[fosshogg]

"Asked recently whether he was afraid of San Francisco police, a dealer let out a loud laugh. Yes and no, he said.

“They know what’s going on, but I don’t know. If they want to clean it, they can clean it,” the dealer said. “Sometimes they do the job, but it’s like, just for the news, like, ‘Oh, we did the job good.’ If they wanted to clean it good, they could do that.”

The dealer said he likes some of San Francisco’s police officers. Sometimes, he said, one will tap him on the shoulder and say, “You’ve been out here for four hours. You’ve made enough money.”"

So the police seem to just let this happen without caring about its impact on the citizens that pay their salaries? Got it.

[bsder]

> So the police seem to just let this happen without caring about its impact on the citizens that pay their salaries? Got it.

As long as the demand exists, the supply will come.

If you want to fix this, you have to get the users into the medical system to get them off the drugs.

But, you see, that takes money--real money. And nobody actually cares about the drug users--they just want them out of sight.

So, the charade will continue. And so it goes.

[xyzzy123]

I wonder if many social problems are being "made worse" by the baumol effect.

As productivity goes up in some areas of the economy, the relative cost of dealing with social problems goes up. Doctors, nurses, social workers, police - these professions are essential but not very scalable.

You would expect that as you grow the economy, you have more resources to deal with homelessness, violence, drug addiction etc, but paradoxically the exact resources needed to address these problems are getting relatively more expensive every year compared to other goods.

I expect these problems should keep "getting worse" in dollar terms as broader productivity increases.

[isthisfoss]

It’s not a money issue. These cities have all the money they can into reducing “homelessness” aka open air drug markets. It’s a policy issue. Get these guys off the street and tell them to get clean.

[bsder]

The money being spent on "fixing homelessness" is a small fraction of the money that was being spent on the (admittedly terrible) mental health medical facilities that California shut down back in the 1970s.

"A failing mental health system leaves this mother pleading: Keep him in jail"

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-12/one-moms...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/story/...