zlacker

>>NaOH+(OP)
The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]

I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.

I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.

>>idlewo+L9
You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then.

I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.

Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.

So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.

>>marcus+ac
I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.

>>seanmc+zk
We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful.

Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.

Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.

>>marcus+5z
>That just makes the problem worse.

The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.

This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.

>>Workac+xJ1
Regular people who are down on their luck are at severe risk of becoming the drug-addict permanent homeless. Living on the street is real hard in an environment like SF, and subjects you to all sorts of wildly stressful circumstances that must be coped with somehow. Taking drugs then becomes a vicious cycle.