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I'm aware of the problem. I live in Sacramento, up until recently I lived in LA, and I visit San Francisco often. The place we will disagree is solutions. Your language constantly implies stuff without saying it outright, and it makes me think the solutions you find attractive will differ, and it makes me think your motivation is the well-being of people who aren't homeless (for now) at the expense of those who are. Let's take pooping in the street. I figure we can call this an anti-social behavior. I see two reasons someone would do this: 1. They need to shit and have no restroom. Presumably even then they'd still try to get some privacy, which leads me to 2. They're fucked in the head, completely calloused to it out of years of living like that, or off their ass on something (or choose multiple). Now the act is "anti-social" in technicality, but of course this person is just messed up and needs serious help. They aren't out to bother you or destroy society or whatever, and the solution isn't whacking them harder with a baton so they make the correct choice of not shitting there, it's not a choice. Say we adopt the simplest policy that seems to directly follow from your outlook. "It is now a crime with a 1 year minimum or something to voluntarily shit on the street." By extension all you're doing is moving the crazy or drug addicted people into prisons. Prisons aren't built to help people, they're generally thought of as punishment and administered as such. So you're taking a bunch of people many of whom are not beyond help and happen to just be fucked up or addicted to something, and shunting them off into a torture cage because you don't want to see them shit on the street. What am I missing? I'm not saying you should do nothing and let them shit on the street. The solution just needs to recognize that we're dealing, generally speaking, with people who need help. It would involve investment and well-designed systems built with the goal of helping those people, and most importantly an attempt to build more of a safety net to keep people from falling into that state. I'm inferring from how you talk about this that you would disagree. Word choice like "anti-social actor" (as though they just want to give people a hard time for the fun of it) or "asquiessing" (as though a large coordinated group just wanna shit on the street and do heroin because it's fun and everyone is just unwilling to do what needs to be done) and "enforcement of anti-social behavior" (as though policing the symptom is anything other than just criminalizing homelessness to shunt them off out of sight) makes me think you're approaching this from a counterproductive angle. There is a problem but what you're describing is a bandaid, and if I'm inferring correctly it's also cruel. |
Prisons? What, no. You don't got to prison for falling asleep in a bar. You just get asked to leave. That's all I'm suggesting for high-cost city services, that they actually enforce the rules, and ask people who are breaking the rules to leave the premises.
Obviously, the services must be valuable enough to enforce, but BART and Muni are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues every single day due to anti-social behavior (SF Muni loses about $750,000 every single day to fare non-payment alone), so it trivially justifies having folks out here issuing citations and asking people to leave the service.