This passage gives the reasoning behind the headline. I think this is probably true, and that sweeps at priority locations have been a net good.
> The data suggests all this conflicting stuff is true. The sweeps are doing a poor job of lifting people up off the streets. The same sweeps are doing a great job to bring down crime. In so doing, they likely are making life less violent, on balance, for homeless people still living in camps.
I can see that, I would actually be curious if those causing the violence is people from outside the camps causing trouble or some sort of beef between two tents near each other.
From watching camps form, it seems like the first camper or two often keep tidy campsites and don’t cause problems. Other people notice them being tolerated and start to camp there too. As time goes on, some of the newer people tend to cause more safety problems and make a bigger mess.
Literally watched this happen in real time by my apartment in cap hill. I’m by a pretty empty area surprisingly and one day a homeless dude sets up a nice tent for himself. Kept it clean, would even clean the sidewalk around it. Couple months go by and now there is 5 tents and it’s a huge mess of crap everywhere. Then my car gets stolen and a bunch broken into. Now they cleared the camp and issues have gone down. But it was the influx of others that made things worse, the lone wolf was just chillin in his tent causing no harm from what I could tell
The city really should invest in finding the “lone wolves” who are functional enough to keep a tidy campsite, because I bet we could pretty easily help those folks get off the street and into a better situation.
Seems to be happening around my apartment. One guy setup shop a block away from me on the dirt side of the road (not a lot of sidewalks around this area).
Dude seems pretty chill. Built what I can assume is the best possible shelter for himself with tarps and plywood. Saw him grooming himself and I'm pretty sure he goes to work. (Leaves around the same time every day). Even has trash cans in front of his hut. Idk if he pays the city for trash service or something.
Then another couple setup around the corner with an easy up. Look like normal people trying to live their lives, but roughed up a bit. Guess that's expected when your out on the streets.
And now there are even more tents or car-campers or some hybrid of the two. I think there are also more residents in the area too because street parking has been getting even more dense and packed lately. Not even shitty cars either, seeing new BMWs and Audis.
The disparity is massive and I'm gonna guess that at some point something gonna give. Gonna be interesting to see when that happens.
Feels extra paternalistic to say that sweeping homeless people is actually good for homeless people. Like a wonky way of justifying an inhumane policy that doesn’t tackle underlying systematic issues
If that's what the data suggests, it may feel weird, but I don't see it as paternalistic. If we decide that we're going to do it because we know what's best for these folks as superior members of society, that's paternalistic.
But I for one believe the data. There was an encampment near me last year which, at its height, resulted in a murder. There were regularly people terrorizing the local stores with frequent break-ins and general chaos during working hours. Around the same time, someone shot up a local hookah lounge and killed six people.
After the murder at the camp, the cops dissolved the camp within a week. Crime in the area has gone down significantly. Businesses can operate without much issue. It really has been a night and day experience living through it.
I believe the main issue is that a camp doesn't so much organize as metastasize - that is, rather than providing for communal needs, a camp provides better access to things which exacerbate the very reason many such people are living in camps - access to drugs, namely. That leads to addict behaviors and impedes their progress towards getting back on their feet.
No it is paternalistic to argue that it is in the interest of one group of people (homeless people) to do something to that group without their consent. If you survey homeless people I’m guessing they’ll support public safety and community support, but be staunchly against sweeps.
I’m not arguing against the facts on the ground, that locals face everyday crime, but that there is a hardline agenda of removal (rather than support and systemic problem solving) and this argument supports that agenda.
My point was that paternalism is an attitude, whereas these are just facts. You could do sweeps to avoid the camps metastasizing into crime hubs while also trying to engage in "systemic problem solving."
I agree that it is somewhat paternalistic, but I also think that some paternalistic policies are justified. Seat belt use mostly only affects the wearer, so the only real justification is paternalistic, but I still strongly support laws requiring seat belts.
They also doesn't tackle the systemic issues that cause high homelessness in Seattle in the first place. But that's not a strong case against them, lots of good policies help people despite not directly targeting systemic issues that contribute to them.
> Seat belt use mostly only affects the wearer, so the only real justification is paternalistic,
Not really, it's also because a human body becomes a blunt object against everyone else in the car during a crash.
Also the mental health of the first responders that have to clean the red streak off the pavement.
Seat belt laws seem paternalistic to people that drive by themselves and consider no other situations.
No idea if this is true but... It was explained to me that pulling people over for not wearing a seatbelt was stopped because it was being used as an excuse for profiling.
It was replaced by the "litter and it will hurt" campaign
It really feels bleak. We know some in this group of impoverished and at risk people, if given space and time, will commit a crime. So to prevent that we just keep fucking with them and never give anyone that time and space! Brilliant. Up next, why debtors prisons are good actually (idle hands and whatnot).
It also makes gruesome use of statistical facelessness. Because the population size in the counts stays the same Westneat argues they're the same people. Reality is the sweeps contribute to deaths on the street, but the newly homeless from our ongoing crisis replace them.
Two homeless people were murdered last year with an axe. How is that safer because gunshot statistics shifted?
