and street dealing just so they can supply their habit. Furthermore, I heard that in the countries that started the dealers dry up and new heroin addicts are simply few and far in between. I suspect that laws were not originally designed to help these people but rather to exert control over them. On a side note, with all the problems alcohol causes it amazes me we sell it but worry so much about others such as marijuana.

darkpuma3• 7 years ago

I don't think it should be assumed that the homelessness is caused by the addiction, rather than both being comorbid to some third condition. Certainly some homelessness is caused by addiction, but for some a mental illness could be the cause of the homelessness and the drug-use may be an attempt to self-medicate that mental illness. In that scenario, providing clean and safe heroin would improve their quality of life, but wouldn't address the underlying condition or the subsequent homelessness. The family living next to the tent city will probably still feel pretty upset about the state of things.

ttul• 7 years ago

Patiently waiting for this to expand into a mainstream program here in Vancouver... Meanwhile, the streets near where I work are literally mayhem 24/7. Take the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, enlarge, enhance, and shittify and you're only part way to how bad parts of downtown Vancouver are these days.

docbrown• 7 years ago

If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.

1: http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/

briffle• 7 years ago

I agree with you in principal, but at the same time:

we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.

Where I live, the groups of car campers (or often times falling apart RV's) seem to attract crime, drug use, theft, vandalism, etc. I stopped going to one park in the middle of a city with a large group of car campers, when I found a used syringe in the fenced in dog play area, and saw two different heroin deals go down while playing with my dog. (one of them involved prostitution right in the back seat of the car in the middle of a city park)

drak0n1c• 7 years ago

Intervention and interning street addicts in rehab centers is a very effective program for Rhode Island. They prosecute drug crimes and misdemeanors, and offer a choice between prison or rehab. Many people who go through the program say it saved their life.

West coast states have similar alternative drug courts and rehab available, but they are underutilized, because there is no prosecution in the regular court system and therefore no incentive.

natalyarostova6• 7 years ago

A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin. They don't want to live in shelters. They want to live in a tent and shoot heroin.

There is a heroin addict that lives on one street I use to walk to work. He can't have more than a few years to live, he's as broken as humans get. The street he lives on is littered with literally hundreds of his used needles across bus stops, gardens, yards, paths. He defecates on the street and in bags that he leaves around.

Letting people do this legally, which Seattle now de facto does, is not appropriate.

munificent4• 7 years ago

something as simple as car camping

It's not that simple. (Problems are never that simple.) I live in Ballard which has a lot of people living out of RVs and tents. Many of those people don't cause problems for anyone, however, I have personally experienced:

* People shitting in our alley.

* People pissing on our garage.

* Someone shitting in a medical commode on the side of the road in broad daylight. (I admit a certain admiration for this person's self-confidence.)

* In the middle of the night, someone standing at our fence gazing into our kitchen for several minutes while gesticulating wildly.

* Furniture stolen from our front porch.

* Someone rifling through our trash. (Presumably for identity theft. In Seattle, food goes into separate compost bins.)

* Finding used needles on the lawn. (I have small children, so I had to teach them that the shiny bright orange plastic things are not toys.)

* Frequent fights and people screaming at each other at all hours of the night.

* Multiple car break-ins from car prowlers. My wife caught and yelled at one car prowler before they were able to get into one.

* When they people relocate, they typically leave a pile of trash and human waste behind. Often, RVs will dump their blackwater tank directly on the street or sidewalk. This is, obviously, a health issue.

This is just what has happened directly to my wife and I. Other nearby events:

* My neighbor owns an RV in his backyard. Someone broke into it and stole several things, including an urn containing his father's ashes. He chased after the guy, who responded by pulling a knife on him. [1]

* A couple of blocks away, someone was stabbed in the chest when they confronted someone slashing tires (in what I heard was some sort of turf disagreement).[2]

* Another neighbor found a discarded gun in their bushes. They have small children too.

* Our neighbors are constantly finding trash that's been dumped in their bushes.

* Many neighbors have been screamed at, harassed, or assaulted by people that are either mentally ill, in the throes of meth psychosis, or both.

* Public parks that used to be places to play with the kids but now are effectively off-limits. [4]

All of this is just in a couple block radius, just in the past few years. And this is in a nice part of town. Residents in the city have had a lot of compassion and a lot of patience for many years, but the city has failed to actually come up with any effective solutions. In the past year or two, people have simply run out of. It's hard to get people to empathize with someone who is actively causing them harm.

