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In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

nytimes.com

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Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#431

Post by memmcgee »

dcolkitt wrote: post #75

I fully support legalizing all drugs, but don't understand why the latest wave of criminal justice reform tolerates property crimes. Crimes like smash and grabs, purse snatching, bike thefts, vandalism, littering, and shoplifting clearly have defined victims and lower the quality of life for everyone. It's perfectly possible to be a heroin addict and an upstanding citizen at the same time. The same cannot be said of…

Property crime is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Consider this: wage theft results in over double the losses of all other property crimes COMBINED, yet we don't throw bosses who rob their workers of earned pay in jail.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#432

Post by pnw_hazor »

rlucas wrote: post #353
pnw_hazor wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, may be you are right -- that the "right" person hasn't been assaulted, raped or killed yet. Certainly, the high profile stabbing in front of Nordstroms didn't do much. Nor, did much change when the homeless guy was stopped from throwing a women on her way to work off an I-5 overpass. Or the lady who was raped by the homeless guy at the U-district car dealership after dropping her car off for an oil change on…

Your last graf implies that there was some nefarious favoritism that gave a turbo boost to Seattle's 2nd Ave bike lane project, due to the connectedness of the woman killed shortly before it took effect. If you are referring to the well known tragic death of Sher Kung in August 2014, just before the September 2014 scheduled opening of the 2nd Ave bike lane, you are very wrong. The project had been underway long befor…

Good point. And, this victim was not a city worker, but a civil rights attorney at a large well-connected law firm.

It sure seemed to me that after her tragic death the call for bike safety was turned up to 11.

We haven't reached that point yet re homeless/junkie assaults. It will take the right person to get killed or raped for that to happen.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#433

Post by newfriend »

jrockway wrote: post #65
empath75 wrote: post #39

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.

I think people are also ignoring the fact the drug use might not correlate with the crimes these people are committing. Perhaps they are just mentally ill, with no access to proper care, and are self-medicating. Jailing them will never solve the problem. Affordable healthcare might, however. But oh no, then we'd have to pay taxes! We don't want a safe city that badly.

Jailing someone who is committing crimes instantly solves that problem. The perpetrator is off the street, unable to commit more crimes.

Treating criminals like victims, instead of showing empathy for the actual victims of these crimes is disgusting.

Honest people should not be made to suffer at the hands of some junkies who can't control their urges and are compelled to commit crimes to feed their addictions.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#434

Post by blackflame7000 »

Spivak wrote: post #405
blackflame7000 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that while they are trying to break the addiction they often relapse and because drugs are expensive and also not conducive to holding a job there is a non-negligible percent of people that would continue to break into cars and steal things to pay for their habits. If they aren't hurting anyone ok fine let them go the rehab route first, but if they demonstrate they are a danger to society then they need…

I’m extremely against confinement as a punishment but I don’t think this would be unreasonable so long as it was strictly limited to the time needed to detox and you could say with a clear conscience that it was for the addicts benefit. Like they have to leave with an escort but they can hit up Mcdonalds and Yankee candle for their room.

Yea I think the best way is to first heavily restrict their freedom until they normalize and then have an incentives-based system that rewards positive behavior and actions with more freedoms until they can return to a normal life. Unfortunately, drug addiction is always the product of something deeper that's causing self-medication. Personally, I think a lot of addiction is due to a lack of connection with others and a lack of purpose for being. I like the concept of community service in the form of actually interacting with other members of the community instead of picking up trash on the side of the freeway for example.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#435

Post by tkxxx7 »

rayiner wrote: post #430
tkxxx7 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a decade of strong economic growth This seems impossible to solve without considering which people were actually experiencing this growth.

Hence the statistics I presented below that, showing that the poverty rate went down dramatically over that period.

You did - I should add that I didn't consider their breakdown sufficient enough:

> In 2013, for example, the average poverty threshold for an individual living alone was $11,888; for a two-person family, $15,142; and for a family of four, $23,834.7

I wasn't alive in 1969, but for 2013, that threshold is quite low - it may make sense for poverty, but it is not a net wide enough to catch a significant portion of (relatively) poor people whose addictions have grown to far outweigh their paychecks.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#436

Post by refurb »

lacker wrote: post #294
refurb wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes more sense.

I read it as “opposed to trash pick-up in general” and then thought “who the hell would be opposed to that?”

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#437

Post by Gibbon1 »

rtkwe wrote: post #428
rayiner wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If economics were the main driver, you'd see a strong correlation between crime rates and the economy. But by and large you do not: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta... . > Based on these estimates, the observed 2 percentage point decline in the U.S unemployment rate between 1991 and 2001 can explain an estimated 2 percent decline in property crime (out of an observed drop of almost 30 perc…

I'm not terribly surprised macro economic number don't show a strong correlation to crime. We're already talking about a group on the margins generally when we're looking at small property crimes and top line numbers like unemployment don't capture people who aren't even looking for work anymore (eg drug addicts).

Yeah Economics has a huge problem with the Fruit Basket Fallacy.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#438

Post by mkl »

rayiner wrote: post #196
xenocyon wrote: post #173

Earlier 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…

> "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

I'm not sure I understand that. Surely people in prison are even less productive? Or is this counting the massively underpaid prison labour that sometimes happens in the US?

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#439

Post by new_realist »

xyzzyz wrote: post #360
williamstein wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Seattle (Central District), and was harassed by a homeless person a half hour ago, had our bike stolen last week, saw a homeless person peeing 40 feet from my house an hour ago, and had three car break-ins and one car theft in the last year. All my neighbors have very similar experiences, and the above list is far from comprehensive for the last year. It's genuinely scary and disturbing living here, and I d…

Get out of Central District for starters. East Side, West Seattle (north part at least) are still nice and safe.

Yes, let’s abandon the city to the criminals.

Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs

#440

Post by [deleted] »

hash872 wrote: post #365
kenoyer130 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a good chapter to read to see their methodology even if you don't agree with the results. For example, comparing stricter/easier gun laws and prison times in different cities and not finding a correlation to the drop in violence since it was across the board.

Oh I've read it and am familiar with their argument, I just disagree. I don't think analyzing gun laws on a city by city basis makes a lot of sense, they're small, in high demand apparently, and easily smuggled from a more permissive locale. The abortion argument is just a pathway to IQ/some people are genetically more predisposed to being dumb & violent, etc. It's just a step on the way there. I hardly think I have…

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