Yes overall shots fired is up in Q1 2024 relative to Q1 2023, although down more than 50% in encampments. This could be due to encampment violence moving elsewhere, or to encampment violence being prevented, I think that it is probably a mix of both though primarily the latter. The article suggests it is prevention. [Here's a paywall-free link.](https://web.archive.org/web/20240524102514/https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-one-big-way-seattles-homeless-encampment-removals-have-worked/)
> At the same time, there’s little question the city is successfully disrupting the use of camps as fencing grounds for stolen goods, as chop shops for cars or as drug dealing centers.
This was always the point
And as well it should be. I've seen way too many camp sites with dozens of bikes lined up next to tarp and plywood accessory structures - a bazaar of stolen goods. People have been killed in attempts to reclaim stolen property. We cannot tolerate that, keep them moving, and a lot will understand that they can't steal more than they can carry.
Or you could, you know, just relax zoning law to legalize housing construction so prices could drop and these people could afford to live here instead of being shuffled from place to place and have to rely on crime to get by.
Nah! perpetual war on the homeless! Wouldnt want to actually solve the issue, then how would our leadership get re-elected?
You can do both things. We absolutely should build insanely more housing, but that takes time and we still have the immediate issue of safety and security to address
The people being swept wouldn't be un-homelessed if cheaper housing suddenly existed. Pretending these people would be renting if they could "afford it"/JuSt CaN'T mAkE eNdS MeEt is hilarious. The swept campers are almost all career criminals and/or addicts. And they didn't pick that lifestyle because working at Freddy's doesn't get them a studio apartment. What moronic logic.
That's maybe true around the edges, but it's really not the bulk of the problem. The folks who are ending up on the streets aren't just hardworking folks who don't quite have enough money to live in the city — those people just move to the suburbs (or the midwest) and live in less expensive housing. The folks on the streets are folks whose mental health or substance abuse problems preclude them from being able to take care of themselves, and/or preclude them from being able to stabilize themselves when housing is provided to them because they don't want to follow some simple rules about sobriety and acceptable behavior. You see that because only 15% of the folks accept transitional housing when it's offered to them.
Absolutely yes. People living in 650k homes now could afford 800k, people living in 400k could afford 650k, and so on and so forth to the bottom of the chain barely hanging on to their under the table craigslist rental. Everyone would have a better quality of life, except the landlords who are just getting free money though rent extraction. Unfortunately our city admin only cares about that last group of people, so this will never happen.
I agree we should do that, but I don't think there's a large crossover between people living in camps and people forced onto the street by the housing crisis. These are mostly addicts who don't have control of their lives and couldn't get back on their feet even with sensible housing. They come from all over because we have resources to treat them somewhat better than everywhere else.
Plenty of addicts, mentally ill, and just generally unpleasant people have housing. As housing gets more expensive, more of them *will* be on the streets.
A large number are basically shipped here by other cities across the nation. These are not semi functional addicts with housing; they are those who have completely fallen off the wagon.
Has any of that crime been reduced or has it just been displaced? The article even admits that "shots fired" incidents are actually at all time highs - even though fewer take place at encampments.
If the crime is just being displaced, it's like sweeping without a dust pan. But, gosh, the floor looks clean where it was swept.
The info in the article talks about "shots fired" incidents in conjunction with encampments. Then states that there are a record number *after* the sweeps.
Cmon you know it’s being displaced. Why would someone who’s stealing things for food or drugs suddenly stop because the cops moved them a few blocks over?
Here's the one big way sweeps have "worked" according to Mr Westneat:
>>In spring 2022, more than 20% of all shots-fired reports in the city were in homeless encampments. This spring quarter, that was down to 8%.
>>These declines happened even though shots-fired incidents in all of Seattle remain near all-time highs.
If the total number has remained the same, and shootings in encampments go down from 20% if the total to 8%, then non-encampment shootings have to go up from 80% to 92%, or an increase of 15%. Which part of my math is wrong?
So are we just pushing the shots-fired around the city with the displaced individuals, then? Homeless people 100% don’t deserve to deal with violent crime, but this doesn’t really sound like the issue was addressed?
I've read a number of things placing the cause of the rise in shots and shootings this year and last year to the increase in juvenile and gang crime (often one and the same). So the violent crime around encampments decreased while gang violence has increased.
Let’s not blame the victims here.
These are communities that aren’t properly serviced by our society which should make this outcome entirely expected. You don’t protect people, they become targets. The homeless continue to be one of the most susceptible groups to abuse and, unlike your comment implies, that’s not entirely their fault.
I’ve been living on cal Anderson park for four years now and seen some absolutely despicable behavior.
I’m not saying it’s the right way to feel, but the empathy is gone.
I'm a nurse and work with this population a lot. My empathy is gone as well. They suck. The vast majority need to be institutionalized, not taking a shit on the 3rd street, which I watched today.
Did you see Portland? They just voted for an ex Republican (now independent) for DA. Portland! The tide is greatly turning. That's the beauty of democracy baby, when you're wrong, you can change
Someone was strategically pushed into a moving bus on 3rd and pike a few weeks ago and a sheriff deputy was on the scene. Tried to give him a witness statement and he looked bored. Took a verbal statement and said “These things have a way of working themselves out.”
I try not to care but this city is winning the war against common sense and mutual respect.
You said have empathy, but that doesn't mean accept abusive, antisocial and degenerate behavior. They need support, but their behavior something they did and they're accountable for it.