Fundamentally, humans cannot safely live at urban density without access to the full range of residential services. You can't just "car camp". Humans produce waste. Without clean water, garbage pick up, and sewage services, each of those humans is a walking disease vector [3].

Safe injection sites are not a solution. If you don't address the crimes that addicts commit to afford drugs, then your injection site just becomes a crime magnet. Mental health and addiction treatment centers are good. Shelters are somewhat good but many homeless people choose not to use them because most shelters prohibit drug use.

It's not about jailing homeless people or drug addicts. It's about jailing people who repeatedly commit property or violent crime. The root cause is usually drugs, and should be treated as part of a solution. But, at the same time, other people in the city (including many other homeless people who are one of the most common victims of crime) need to be protected and feel safe. Being a drug addict should not be a blank check to steal from, vandalize, and assault people.

[1] https://q13fox.com/2019/05/06/a-seattle-dad-frustrated-over-...

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/ballard-business-owner-hail...

[3] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/infectiou...

[4] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/camping-in-the-end-zone-how...

fortylove• 7 years ago

For something as simple as car camping

I have personally witnessed a car camper leave their vehicle and barefoot chase an ambulance in the road, screaming profanities at the ambulance (right across from houses with small children). Through their own profanity-laced words, the person was trying to start a fight with the ambulance. Any reasonable person would assume that this car camper was some combination of a) beyond high on some drug, or b) suffering from severe mental health issues (if so, please revoke their license and get him proper help?). My neighbors and I both witnessed the situation, and called the police. Five police cars show up, get a statement from the ambulance driver, and sit the camper down. After talking to the camper for about 5 minutes, the police left with no action.

This _exact_ same car camper 3 weeks later threw a stolen bike at a moving car, out of the blue. 1 week later, I again saw this car camper kicking cars that were stopped at a traffic light, all the while swearing profanities at them. This person is still on the street, likely ready to harass the next underserving victims.

Here's another experience, which you might just write off as another anecdote. I was with my pregnant wife for a normal pregnancy checkup. A person who again was either high or suffering severe mental problems was being restrained by hospital security for breaking the hospital entrance door. The reason? The person was screaming that "the door was not supposed to be guarded by an evil spirit". Again, this person was clear high or mentally ill, or some combination of the two. However, NO ONE, including THIS PERSON, benefits from being left on the streets.

Oh, another anecdote you might write off. I take the bus to work. One morning, there was a school field trip that shared this bus. There was another person on the bus who one might assume was homeless, but agreed, looks can be deceiving. This person was drinking from a handle of cheap vodka, and then spitting back into the bottle. In between swigs, the person was swearing. What a great environment for children. We need to feel compassion for these troubled people, and provide help, but that DOES NOT mean that we should normalize these harmful behaviors.

Anyways, just some first person anecdotes to balance this thread out. It's easy to preach when you're not the one raising children around these folks.

*edit for newline

rolltiide• 7 years ago

Northwest and West coast governments have acknowledged that the current legal deterrents and consequences do more harm than good: fines being impossible to collect alongside being inadequate deterrent, jail and prison exacerbating the situation and not resulting in holding people for very long anyway. Costing taxpayers even more when they do hold people for long.

They have not reached consensus on what to replace the deterrents with, so now there is a void and no oxygen to even criticize the outcome.

weeksie• 7 years ago

You guys could also build some shelters.

loeg• 7 years ago

Also a Seattle resident; I don't think you speak for all Seattlites.

StudentStuff3• 7 years ago

Ditto, there is a certain subset that feels unsafe in the city (like the cop that did an AMA on Reddit about how he doesn't feel safe on 3rd avenue without his gun) despite its relative safety. Some of these people, like the aformentioned cop, are a danger to those around them due to this mindset.

As a kid I caught busses every day on 3rd Ave without a problem, and yes, the same open drug dealing still happens at 3rd & Pine (by the crackDonalds), but that has been going on since before I moved here in 2003. When I transfer there now, not much has changed in terms of the people you'll see.

The level of danger hasn't changed, but the homelessness crisis has worsened and become much more visible as we fenced off the underside of bridges, replaced parking in the inner suburbs with bike lanes (in large part to push the van dwellers out) and rent has increased. We have an opioid crisis that is going untreated, high rents and few middle income jobs.

