[xenocyon]

Perhaps, but trespassing and getting complained about is something that can happen fairly easily to a homeless person.

As a young (housed) person I once called the cops on a person sleeping soundly in the exterior stairwell of my apartment complex - a thoughtless decision on my part that I now regret. The cops who responded were unnecessarily brutal: kicking him awake, then demanding he stand against a wall and spread his legs to be frisked (when there wasn't any reason to suspect a weapon). The trespasser was compliant and meek throughout, but the cops nonetheless spoke roughly to him. I later asked myself why I had been so naive as to expect any other outcome. Since then I've learned better.

And this was in Seattle, where cops are reputedly much gentler than many other places.

[vkou]

> And this was in Seattle, where cops are reputedly much gentler than many other places.

SPD are not gentler than many other places. They've been absolutely blasted for police brutality in a 2011 DOJ investigation. [1]

Now, to SPD's credit, it has been taking steps to improve since then. [2]

What you can count on, though, is them usually ignoring homelessness - if nobody complains. There's just too many homeless people in Seattle for them to do anything proactive about it.

If somebody does, and it's a slow day, the homeless person in question will get ran off by them. Law enforcement against the homeless is incredibly selective, which is one of the reasons why being homeless is so hard - you always live in fear of being the target of essentially random violence.

You never know if you're actually going to get 8 hours of sleep, or if you're going to be kicked (Or shouted) awake half-way through it.

[1] https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Feds-findings-in-Sea...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/in-major-ste...

[catalogia]

SPD often ignore matters even if somebody complains.

Two years ago there was a homeless woman in my neighborhood who began screaming in the middle of the night as though she were being murdered. I called 911, obviously. An hour later she was still screaming and there were no police in sight. The next night she was still screaming. A week later she was still screaming. Thankfully she wasn't being murdered, not that the police would know, because they never came.

Incidentally this experience gave me a new perspective on the bystander effect. After I stopped calling 911 because it was accomplishing nothing, what if one night she really was being murdered? But what is somebody meant to do, call 911 every night until they stop taking your calls?

[droithomme]

A guy down the street was a drug dealer. He would also do meth cooks, which everyone could smell. He was a polite guy though and didn't seem to have weapons. However, customers would come to buy drugs, exchanges would take place right in his front yard. Stuff would go missing around the neighborhood, apparently stolen by customers who noticed stuff like riding mowers in yards, and would come back when they needed something to pawn to get cash for drugs.

I regularly called the police department and talk to the narcotics detective. He'd always say he'd look into it. Neighbors told me it was useless to call the police. The detective was obviously getting annoyed by my calls.

One day the drug dealer knocks on my door. Tells me no use in calling Steve (name of narcotics detective) because they have an arrangement and Steve is getting annoyed by my calls.

A couple years later Detective Steve was arrested in a federal sting. His entire house was full of drugs and cash.

The drug dealer eventually died of a disease he contracted from needles.

Some squatters moved into that house for a while. Sometimes I'd hear screaming and gunfire. The property is overgrown now and the last car parked in the yard has four flat tires. Maybe there's corpses inside the house. Who knows. At least I don't smell meth cooks anymore. And theft has gone down on the street now that we don't have customers coming to buy drugs.

So, yeah I no longer call police for anything, they won't do anything and if you keep calling they consider you a nuisance caller and can create problems for you. It would be better to stop public funding of police all together and replace it with either private security contractors hired on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, or citizen's patrols like the Guardian Angels, Black Panthers, or a version of Neighborhood Watch.

[ggcdn]

> It would be better to stop public funding of police all together and replace it with either private security contractors hired on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, or citizen's patrols like the Guardian Angels, Black Panthers, or a version of Neighborhood Watch.

This is a bad take, in my opinion. For the most part, all types of crime have been steadily declining since the 1990's [0][1][2]. You can't say policing is ineffective as a whole. There are certainly things to be improved upon, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_t...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_ge...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burglaries_per_1,000_pop....

[droithomme]

Yeah that crime rate decline was not due to better policing though. Most likely the main factor was the elimination of leaded gasoline.

[modo_mario]

```So, yeah I no longer call police for anything, they won't do anything and if you keep calling they consider you a nuisance caller and can create problems for you. It would be better to stop public funding of police all together and replace it with either private security contractors hired on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, or citizen's patrols like the Guardian Angels, Black Panthers, or a version of Neighborhood Watch. ```

Alternatively look at places where police does function properly and consider what's different.

Because what you can describe like your police compared to the police in some African hellhole or the police where I live can vary between unaccountable mercenaries perpetuating class imbalances, ghettoisation, etc or a well functioning local guardperson or a mob offering "protection"

[mandelbrotwurst]

> SPD are not gentler than many other places. They've been absolutely blasted for police brutality in a 2011 DOJ investigation. [1]

Gentler is a relative term. That fact doesn't refute the assertion that others are worse.

[gamblor956]

I called the cops on a vagrant sleeping in my building's parking structure stairwell.

The cops came, nudged him awake, and then waited calmly while his drunk ass gathered his crap and yelled at them as they escorted him down the stairs and away from our building.

LAPD may be brutal to suspected gangbangers and minority drivers but they're overly polite to the homeless to the point of being fairly useless at preventing the homeless from committing crimes (that affect others, like theft or property damage).

[jshevek]

I'm uncomfortable with the generalizations [that get] made on both sides of this debate.

Region specific policies and culture can play a role, but ultimately the behavior of the police can depend highly on the specific individual or even the type of day they are having.

[anarchodev]

Why would you want the cops to be overly aggressive to someone who, even in your hypothetical, hasn't committed a crime? Do you foresee any consequences that might arise from encouraging this behavior from cops towards the most powerless struggling members of our community?

[gamblor956]

In this case, I left out the part where said vagrant had broken into the parking structure and caused several thousands of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure that we had to pay to repair.

There's also the matter of the broken glass bottles he left in the stairwell, which created health and safety risks to everyone using the parking structure.

And there's also the distinct possibility he was the focker who broke into a bunch of cars over the holidays trying to find things to steal.

[anarchodev]

Yes, irrelevant details that slipped your mind, and which you most certainly did not just make up to justify your bloodlust. How was a dude who can't even afford to drink indoors able to do infrastructural damage to a parking garage? Did he bring his jackhammer?