quite simply to screen drugs from reaching the emergency shelter, which is also a school, and save you from special prosecution applied to these situations and protect themselves politically from something the media will monitor closely. if they screened you at the shelter, its worse for everyone if they find anything on premises. emergency shelters will house anyone affected, including vulnerable elderly, children, mentally ill people, and unhoused heavy drug users. everyone was likely checked which also protects you while sheltering. i volunteered for a shelter during katrina and it gets out of hand very fast with just one delusional person or drug user. i stopped a robbery within 3 minutes of starting my first shift. a deranged person was aggressively drug seeking, and robbing pill bottles away from an elderly woman in a wheelchair. could have been your mom or grandma just caught up in it. so- check everyone as a protocol, as its for public shelter safety. seek therapy for ptsd, its never too late to heal. if you have heavy bias against law enforcement, perhaps consider joining a community program or volunteering - do it as a therapy to yourself to help improve your insight which will help everyone work towards improving the situation in your community.
Naah, hard to say what exact proximate cause (excuse) they entertained in their fucking skulls, but yes, it comes down to budget.
Police budgets are a farce, and this is what the US gets. Public services are (in too many cases literally) criminally underfunded.
And .. obviously the last ~50-60 years of "tough on crime" dogwhistling (as the civil rights movement successfully moved the discrimination boundary) is the new heuristic for quasi-segregation. Of course it's was not invented overnight back then, as it has been ongoing since ~1866. The post-Reconstruction culture and policy changes all boil down to "X while Black" and occasionally "or poor".
> Public services are (in too many cases literally) criminally underfunded.
Finish the job and end 'em. The US isn't a compatible platform for that kind of thing. It's a decentralized libertarian wild west with low social development, as intended from the start. Meanwhile, our taxes are going to waste in ignorance of that or in pretending we can (or even should) change it.