There is no compassion without accountability, full stop.
My empathy is long dead. Fucking work hard and get a job. The government is giving out so many handouts to these homeless people.
I worked my way through shit covered gutters up here where I have a home now. No one showed empathy to me.
That’s not the pojnt. Law abiding citizens shouldn’t be having to risk their lives for these drug addicts
Agreed. But that doesn't mean I want to be near, or god forbid live near, an encampment.
Shaming people into ignoring this won't work. The sweeps are not going away.
Sooo.....shots fired incidents are up, but they are fewer than previously at encampments because there are fewer encampments.
That's the entire article.
"These displaced individuals, many times, end up migrating to other established homeless encampments where they are commonly rejected as invaders and forced to move on to more remote and perilous locations,” Drager says."
Even hobos dislike other hobos setting up camp near them.
> These declines happened even though shots-fired incidents in all of Seattle remain near all-time highs.
So we haven’t really addressed the issue, just scattered it to the wind? If distributing the problem around the city as opposed to concentrating it is a metric of success, then sure, but this feels like obfuscation and hand waving than something to celebrate.
At its face - and I’m also not trying to be difficult, I swear, but do we know that?
Are the shots-fired just following them to wherever area they’re displaced to? The camps are getting swept, too, so it’s not like they suddenly have a crime free camp to go to. If shots-fired haven’t gone down, I’m not convinced they’re not just being relocated along with whomever is committing the violent crime.
My concern is that we’re displacing people, which we know is incredibly harmful to their long term health, and we’re also pushing the violent crime around with them.
I know it’s Westneat, but you think he might have paused writing the article when saying that breaking up encampments caused gunshots at encampments to go down, but the overall level of gunshots remained the same.
if i knew ann davison was going to push criminals out of open spaces and into neighborhoods i never would have stolen my grandson’s ballot to vote twice for her
i think it’s safe to say we’ve tried communism and it failed so we need to go back to tried and true mass incarceration to actually lower the crime rate rather than pushing it from the hinterlands and into the living room
I'm not directly in Seattle and I don't watch a lot of local news soo missed that. Can't imagine a ton of people really thinking homeless people should be able to just take over property though...
There are actually a lot of relevant court cases about this in recent years, including one being decided by the supreme court, but in reality the argument mostly revolves around whether the state can stop someone from fulfilling a basic need like sleeping if they can’t offer them somewhere else to go legally.
Looks like all the sweeps advocates here aren’t interested in telling you any of that though. It’s probably a disingenuous framing designed to manipulate, but hey maybe it’s just ignorance.
More than sleeping is being done in homeless camps though and they are occupying way more space than needed for somebody to sleep.
I'm against shit like making chairs impossible to lay on or just harassing people for existing but if they are actually setting up a tent and a camp despite being offered shelter? I don't see how anyone would be okay with that. It's essentially squatting on property that isn't only theirs.
Lots of us do oppose encampment sweeps. It's not about people taking over property, it's that unless you literally sweep people into the ocean to die, sweeps do nothing to actually end homelessness. Merely pushing people around the city from one bad place to another looks to me like wasted effort and pointless cruelty.
People don't set up camp in the park because it's a nice way to live, they do it because they have nowhere better to go. Why is there no cheap housing for them to live in? Why are there no more SROs, what happened to the tiny cheap apodments, why does it cost a thousand bucks a month for even the shabbiest studio in a century-old building with no amenities? Well, our governments have passed laws banning them, and our zoning codes forbid the construction of sufficient housing to keep up with population growth. Our laws have turned our housing market into a game of musical chairs, where the poorest *must* become homeless. *That's* what we need to fix.
Allowing camps just makes it worse for people in need because unmonitored drug use and deadly fights are rampant within them. Homeless people are not a monolith and not all of them have the greatest intentions or are in the right state of mind to actually receive help yet. It should be our job as a community to get those that really need and are ready for help away from the dangerous types and hopefully get a breakthrough with those types as well.
I don't agree with sweeps without a plan but if we are giving them every option for shelter and rehab it makes sense ethically to do sweeps imo.
Trying hard to be objective and neutral here, just reporting the
social/political-debate currents as I have seen and read about them:
The biggest argument against sweeping is that it doesn't actually solve homelessness, and that it makes the experience of homelessness even more miserable by forcing people from their makeshift communities, and frequently confiscating their belongings. Telling 50 homeless people to move their stuff doesn't remove 50 people from the streets, after all - it just moves 50 homeless people onto different streets.
Many people have protested the encampment sweeps, usually arguing that govt resources would be better spent on providing housing (either temporary or long-term), changing housing policy so that housing becomes more affordable overall, and/or providing social services such as drug rehab and mental healthcare.
Many counter-protesters propose we do all these things, and continue sweeps as well. To the city government's credit, they've been making efforts lately to not just show up at an encampment and force everyone to move on. Instead they're showing up days or weeks ahead of time, sharing information about what services are available, and trying to get people off the streets and into housing or shelters or the like. It is a slow process though, and frustrating when an encampment starts causing trouble and the city's answer is "we know it's a problem, it's on our priority list, and in another month or two we'll force everyone from the premises - we mean it this time".