Our society is stratifying badly between the 90% that is getting poorer every year (and feels no hope) and the 10% that are able to afford rent in prime cities.

russdpale5• 7 years ago

This sounds like something right out of the "Seattle is dying" propaganda documentary that released lately. Living in White Center, I don't experience any of this. People act like its the lower 9th ward or chiraq or the walking dead around here, and it just isn't.

Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.

max76• 7 years ago

I live in Seattle, and have for years. I’ve lived in several different cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South.

King County has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. There are several organizations giving out clean needles in King County. We are building new housing at a very rapid rate and many areas of the county were upzoned just this year so we can build even more housing.

To me your comment is asking for us to do more of what we are already doing, even though what we are doing is barely slowing the growth of homelessness. There is no amount of taxation on businesses the city, county and state can impose that will provide a home for everyone that needs it. This approach will not produce positive change.

ericd• 7 years ago

City planning and zoning are much more on the side of planned economy than free market. If building was unrestrained, I'm sure there would be a lot more new housing coming online than there is.

RickS• 7 years ago

White center is gentrifying fast – it's significantly better than it used to be. It's also significantly better, at the sidewalk level, than pioneer square and 3rd/pine.

The downtown spots have a high and constant density of mostly undangerous people, involved in low level anti social behavior.

White center has a low and volatile density of somewhat dangerous people, doing some nutty stuff. Just in the past few months, I can recall: A guy got his throat slit, while driving his car, because he had given his passenger's girlfriend a ride earlier. There was an armed robbery outside of Triangle. A 59 year old got shot in the bathroom of Tug on St Patrick's Day. I lived on 16th until recently, and would flip the scanner on every time I heard sirens, just to keep a pulse. It's not chicago, but it's legitimately dicey sometimes.

With that said, I agree that we need more housing, though I think seattle is doing an excellent job of that compared to SF, and it's reflected in the flattening rent prices. We could be doing more, though. No reason we can't have significant multistory buildings in west seattle.

xenocyon• 7 years ago

It's not OK to oppose drug legalization merely because one wishes to find ways to criminalize homelessness.

Klonoar2• 7 years ago

I live here too, and I disagree with you - this is a symptom of an entirely different problem. We should not be screwing people's lives over for simple possession, the rest is the same homeless problem that every city has nowadays.

itslennysfault2• 7 years ago

What do you propose? Cracking down on homeless people. Heavy fines and jail time? Is that somehow going to make them less homeless?

The only viable answer is programs like what this article is talking about. Providing consoling/rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one at a time. There is no blanket solution. These are individuals that are suffering and trapped in a cycle.

If you think violently oppressing the already downtrodden is a good solution please leave and go to another city. This is probably not the place for you.

hash872• 7 years ago

People are conflating 'drug decriminalization' with other policies. I'm agnostic on other homeless policies, but strongly support decriminalizing possession. You can be for more social services for the homeless, or, more law-and-order and advocate for more cops on the beat to stop car camping, burglary, etc. All while agreeing that spending thousands on incarceration just for possession is a poor use of societal resources.

I'd advocate for a) outlawing public drug usage (the same way alcohol is legal but public consumption is not). And b) an officer on the scene can still confiscate illegal drugs- motivating addicts/homeless to be discreet and low-key. Both of these will help prevent public spaces from becoming a free-for-all, while not wasting valuable money on arresting an addict for the 20th time

aisenik12• 7 years ago

public alcohol usage is very much legal. we manage it by providing regulations on dispensing/selling alcohol. in my city alcohol may be consumed in most parks and in the majority of municipalities it is legal to serve alcohol in public establishments meeting basic business regulations.

alcohol of course, is a deadly and addictive drug that increases incidences of violence, property crime, and other anti-social behavior.

undersuit• 7 years ago

I gotta ask, which city or even country? The United States has extensive and varied laws on public consumption and intoxication. Places like Las Vegas are the exception, not the norm.

throwawaysea• 7 years ago

Seattle is a city that has made a lot of bad decisions. It is suffering from rampant drug abuse, property crime, and gross mismanagement under the current city council, which seems obsessed with following an ideologically-motivated progressive agenda instead of common-sense good governance.

The policy of not enforcing laws, not prosecuting (either certain crimes or certain cohorts of offenders) has caused the city's problems. There are two sets of laws - one is for law-abiding tax-paying residents who are just trying to live their lives without disruption, and the other is for everyone else, who somehow are seen as victims through a twisted social-justice lens, instead of malicious actors. The law-abiding tax-paying residents should not have to give up their public spaces, safety, property, or contribute more taxes in order to accommodate the huge rise of permanently-homeless service-refusing people that want nomadic or drug-centric lifestyles.

