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Yesterday, I was out for a late morning run, coming up my city's main commercial and restaurant street towards the capitol square. As I approached a stoplight and took a little break in the sweltering heat, a man across the street was blaring music on Bluetooth speakers; mildly annoying, but common enough in the public square. What startled me was another man on the other side of the road who began rapping (for lack of a better description, since it was basically just yelling with a slight match to the cadence) a stream of invective - he was going to kick people's asses, motherfucker this, n-bomb that, people better not fuck with him, and so on.
Reflecting a bit, this made me think of the recent discourse on asylums and what to do, and it occurs to me that I think many people are still missing the actual point. The man I described above didn't show outward signs of any particular mental illness, I have no idea if he uses drugs, and while he did look like a vagrant, I don't know whether he sleeps rough or not. Do any of those things actually matter to me? In some sense, it would matter if there was a serious and treatable mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia), but I don't actually care whether he has diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder or is merely what we would colloquially describe as an asshole. What's to be done if there is no such diagnosis and no drug-induced psychosis, but merely an asshole yelling at people about how he's going to kick their ass? My answer is basically that I want police officers to exercise their discretion to inform him that his options are that he can knock it off, do it elsewhere, or they'll arrest him for disorderly conduct. We don't need to escalate to immediate criminalization, starting with "move along sir" is fine, but no, you don't get to keep yelling at people all day.
So much of the discourse about
bumspersons experiencing houselessness seems like we're just talking past each other. At the end of the day, I genuinely don't care what the state does with these people, I just want them removed from my neighborhood. This attitude is derided as not solving the problem, but that claim merely highlights that we don't agree on what the problem is. For the people that insist on handling root causes, that part will be up to them, I'm perfectly satisfied with literally any solution that removes the people that throw chicken bones and vodka bottles on the ground in the park. I'm not actually very interested in whether they're addicts, mentally ill, or simply terrible people. The answer from the BeKind crowd seems to be that everyone has the right to behave the way they want to and that I'm a very bad person for wanting these guys removed; this seems like an unsolvable impasse in preferences for how to live.There are numerous problems with trying to deal with this. One being that it literally is legal to stand on the sidewalk and curse. Another being anarcho-tyranny. If you make it illegal to do this or stretch some disorderly conduct law, the people who will get collared will largely not be these guys -- the cops don't want to deal with them because they're unpleasant and some NGO will be on their ass if they do anyway. No, instead the cops will go after mildly annoying groups of teenagers (whose parents won't protect them), random people who are swearing because they had a bad day, and most of all, people who swear at the cops themselves.
I ran into an example of this in even a small town policing context. An older Dead Head hippie lady decided to create, then cycle through semi-permanent campsites nearby an elderly relative's property. One camp she chose was as close as possible to private property while technically still sitting in national forest. I'm talking yards when there's thousands of acres of accessible national forest to choose from. She must have decided a great cosmic injustice had occurred when more secluded alternative sites were offered for her, uh, more natural demeanor and trash. Areas that would be out of view of a sweet, old God fearing woman.
If the squatter was ever liable to exude nice old hippie vibes instead of robbing your campsite is karma, also fuck you scumbag vibes I never saw or heard about it. One expects, unless you're in Vermont or something, a Sheriff can be called out to apply some pressure on behalf of an elderly taxpaying resident. If not to drive a squatter out of town, then at the very least to make a token effort to comfort a voter. "Yes ma'am, you give us a call" instead of "Sorry, nothing we can do-- federal land." Nope.
Eventually this was resolved with trashy, angry nudist hippie squatter moving on. Maybe there was liaising between police and National Forest Service I never learned of that aided in getting the squatter to move on, or maybe the federal land excuse really should dissuade any action. Regardless, I was left a greater impression that the injustices and costs of small town prejudice in law enforcement are mostly just that. Not any great leeway to actually get stuff done or help people that should matter.
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