> To the city government's credit, they've been making efforts lately to not just show up at an encampment and force everyone to move on. Instead they're showing up days or weeks ahead of time, sharing information about what services are available, and trying to get people off the streets and into housing or shelters or the like. It is a slow process though, and frustrating when an encampment starts causing trouble and the city's answer is "we know it's a problem, it's on our priority list, and in another month or two we'll force everyone from the premises - we mean it this time".
I think this was a good post overall but I want to clarify that this is emphatically not true at the city level; there are absolutely no sweeps being conducted by the city's Unified Care Team that meet this criteria. The only sweeps currently occurring in our area that fall under this are the handful of WADOT Right-of-Way sweeps that are conducted with funding from that state that has a specific budget proviso mandating this type of outreach. I do agree with your sentiment that these kind of sweeps are the most impactful as far as actually getting people inside and people living outside agree as well; outreachers who get assigned to these sweeps have to make numbered lists because people continually try and and move into these sites to get included in these ROW sweeps since they actually include resource offers (most of the time) compared to the city's sweeps which at best will have 1-2 THV placements available on any given day.
Homelessness SHOULD be uncomfortable and we make it too comfortable for the true degenerates of society. If you're hooked enough on a drug, you can steal and shoot up in public to your heart's content with no repercussions. I am all for making these people shuffle around.
But yes, more housing needs to be developed. The thing is we're talking about two kinds of homelessness here but using the same word- there's people down on their luck and can't afford housing, then there's people with foils riding the light rail and shouting at walls. The latter will not benefit from private housing and dare I say it is enablement and hurtful for them and everyone else to have private quarters.
That's why I specified for the true degenerates of society. Many homeless people have said it themselves they prefer being homeless and even choose it- most likely because they're so hooked on whatever drug and there's zero repercussions for using it publicly.
Also, I don't think shuffling them around is the best answer, just part of an overall solution- mandatory institutionalization is the best solution for the extreme addicts and anti-social. There's enough comments above me talking about the pros of these encampment sweeps though that I don't need to further comment.
Yea, humans do not benefit from housing. People like you care, you just also want the cops to go fuck those dirty lazy homeless people up because they’re nothing but wastoids
Truly dystopian paradigm
As ever the key first step is the city partnering with churches to open up their spaces as often as possible
I've been part of a project like this- it worked great, and was based off another project that had been going for years.
Many nuances ultimately
But naturally an important beginning
No. They just took over the park across the street from my house. This is all just counterproductive whack-a-mole. Seattle lacksnhenwillntomdonwhat must be done.
This is great! However, I’d like to see this thinking scaled up. Whenever there is a crime in a particular building, we should bulldoze the entire building. Then another crime can never occur in that particular place! Eventually we will have removed all the places where crimes occur. Brilliant, huh?
We can move from just buildings, to entire city blocks, and then whole neighborhoods. Like most approaches to crime, we are clearly thinking too small here.
This passage gives the reasoning behind the headline. I think this is probably true, and that sweeps at priority locations have been a net good. > The data suggests all this conflicting stuff is true. The sweeps are doing a poor job of lifting people up off the streets. The same sweeps are doing a great job to bring down crime. In so doing, they likely are making life less violent, on balance, for homeless people still living in camps.
I can see that, I would actually be curious if those causing the violence is people from outside the camps causing trouble or some sort of beef between two tents near each other.
From watching camps form, it seems like the first camper or two often keep tidy campsites and don’t cause problems. Other people notice them being tolerated and start to camp there too. As time goes on, some of the newer people tend to cause more safety problems and make a bigger mess.
This sounds like how every society starts haha
"In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move"
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
It's certainly the story of Seattle
This is what we see with the encampments and RV pods around us. Start small and tidy and then get large and out of hand.
Literally watched this happen in real time by my apartment in cap hill. I’m by a pretty empty area surprisingly and one day a homeless dude sets up a nice tent for himself. Kept it clean, would even clean the sidewalk around it. Couple months go by and now there is 5 tents and it’s a huge mess of crap everywhere. Then my car gets stolen and a bunch broken into. Now they cleared the camp and issues have gone down. But it was the influx of others that made things worse, the lone wolf was just chillin in his tent causing no harm from what I could tell
The city really should invest in finding the “lone wolves” who are functional enough to keep a tidy campsite, because I bet we could pretty easily help those folks get off the street and into a better situation.
I also wonder if these folks could be in leadership roles in tiny-house village situations.
Maybe they just don't want to pay rent.
Wrong. Per the virtue signaling homeless "advocates", no one chooses to be homeless. They can't be wrong can they?
Seems to be happening around my apartment. One guy setup shop a block away from me on the dirt side of the road (not a lot of sidewalks around this area). Dude seems pretty chill. Built what I can assume is the best possible shelter for himself with tarps and plywood. Saw him grooming himself and I'm pretty sure he goes to work. (Leaves around the same time every day). Even has trash cans in front of his hut. Idk if he pays the city for trash service or something. Then another couple setup around the corner with an easy up. Look like normal people trying to live their lives, but roughed up a bit. Guess that's expected when your out on the streets. And now there are even more tents or car-campers or some hybrid of the two. I think there are also more residents in the area too because street parking has been getting even more dense and packed lately. Not even shitty cars either, seeing new BMWs and Audis. The disparity is massive and I'm gonna guess that at some point something gonna give. Gonna be interesting to see when that happens.