Those people do not contribute to society and are making society worse for those who do want to contribute. And yes, there has to be a consequence for that, in order to deter such behavior and lifestyles and not attract an influx of them into the city. This article does not make real the frustration experienced by most residents of Seattle, as it has deteriorated towards SF 2.0 in these last 4 years.

imperialdrive• 7 years ago

In response to the 'dead' reply, you make some points that stick. I'm curious what kind of solution could exist to address the issue(s) you describe. Hoping to hear more thoughts.

m463• 7 years ago

I can't help but remember when mexico decriminalized possession of small quantities of drugs, it was to stop corruption.

voxl• 7 years ago

The only thing I've learned from this thread is that there is a vocal group of regressive, probably rich (software developers), complaining about homeless people not being jailed.

the_watcher• 7 years ago

No matter the merits of the case to be made for this specific policy, the state of Seattle isn't one of the highlights.

To clarify: there are all sorts of factors at play in Seattle's troubles, my point is that if you believe a the policy "we should stop charging people for personal drug use", "just look at Seattle!" isn't going to be convincing to most of the country.

tinyhouse2• 7 years ago

Just finished watching Seattle is Dying. I don't understand why so many American cities suffer so much from drug problems. Everywhere in the world you will find homeless people, but outside of the US I haven't seen anywhere so many drug addicts. Is it all those depressing suburbs with shitty education and people who are bored to death with their life? Is it lack of support from family? I don't get it.

I feel that's the root of the problem and where the US should invest heavily.

cobalt• 7 years ago

a lot of new addicts are because of the pain killer epidemic

adventured• 7 years ago

The US drug abuse problem is multiple things colliding over many decades.

Extraordinary wealth & extremely high disposable incomes (very large profit magnet), by far the largest pharma economy, a pharmaceutical culture you won't find anywhere else, a many decades long history of general persecution of drug addicts, and a healthcare system that doesn't take good care of the homeless or drug addicts.

That covers both the prescription abuse and blackmarket issues.

The wealth & income in the system acts as a huge magnet. If you're going to sell drugs somewhere (legal or illegal), you want to do it in the US. The US has nearly double the median personal disposable income of the EU, under one big roof. The culture encourages a drug-solution approach to everything. The doctors, nurses, admin, hospitals, pharma companies and healthcare system overall have been very happy accomplices, feeding the problem for decades to great personal profit. A lot of prescription writers should be in prison for playing assist in murdering tens of thousands of Americans. The persecution of drug addicts makes everything worse on the back-end once a person has become an addict; it pushes them away from treatment, it isolates them from society. The poorly constructed healthcare safety net in combination with the cultural & legal / political persecution, then finishes them off, leaving them little to no proper safe recourse or way back out - ending far too often in death.

tinyhouse2• 7 years ago

These make sense. I've experienced it myself in the US when I felt the medical stuff is pushing me towards the most money making for them option than the option that made the most sense for me.

losteric• 7 years ago

If you can imagine what a crowd of people waiting for Walmart's Black Friday sale behaves like... I think that's a great metaphor for America at large.

Poor social cohesion, poverty traps, excessive materialism and individualism.

I blame Cold War domestic propaganda tactics. Americans stigmatized and undermined cultural values for a generation, the societal equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and ever since we have been shifting further towards a brutal, cold, almost purely economic system with sparse and weakly connected communities made up of individuals constantly bombarded by news and ads (propaganda).

ddenisen• 7 years ago

I believe that one of the primary causes is the overprescription of opiods by doctors in the USA, who were pressured by a patients (a generation of consumerism and instant gratification who expect doctors to provide instant treatment/remedy) on one side, and drug companies (who saw prescription painkillers as a sudden new cash cow) on the other. An article I've recently read in the Atlantic provides a perspective on this subject:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/opioid-...

lstodd5• 7 years ago

All those comments to the tune of "those bums are bums because they are addicted" ... they make me so sad.

Can anyone not see it's the other way around? Really?

remarkEon3• 7 years ago

What a depressing thread.

In one corner, we have people that are absolutely exhausted of the current state of affairs. The trash, the needles in parks, human feces, the tents ... etc. They want someone to do something about it, but it's not clear at all what that something really is or who would do it. If it were clear, we wouldn't be arguing about it. There are real costs to a draconian reversion to hardcore enforcement. People will get hurt, unnecessarily.

