S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps: city charged with criminalizing unsheltered

Canada never tried to mass incarceration imprison-away the problem and they're rapidly discovering that they actually need some criminal charges and some incarceration or people don't care to improve. Taking fentanyl is literally the best feeling thing in life and you expect a junkie to just stop living in a free-drug camp?

The Netherlands and Portugal though have an incarceration-based rehab program. They don't ask the junkie if they're ready, they pick up anyone drugged out in public. But their programs work because there's essentially no other choice. You can't just refuse to detox because they don't give you free Fentanyl like Vancouver and SF. You can't support a junkie by giving them poison. They wean you, in 3-9 months, with long-halflife opioid agonists and then you spend years, sober, learning to live clean.

The policies you support are killing people with kindness.

I think if it disincentivizes drug hotspots, the effect is weak. I would say it temporarily moves the same people by a very short distance. You still see the same issues in the same neighborhoods, week after week. Similarly, if this is meant to be a mechanism for helping people with mental illness get to help, it's not effective. I see the same characters over and over again.

I would also argue it doesn't improve safety for everyone else. If anything, when a sweep happens, it creates a sudden stream of agitated, physically and emotionally unsettled people, moving through the street. Normally in my neighborhood walking _past_ an encampment isn't too bad. Walking home when a sweep has just happened nearby is much less comfortable.

I think what's really happening is theater. Local officials and institutions need to appear to be active more than they need to be actually effective. So while we're not actually solving problems, we're having the most visible homelessness shepherded from block to block.

Everyday, there is a missed opportunity to clean up the streets: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

[..]In what has become a five-alarm fire for many women in the city — spread on social media — several alleged victims have posted photos of the distinctive-looking Hobbs, a 6-foot-4 white man with a buzz cut and a body covered in tattoos, including the E-V-I-L tag on his fingers.

The fact that a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed a case against Hobbs in which he was accused of following and grabbing a 15-year-old girl — first reported in this column — is well known by now. So is the fact that he’s back on the streets despite a long arrest record in four counties, despite admitting to me in a phone interview that he follows women he finds attractive, and despite the flood of new complaints.

But it turns out city officials had another chance to intervene on Aug. 11 — and again came up short.[..]

[..]A police report states that he entered a home on Avila Street in the Marina while the owner, who left the door unlocked, was out walking his dog. When the owner returned and found Hobbs standing in his hallway, he called police and told them the intruder kept saying, “I want a house like this.”

Hobbs, according to the report, initially told officers he was “Scott Peterson,” using the name of the California man who notoriously killed his pregnant wife.[..]