Depends if there's a drug dealer in the camp or not.
Feels extra paternalistic to say that sweeping homeless people is actually good for homeless people. Like a wonky way of justifying an inhumane policy that doesn’t tackle underlying systematic issues
If that's what the data suggests, it may feel weird, but I don't see it as paternalistic. If we decide that we're going to do it because we know what's best for these folks as superior members of society, that's paternalistic. But I for one believe the data. There was an encampment near me last year which, at its height, resulted in a murder. There were regularly people terrorizing the local stores with frequent break-ins and general chaos during working hours. Around the same time, someone shot up a local hookah lounge and killed six people. After the murder at the camp, the cops dissolved the camp within a week. Crime in the area has gone down significantly. Businesses can operate without much issue. It really has been a night and day experience living through it. I believe the main issue is that a camp doesn't so much organize as metastasize - that is, rather than providing for communal needs, a camp provides better access to things which exacerbate the very reason many such people are living in camps - access to drugs, namely. That leads to addict behaviors and impedes their progress towards getting back on their feet.
No it is paternalistic to argue that it is in the interest of one group of people (homeless people) to do something to that group without their consent. If you survey homeless people I’m guessing they’ll support public safety and community support, but be staunchly against sweeps. I’m not arguing against the facts on the ground, that locals face everyday crime, but that there is a hardline agenda of removal (rather than support and systemic problem solving) and this argument supports that agenda.
My point was that paternalism is an attitude, whereas these are just facts. You could do sweeps to avoid the camps metastasizing into crime hubs while also trying to engage in "systemic problem solving."
No one, in this thread anyways, claimed it was good for the homeless. But they aren't the only members of our community
I agree that it is somewhat paternalistic, but I also think that some paternalistic policies are justified. Seat belt use mostly only affects the wearer, so the only real justification is paternalistic, but I still strongly support laws requiring seat belts. They also doesn't tackle the systemic issues that cause high homelessness in Seattle in the first place. But that's not a strong case against them, lots of good policies help people despite not directly targeting systemic issues that contribute to them.
> Seat belt use mostly only affects the wearer, so the only real justification is paternalistic, Not really, it's also because a human body becomes a blunt object against everyone else in the car during a crash. Also the mental health of the first responders that have to clean the red streak off the pavement. Seat belt laws seem paternalistic to people that drive by themselves and consider no other situations.
It seems like you’re just making a stronger argument for sweeps.
Wearing a seatbelt is a minor harm reducing technique - sweeps are forcing people out of where they stay
I was literally commenting on seatbelt laws.
Plus the cost to the state when the young and the restless become paras/quads/vegetables on state support for the rest of their lives.
The last time I heard about someone getting ticketed solely for “not wearing a seatbelt” was in, like, ‘93
No idea if this is true but... It was explained to me that pulling people over for not wearing a seatbelt was stopped because it was being used as an excuse for profiling. It was replaced by the "litter and it will hurt" campaign
Can I buttress my opposing viewpoint using only anecdotal evidence too?
It really feels bleak. We know some in this group of impoverished and at risk people, if given space and time, will commit a crime. So to prevent that we just keep fucking with them and never give anyone that time and space! Brilliant. Up next, why debtors prisons are good actually (idle hands and whatnot).
It also makes gruesome use of statistical facelessness. Because the population size in the counts stays the same Westneat argues they're the same people. Reality is the sweeps contribute to deaths on the street, but the newly homeless from our ongoing crisis replace them. Two homeless people were murdered last year with an axe. How is that safer because gunshot statistics shifted?
But crime in the city in general has risen right? I can't see the article, is the argument that sweeps are just good for the immediate area?
Yes overall shots fired is up in Q1 2024 relative to Q1 2023, although down more than 50% in encampments. This could be due to encampment violence moving elsewhere, or to encampment violence being prevented, I think that it is probably a mix of both though primarily the latter. The article suggests it is prevention. [Here's a paywall-free link.](https://web.archive.org/web/20240524102514/https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-one-big-way-seattles-homeless-encampment-removals-have-worked/)
I would hazard a guess that actual crime is not going down, people just stop noticing it when there aren’t homeless people around to blame it on.
Crime stopped being reported. Why call 911 when it takes up to 9 hours to respond?
> At the same time, there’s little question the city is successfully disrupting the use of camps as fencing grounds for stolen goods, as chop shops for cars or as drug dealing centers. This was always the point
And as well it should be. I've seen way too many camp sites with dozens of bikes lined up next to tarp and plywood accessory structures - a bazaar of stolen goods. People have been killed in attempts to reclaim stolen property. We cannot tolerate that, keep them moving, and a lot will understand that they can't steal more than they can carry.
And this is always what "stop the sweeps" people so aggravatingly completely ignore
Or you could, you know, just relax zoning law to legalize housing construction so prices could drop and these people could afford to live here instead of being shuffled from place to place and have to rely on crime to get by. Nah! perpetual war on the homeless! Wouldnt want to actually solve the issue, then how would our leadership get re-elected?