In the other, we have people that seem completely convinced that enforcing any kind of norms against anti-social behavior - indeed, outright dangerous behavior - is simply an extension of the War on Drugs, and further criminalizes marginalized people by cycling them through a prison system that seems equally uninterested in actually solving the problem. And there are real costs here, too. People are getting hurt continually by repeat offenders, and by the other social costs of living where parts of the city are unclean or unsafe, or both.

I've lived in Seattle since 2011 (with a 29 month cumulative absence for a deployment and then for school), and I think it's just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse. I understand the impulse behind it. I really do. But we can't keep trying to convince ourselves that this is "working", unless "working" is really "condition people to think that this is the new norm". Obviously, I guess I sit in the first corner. There's no real middle ground between these two cohorts, as far as I can tell. One group sees the other's concerns as reactionary or uncompassionate, and the other see's the first group's compassion as naive and even a deep enabling of the problem.

For me, I don't want to live in a city like this. That's maybe the only middle ground that exists between the two groups - neither want this. But my sense is that we're at a true impasse here, and that, and I'm just being realistic given the political arrangement here in Seattle, we're going to keep doing "more of this", whatever "this" is. The second camp has clearly captured city leadership, and decriminalization, lax or no enforcement of existing laws, and a general apathy (or maybe it's faith) about the situation will guide policy. We'll become the next SF, and then wake up one day wondering "how did this happen"?

notJim6• 7 years ago

They want someone to do something about it, but it's not clear at all what that something really is or who would do it
it's just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse

From reading these two statements and others in this thread, it's hard for me to see how you're the one arguing against criminalizing people, and yet that's how you're describing yourself. What does "enforcing norms against anti-social behavior" mean in this context, if not putting people in prison or issuing citations (which eventually lead to prison)? I'm genuinely unsure if there's some third option I'm not thinking of.

The thesis seems to be that if you just do that enough, those people will go somewhere else or decide to stop being homeless. The problem is, that's what we used to do and it didn't work. Those people are from here, and they're not homeless by choice. Even if some do move on, they'll just end up homeless somewhere else.

The frustrating thing is that there is a solution to this, which is called housing first. The basic idea is that you give people housing they can live in, and then provide services like addiction counseling and job training to get them into a better place. But you start with the housing, because without stability in your life, it's hard to tackle challenges like this, and not having housing results in all kinds of other social problems. The problem with housing first of course is that it's expensive, which requires taxation.

To me the real problem is that the council has insisted on sticking to ineffective half-measures. We had the beginnings of a tax for affordable housing last year, although it was still too small, but the council backed down when Amazon and other large companies raised hell. What this ended up doing is making it clear that the council has no solution to this that they're willing to pursue, which has lead to this impasse.

remarkEon3• 7 years ago

I guess I don't really disagree with what you said.

What does "enforcing norms against anti-social behavior" mean in this context, if not putting people in prison or issuing citations (which eventually lead to prison)?

Not being okay with it, which implies that we'd so something about it. Which does mean things like citations, at a minimum. Right now it's totally normal.

The frustrating thing is that there is a solution to this, which is called housing first...

Broadly, I agree with this paragraph. I think we should take the billion we spend in this city on homelessness (not sure that stat is actually true since I've never seen the line item in the budget but people say it a lot) and build these places ... and then make them mandatory, or at least semi-mandatory. That might sound extreme, but frankly many of these people clearly don't have agency anymore given their addiction and they've become a danger to themselves and others. So that's my "out there" suggestion. Build the housing, fund the medical and job-training services, and deliberately - not passively - push people into them.

Of course, this presupposes that lack of housing is the first incident problem. Maybe it is, maybe drug use is in some cases. I don't particularly care for drug use, so my personal preference is that we repeal the decriminalization rules and reverse some of the cultural acceptance that's taken hold here of this behavior. We've probably missed the boat on that one, since most here seem to take the libertarian approach that what someone does with their body is "their business", despite the fact that it often becomes someone else's very quickly.

...backed down when Amazon and other large companies raised hell.

If the city council wanted to just tax Amazon then they could've done that, but instead that cast such a wide net that medium sized low-margin businesses that don't have enormous capital behind them were wrapped up in it too - so I understand why they backed down. There wasn't any real self reflection from them after that happened, so I tend to agree that we're stuck in an infinite loop of "more of this".

Seattle has stopped charging people for personal drug possession

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