Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people say things like this, I do have to wonder if they've ever lived in a city before. Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s. There is just a certain amount of crime and drug use that will always exist in the big city. No amount of 'tough on crime' policing will make it go away.
> Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s. Someone else says the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780632 Not sure which one is correct...
In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
291–300 of 501 posts
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a conversation with someone the other day who made many of the same arguments as you. I agreed with some of it--namely that around safe injection, harm reduction, methadone (et al) clinics, etc.--but I had a hard time stomaching the idea that "housing first" was a good idea, in that if you take a drug addict and put them in a home, they're still a drug addict who can't contribute meaningfully to society. Would…
I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them? Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if th…
You know, I actually paused after those words because I was afraid of a response like this, but I didn't rephrase because I just figured "they'll get what I mean".
In the context of my response, I really just meant it as shorthand for "not doing any of the negative stuff that Seattleites deal with on an everyday basis". Lots of homeless people are already doing that--namely, not putting the general public at risk with violence or needles sitting around--but many of the ones visible to us are making the city worse off.
So again, my OP should really be reframed as: "if you take a dangerous drug addict and put them in a house, they're still a dangerous drug addict".
And I do implicitly mean there that if you take a non-dangerous, knocked-off-their-feet homeless person and put them in a house, you now have a housed person, and that's a very positive thing :)
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like the framing of this premise that you need to "contribute to society" in order to not be exposed to the elements and have a safe place to retreat. Do people working on ads contribute to society? What about middle managers of middle managers? What about the people on golf courses that basically spend money to make other people do shit for them? Furthermore, we cannot dehumanize our fellow humans even if th…
I think it's pretty obvious he didn't mean "contribute to society" in the metaphorical sense, but in the idiom which typically means "hold a job".
See my response above, I really didn't mean either of those things, it was just a lazy end to the sentence.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attrac…
Tough on crimes folks oppose trash pick-up? Really?
I imagine a conversation like:
Q: What should we do about this homeless encampment? The options are:
1. Provide it with free trash pickup so that it's a slightly nicer place to live and to be around
2. Shut it down, remove the tents as well as the trash, make the inhabitants move elsewhere
And then I would expect the "tough on crimes" crowd would prefer option #2 to option #1.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
The severe wealth stratification that has occurred over the last few decades has left the majority of Americans facing a grim future of low earnings and unstable employment. Its easy to see how that would make many people depressed and lead to a cycle of addiction to escape this crappy reality.
Bollocks, overall more people are rising out of poverty
The official poverty line is drawn by the government. It's great news for them if the poverty line rises slower than cost of living increases.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a perfect world, no. In the world we live in, yes I disagree. Our criminal justice system further entrenches these problems. Before you claim that these petty crimes don't apply, the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations, and these petty crimes are all jailable/revokable offenses for folks on paper. In America, we put the already marginalized in jail and prison which only fu…
>the majority of folks in jail and prison are there on probation/parole violations This is a funny way of saying they're back in prison for more serious original crimes after failing to rehabilitate during the second chance they were already given in the form of probation/parole. Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets and commit more crimes is not empathy, it is folly. Empathy is protecting the neighbo…
> Repeatedly letting criminals free to walk the streets
That's a funny way of implying that everyone that the justice system imprisons are criminals in a world where we imprison 22% of the global incarcerated population despite accounting for 4% of the global total population[1].
Fear-based rhetoric around crime and the people who commit crimes* is not empathy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a big problem for those of us still here that would prefer enforcement; our fellow-minded voters have (probably rightly) chosen defect and left the city, rather than stay to vote for change. Suburb living also has twice the greenhouse gas impact as well.
I think the latest city council election is going to show that Seattle sadly wants more of the same problems and people like us are unwelcome
I don't know, Sawant got way less than was expected in the primaries (36.7% [1]), and I think a lot of folks are in the Sawant or anti-Sawant camp whereby all on the non-Sawant primary votes will consolidate to Orion.
Or people blew off the primaries sure that she'd take the general. ️
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/City_elections_in_Seattle,_Washingto...
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#298... this is probably news to people actually living in Seattle. (Edit: the title was originally, "Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs") A place where meth heads attack people with pitchforks in the street a few days after being released from prison on a suspended sentence. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/man-accused-... Not to mention our random piles of used syringes, which are often…
> A place where a meth head attacked people with a pitchfork.
Fixed that up for you - don't pluralize individual incidents to suit your narrative.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least part of the cause of the visible squalor we see in Seattle is that the tough-on-crime crowd has consistently opposed safe injection, harm reduction, trash pickup, housing-first, and other evidence-based policies in favor of expensive, inhumane, and pointless measures like sweeps and incarceration. Any measure the city government takes that is not overtly cruel gets slammed as coddling the homeless or "attrac…
I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons, but it's not clear to me that there is a definitive consensus that incarceration does not work. See: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html > "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions a…
I'll definitely admin that I'm interpreting the data to fit their own political/moral views but the conclusion "10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity" seems that economically the difference in incarcerating addicts and providing them healthcare is negligible.
If the economic difference is negligible then what reason is there for incarceration over providing healthcare? Crime did drop in the 90s but there's also the reality that those with criminal records are predisposed towards recidivism, a complicated issue on its own, but it seems that incarceration leads itself to staying criminal while healthcare at least has less direct links to criminal recidivism.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm anti-incarceration for moral reasons, but it's not clear to me that there is a definitive consensus that incarceration does not work. See: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan02/w8489.html > "Annual expenditures of approximately $10 billion on drug incarceration almost pay for themselves through reductions in health care costs and lost productivity attributable to illegal drug use, even ignoring any crime reductions a…
Freakonomics makes a case the drop in crime is directly correlated with the passing of Roe VS Wade and the legalization of abortion. This led to the 18 year later drop in unwanted male children now adults. Very interesting read on a very explosive topic :)
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