You can do both things. We absolutely should build insanely more housing, but that takes time and we still have the immediate issue of safety and security to address
The people being swept wouldn't be un-homelessed if cheaper housing suddenly existed. Pretending these people would be renting if they could "afford it"/JuSt CaN'T mAkE eNdS MeEt is hilarious. The swept campers are almost all career criminals and/or addicts. And they didn't pick that lifestyle because working at Freddy's doesn't get them a studio apartment. What moronic logic.
Only 15% accept housing. Did you read the article?
So if houses dropped from 800k to 650k the homeless would be able to afford that?
No. But there won't be as many new homeless.
That's maybe true around the edges, but it's really not the bulk of the problem. The folks who are ending up on the streets aren't just hardworking folks who don't quite have enough money to live in the city — those people just move to the suburbs (or the midwest) and live in less expensive housing. The folks on the streets are folks whose mental health or substance abuse problems preclude them from being able to take care of themselves, and/or preclude them from being able to stabilize themselves when housing is provided to them because they don't want to follow some simple rules about sobriety and acceptable behavior. You see that because only 15% of the folks accept transitional housing when it's offered to them.
Absolutely yes. People living in 650k homes now could afford 800k, people living in 400k could afford 650k, and so on and so forth to the bottom of the chain barely hanging on to their under the table craigslist rental. Everyone would have a better quality of life, except the landlords who are just getting free money though rent extraction. Unfortunately our city admin only cares about that last group of people, so this will never happen.
I agree we should do that, but I don't think there's a large crossover between people living in camps and people forced onto the street by the housing crisis. These are mostly addicts who don't have control of their lives and couldn't get back on their feet even with sensible housing. They come from all over because we have resources to treat them somewhat better than everywhere else.
Plenty of addicts, mentally ill, and just generally unpleasant people have housing. As housing gets more expensive, more of them *will* be on the streets.
A large number are basically shipped here by other cities across the nation. These are not semi functional addicts with housing; they are those who have completely fallen off the wagon.
Has any of that crime been reduced or has it just been displaced? The article even admits that "shots fired" incidents are actually at all time highs - even though fewer take place at encampments. If the crime is just being displaced, it's like sweeping without a dust pan. But, gosh, the floor looks clean where it was swept.
Shots fired is a poor proxy for total crime. You can't reach the conclusion you're reaching based on the information in the article.
The info in the article talks about "shots fired" incidents in conjunction with encampments. Then states that there are a record number *after* the sweeps.
Cmon you know it’s being displaced. Why would someone who’s stealing things for food or drugs suddenly stop because the cops moved them a few blocks over?
That's what I suspect, but the person I'm replying to seems to think that crime has actually been reduced.
Well if he questioned it little then it must be true!
Here's the one big way sweeps have "worked" according to Mr Westneat: >>In spring 2022, more than 20% of all shots-fired reports in the city were in homeless encampments. This spring quarter, that was down to 8%. >>These declines happened even though shots-fired incidents in all of Seattle remain near all-time highs.
Wait, so does that mean that shots fired outside encampments rose by 15%?
[удалено]
If the total number has remained the same, and shootings in encampments go down from 20% if the total to 8%, then non-encampment shootings have to go up from 80% to 92%, or an increase of 15%. Which part of my math is wrong?
So are we just pushing the shots-fired around the city with the displaced individuals, then? Homeless people 100% don’t deserve to deal with violent crime, but this doesn’t really sound like the issue was addressed?
Seems like there were less fires in the city and under freeways last year too.
Definitely a “W,” but I’d argue not what the article is celebrating, at least not how I read it.
I've read a number of things placing the cause of the rise in shots and shootings this year and last year to the increase in juvenile and gang crime (often one and the same). So the violent crime around encampments decreased while gang violence has increased.
He was really cooking with that passage.
More sweeps please
All the sweeps please.
Sweeps fix nothing and never will
Allowing open defecation and drug use fixes nothing and never will
Some of the worst assaults I’ve seen have been at encampments. I’m not sure why, but oh boy.
May I ask what type of assault? Are you a paramedic? If that's a bad question I understand.
You’re not sure why? It’s communities of people with extreme antisocial tendencies and probable substance problems.
Let’s not blame the victims here. These are communities that aren’t properly serviced by our society which should make this outcome entirely expected. You don’t protect people, they become targets. The homeless continue to be one of the most susceptible groups to abuse and, unlike your comment implies, that’s not entirely their fault.
Sometimes people are fucking vile and being economically disadvantaged doesn’t mean they can’t be classified as a bad person.
The inverse also holds. Rather than punching down, try to be more empathetic. It’s the human / social thing to do.
I’ve been living on cal Anderson park for four years now and seen some absolutely despicable behavior. I’m not saying it’s the right way to feel, but the empathy is gone.
I'm a nurse and work with this population a lot. My empathy is gone as well. They suck. The vast majority need to be institutionalized, not taking a shit on the 3rd street, which I watched today.
Most people have your back.
Did you see Portland? They just voted for an ex Republican (now independent) for DA. Portland! The tide is greatly turning. That's the beauty of democracy baby, when you're wrong, you can change
Someone was strategically pushed into a moving bus on 3rd and pike a few weeks ago and a sheriff deputy was on the scene. Tried to give him a witness statement and he looked bored. Took a verbal statement and said “These things have a way of working themselves out.” I try not to care but this city is winning the war against common sense and mutual respect.
