They have these rules, but they are rarely actually enforced. Point someone to a homeless person shooting up in public or bathing in the bathroom, and see what happens.
If anything, there's a shrug and a sigh and some rent-a-cop is sent to harass. Almost never is the infraction met with punishment of any consequence.
Start actually arresting or forcibly evicting people who behave this way. They'll stop coming around. San Francisco is particularly feckless in this regard.
> "Start actually arresting or forcibly evicting people who behave this way."
This is one of those easy solutions that sounds practical on paper, but in reality doesn't hold up.
Let's say SFPD go ahead and do what you suggest. What does that achieve? If they arrest people for shooting up, are you sending them to jail? For how long? Is that going to help them get clean when smack is probably easily attainable in prison anyway? When they're released, now not only are they homeless they've got a criminal record, good luck in the job market with that hanging over you. If they go down the other route and forcibly evict them, where do they get evicted to? All it does is shift the problem to another part of the country, who are probably just as resistant to dealing with it as SF.
You have to treat the root causes of involuntary homelessness as if it's a societal disease. The threat of arresting people isn't a strong enough deterrent to break people out of their addictions, which should be clear by now, otherwise the war on drugs would already have been 'won'.
Are we to overlook all criminal behavior because enforcement might make people less employable, or just selectively ignore some laws that you don't agree with?
Perspective! If someone is shooting up in the library, their future employability is of (at best) tertiary concern to me. The pressing matter is making sure they don't continue the behavior. We can't just stop enforcing laws because it might make lawbreakers break more laws.
The city of SF actually did adopt a policy of forcing addicts into treatment by giving them an ultimatum of jail time for accumulated minor offenses. It worked, but was stopped when some bleeding-heart sued the city. I'm a liberal, but I consider that a tragedy. You can't cure addiction by arresting people, but you sure as hell can stop enabling it on a societal scale.
And also, when I say "evict", I mean "evict them from the library". I don't care where they go to shoot up; watch porn; shit in the sink; sleep or harass people, but they can't do it in the library.
> "Are we to overlook all criminal behavior because enforcement might make people less employable, or just selectively ignore some laws that you don't agree with?"
I'm suggesting we have to look at the problems holistically. Let's say someone breaks the law. The main aim of throwing someone in jail is to stop them committing more crime, correct? If jail time is going to be effective in doing so, that's fine, but if incarceration only leads to an increase in crime after the person has been released, was it worth it? Perhaps there are other ways of reducing the problem that we should consider instead.
> "The city of SF actually did adopt a policy of forcing addicts into treatment by giving them an ultimatum of jail time for accumulated minor offenses. It worked"
Do you have a link to an article showing the effectiveness of this approach in SF?
As for your other points, if someone is shitting in the sink, is the main problem that they're mentally deranged, or is the main problem that you have to witness it?
> "What if by doing that people would become willing to invest in the programs that treat these kinds of problems?"
If that's the case, great, but the impression I'm getting from many people here is that it's 'not my problem'. I don't see much of the sympathy that would drive people to act on the behalf of others.
If anything, there's a shrug and a sigh and some rent-a-cop is sent to harass. Almost never is the infraction met with punishment of any consequence.
Start actually arresting or forcibly evicting people who behave this way. They'll stop coming around. San Francisco is particularly feckless in this regard.