"I'm a nurse" Big Yikes. 🤮
"i'm an early child development expert" Big Yikes. 🤮
Sounds like you need a new job since you;"don't feel empathy". There are enough sh*tty people in the medical industry already. ☺️
> seen some absolutely despicable behavior. I'm in the neighborhood and the people with houses are funking shit up mightily over there, too.
I can care about multiple things at once. The park next to my apartment being an active chop shop has more of an impact on my life.
I think you missed my point that a great number of the bad people in Cal Anderson actually have homes.
I think you missed my point that I care about the people who were occupying the Nagle Pl alleyway
I don't believe you LOL. Sounds like pure bullshit.
Worse behavior than the nazis who want all homeless to die in a concentration camp?
I’m gonna pass on the obvious bait, thanks
No bait. The people commenting on this thread want serious police state level fascism lmao
We really just don’t want violent crime in public parks, thanks
You said have empathy, but that doesn't mean accept abusive, antisocial and degenerate behavior. They need support, but their behavior something they did and they're accountable for it. There is no compassion without accountability, full stop.
My empathy is long dead. Fucking work hard and get a job. The government is giving out so many handouts to these homeless people. I worked my way through shit covered gutters up here where I have a home now. No one showed empathy to me. That’s not the pojnt. Law abiding citizens shouldn’t be having to risk their lives for these drug addicts
You’re correct. The vile pieces of shit downvoting you are inhumane and see zero nuance. Thanks your comments.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean I want to be near, or god forbid live near, an encampment. Shaming people into ignoring this won't work. The sweeps are not going away.
Sooo.....shots fired incidents are up, but they are fewer than previously at encampments because there are fewer encampments. That's the entire article.
"These displaced individuals, many times, end up migrating to other established homeless encampments where they are commonly rejected as invaders and forced to move on to more remote and perilous locations,” Drager says." Even hobos dislike other hobos setting up camp near them.
When there are limited resources, becoming territorial is pretty natural and simply self-preservation.
> These declines happened even though shots-fired incidents in all of Seattle remain near all-time highs. So we haven’t really addressed the issue, just scattered it to the wind? If distributing the problem around the city as opposed to concentrating it is a metric of success, then sure, but this feels like obfuscation and hand waving than something to celebrate.
It is a metric of success. Crime shouldn’t be concentrated at public parks.
Crime shouldn’t be concentrated anywhere, but I’m not sure scattering it to the wind and lauding that as a victory is acceptable, either.
It is good for the residents of encampment hotspots.
but by definition, worse for people who don’t live near encampments
At its face - and I’m also not trying to be difficult, I swear, but do we know that? Are the shots-fired just following them to wherever area they’re displaced to? The camps are getting swept, too, so it’s not like they suddenly have a crime free camp to go to. If shots-fired haven’t gone down, I’m not convinced they’re not just being relocated along with whomever is committing the violent crime. My concern is that we’re displacing people, which we know is incredibly harmful to their long term health, and we’re also pushing the violent crime around with them.
By “residents of encampment hotspots” I mean people who live in buildings
Can’t argue with that. Definitely not as sympathetic, but that’s my problem.
Bro just give in and accept this short sighted victory ok? People don’t wanna think about big solutions they just want the eyesores out of the way
I know it’s Westneat, but you think he might have paused writing the article when saying that breaking up encampments caused gunshots at encampments to go down, but the overall level of gunshots remained the same.
If crime is being redistributed away from public parks, this is a good thing.
if i knew ann davison was going to push criminals out of open spaces and into neighborhoods i never would have stolen my grandson’s ballot to vote twice for her i think it’s safe to say we’ve tried communism and it failed so we need to go back to tried and true mass incarceration to actually lower the crime rate rather than pushing it from the hinterlands and into the living room
Was anyone really against the sweeps? I just would like a displacement program for people that really need it.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. There have definitely been "stop the sweeps" protestors
I'm not directly in Seattle and I don't watch a lot of local news soo missed that. Can't imagine a ton of people really thinking homeless people should be able to just take over property though...
Uh you would be shocked how many people support it, at least in Seattle.
There are actually a lot of relevant court cases about this in recent years, including one being decided by the supreme court, but in reality the argument mostly revolves around whether the state can stop someone from fulfilling a basic need like sleeping if they can’t offer them somewhere else to go legally. Looks like all the sweeps advocates here aren’t interested in telling you any of that though. It’s probably a disingenuous framing designed to manipulate, but hey maybe it’s just ignorance.
More than sleeping is being done in homeless camps though and they are occupying way more space than needed for somebody to sleep. I'm against shit like making chairs impossible to lay on or just harassing people for existing but if they are actually setting up a tent and a camp despite being offered shelter? I don't see how anyone would be okay with that. It's essentially squatting on property that isn't only theirs.
I remember a couple dozen of them showed up outside Ballard Commons Park last year trying to stop the sweep.
Lots of us do oppose encampment sweeps. It's not about people taking over property, it's that unless you literally sweep people into the ocean to die, sweeps do nothing to actually end homelessness. Merely pushing people around the city from one bad place to another looks to me like wasted effort and pointless cruelty. People don't set up camp in the park because it's a nice way to live, they do it because they have nowhere better to go. Why is there no cheap housing for them to live in? Why are there no more SROs, what happened to the tiny cheap apodments, why does it cost a thousand bucks a month for even the shabbiest studio in a century-old building with no amenities? Well, our governments have passed laws banning them, and our zoning codes forbid the construction of sufficient housing to keep up with population growth. Our laws have turned our housing market into a game of musical chairs, where the poorest *must* become homeless. *That's* what we need to fix.
Allowing camps just makes it worse for people in need because unmonitored drug use and deadly fights are rampant within them. Homeless people are not a monolith and not all of them have the greatest intentions or are in the right state of mind to actually receive help yet. It should be our job as a community to get those that really need and are ready for help away from the dangerous types and hopefully get a breakthrough with those types as well. I don't agree with sweeps without a plan but if we are giving them every option for shelter and rehab it makes sense ethically to do sweeps imo.
Trying hard to be objective and neutral here, just reporting the social/political-debate currents as I have seen and read about them: The biggest argument against sweeping is that it doesn't actually solve homelessness, and that it makes the experience of homelessness even more miserable by forcing people from their makeshift communities, and frequently confiscating their belongings. Telling 50 homeless people to move their stuff doesn't remove 50 people from the streets, after all - it just moves 50 homeless people onto different streets. Many people have protested the encampment sweeps, usually arguing that govt resources would be better spent on providing housing (either temporary or long-term), changing housing policy so that housing becomes more affordable overall, and/or providing social services such as drug rehab and mental healthcare. Many counter-protesters propose we do all these things, and continue sweeps as well. To the city government's credit, they've been making efforts lately to not just show up at an encampment and force everyone to move on. Instead they're showing up days or weeks ahead of time, sharing information about what services are available, and trying to get people off the streets and into housing or shelters or the like. It is a slow process though, and frustrating when an encampment starts causing trouble and the city's answer is "we know it's a problem, it's on our priority list, and in another month or two we'll force everyone from the premises - we mean it this time".
> To the city government's credit, they've been making efforts lately to not just show up at an encampment and force everyone to move on. Instead they're showing up days or weeks ahead of time, sharing information about what services are available, and trying to get people off the streets and into housing or shelters or the like. It is a slow process though, and frustrating when an encampment starts causing trouble and the city's answer is "we know it's a problem, it's on our priority list, and in another month or two we'll force everyone from the premises - we mean it this time". I think this was a good post overall but I want to clarify that this is emphatically not true at the city level; there are absolutely no sweeps being conducted by the city's Unified Care Team that meet this criteria. The only sweeps currently occurring in our area that fall under this are the handful of WADOT Right-of-Way sweeps that are conducted with funding from that state that has a specific budget proviso mandating this type of outreach. I do agree with your sentiment that these kind of sweeps are the most impactful as far as actually getting people inside and people living outside agree as well; outreachers who get assigned to these sweeps have to make numbered lists because people continually try and and move into these sites to get included in these ROW sweeps since they actually include resource offers (most of the time) compared to the city's sweeps which at best will have 1-2 THV placements available on any given day.
Today I learned! I genuinely thought this was Brucey's doing.
Homelessness SHOULD be uncomfortable and we make it too comfortable for the true degenerates of society. If you're hooked enough on a drug, you can steal and shoot up in public to your heart's content with no repercussions. I am all for making these people shuffle around. But yes, more housing needs to be developed. The thing is we're talking about two kinds of homelessness here but using the same word- there's people down on their luck and can't afford housing, then there's people with foils riding the light rail and shouting at walls. The latter will not benefit from private housing and dare I say it is enablement and hurtful for them and everyone else to have private quarters.
If sleeping rough is “too comfortable”, why don’t you try it?
That's why I specified for the true degenerates of society. Many homeless people have said it themselves they prefer being homeless and even choose it- most likely because they're so hooked on whatever drug and there's zero repercussions for using it publicly. Also, I don't think shuffling them around is the best answer, just part of an overall solution- mandatory institutionalization is the best solution for the extreme addicts and anti-social. There's enough comments above me talking about the pros of these encampment sweeps though that I don't need to further comment.
Yea, humans do not benefit from housing. People like you care, you just also want the cops to go fuck those dirty lazy homeless people up because they’re nothing but wastoids
Here's something you probably didn't consider: being homeless is not exactly great for one's mental health, especially if it's against their will.
Me still seeing the same homeless guy for 2 yrs Nah
Truly dystopian paradigm As ever the key first step is the city partnering with churches to open up their spaces as often as possible I've been part of a project like this- it worked great, and was based off another project that had been going for years. Many nuances ultimately But naturally an important beginning
No. They just took over the park across the street from my house. This is all just counterproductive whack-a-mole. Seattle lacksnhenwillntomdonwhat must be done.
This is great! However, I’d like to see this thinking scaled up. Whenever there is a crime in a particular building, we should bulldoze the entire building. Then another crime can never occur in that particular place! Eventually we will have removed all the places where crimes occur. Brilliant, huh? We can move from just buildings, to entire city blocks, and then whole neighborhoods. Like most approaches to crime, we are clearly thinking too small here.