The Cuddly Wuddly Approach To Skid Row
It just isn't working, writes Heather Mac Donald at City Journal:
For 25 years, Skid Row constituted a real-world experiment in the application of homeless-advocate ideology. The squalor that engulfed the 50-block district just east of downtown Los Angeles was the direct outgrowth of advocates' claims that the homeless should be exempt from the rules of ordinary society. The result was not a reign of peace and love among society's underdogs, but rather brutal predation and depravity. Occupants of the filthy tents and lean-tos that covered every inch of sidewalk in the area pimped each other out and stole from, stabbed, and occasionally killed one another. Gangs and pushers from South Central and East Los Angeles operated with impunity under cover of the chaos that reigned on the streets....In 2006, Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton announced a full-scale attack on Skid Row anarchy. His Safer City Initiative (SCI) would be a demonstration project, he said, for Broken Windows theory, which holds that tolerance for low-level forms of crime and disorder allows more serious crime to fester. When the police started enforcing jaywalking, public urination, and public camping laws, thousands of warrant absconders and violent parolees on the lam lost their refuge. Order gradually returned to the streets.
The homeless themselves were the Safer City Initiative's most immediate beneficiaries. As the lawlessness in the encampments was pushed back, deaths from drug overdoses, untreated disease, and other non-homicidal causes of mortality diminished as well, falling 36 percent in just three years. Skid Row's violent crime--the victims of which were almost always other vagrants--decreased 45 percent from the first nine months of 2006, before SCI began, to the first nine months of 2009. The lean-tos faded away as their inhabitants discovered that they could no longer smoke weed and crack in them all day without disturbance.
Skid Row's radical social-service providers and public-housing advocates declared war on the Safer City Initiative. They directed a nonstop barrage of propaganda and lawsuits against the LAPD, claiming that its officers were abusing the poor on behalf of would-be gentrifiers.
Yeah? Tell that to murdered 17-year-old Lily Burk, who was murdered by a drug-abusing transient named Charles Samuel with a history of violent crimes (including felony gun possession and a very similar kidnapping) who was released from state prison into rehab. More from Heather here:
Samuel was a good candidate for a third-strike sentence, thanks to an earlier attack that foreshadowed Burk's murder. In 1986, he walked up to an elderly man sitting on his porch in San Bernardino (in the so-called Inland Empire east of Los Angeles), grabbed the man's cane and beat him with it, then forced him inside his home and demanded money. When the old man could only come up with ten dollars, Samuel commandeered the man's car and drove the owner to an ATM. The terrified senior citizen was unable to withdraw any money, however, whereupon Samuel struck him with his cane again, punched him in the stomach, and threatened to kill him if he called the police, according to the Los Angeles Times. Samuel pled guilty in 1987 to robbery, residential burglary, and car theft and was sentenced to six years. He became eligible for a three-strikes sentence in 1997, following a conviction for another San Bernardino burglary (the 1986 robbery and burglary charges counted as his first two felonies). But his rap sheet failed to note that the 1986 burglary was a residential burglary, as opposed to a non-residential break-in. Only residential burglaries count as "serious" felonies for three-strikes purposes; breaking into a store, office building, or commercial space is regarded as "non-serious" and can be repeated indefinitely without triggering a three-strike step-up in sentencing. (So much for the idea that the three-strikes law is blindly draconian; in fact, it makes careful--perhaps overly careful--distinctions between felonies.)
Animals should be kept in cages, not be allowed to plea bargain and be paroled onto the streets.
Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it recently -- criminals should be made to work to pay their room and board in prison and restitution for their victims...not that that'll replace a brutally murdered 17-year-old girl or give her parents their lives back.
I wish Bill Bratton would come back to NY and take his old job back!
Kristen at September 29, 2009 5:42 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2009/09/29/the_cuddly_wudd.html#comment-1670050">comment from KristenI wish Bill Bratton would come back to NY and take his old job back!
I wish he'd stuck around here!
Amy Alkon at September 29, 2009 6:05 AM
I guess private sector is the way to go. Despite all he did here in NY, it was a thankless job. Guiliani couldn't handle sharing the attention. I'm not sure if it was as thankless in LA, but why put up with the crap if you can go make a lot of money!
Kristen at September 29, 2009 6:11 AM
More and more I become convinced that the Left actually want violence and chaos in the streets so that they can push for more and more laws that restrict the freedoms of the law-abiding, leading to more and more control over our lives. They don't want to put away true career criminals, push for more and more amenities in prisons in the name of "no cruel and unusual punishment", and take every example of someone breaking existing laws to ignore the laws already on the books and try to pass more.
WayneB at September 29, 2009 6:46 AM
After looking at that mob scene in Chicago, I begin to wonder how far we are from the return of vigilante style justice. There are limits.
MarkD at September 29, 2009 7:46 AM
In Austin, we have a homeless shelter in the middle of the entertainment district. Dumbest fucking idea in the world. Now there's panhandling, crack dealing, assaults- all kinds of fun (not that a bar district is ever particularly safe, but crime has risen significantly in the area since the shelter was moved.) When APD tries to crack down on the problems, homeless rights "advocates" have a fit. In fact, Travis County (which is where Austin is located) is so notoriously lenient when it comes to crimes involving vagrancy, drugs, etc, that other cities bus their homeless here. There are documented cases of the police departments in Fort Worth, Corpus Christi, and Houston sending their "problem" homeless to Austin.
ahw at September 29, 2009 8:32 AM
Minus the cheapshit anecdotal drama about the murder, I concur with Alkon's sentiments re Skid Row. The most valuable property in nay majopr city should be at its center. So that is where we have our Skid Row stinking everything up?
Really, shove these people to a drunk farm in the desert. Reclaim downtown, and help it blossom through a 20-year tax-free zone, to make amends for the damages.
i-holier-than-thou at September 29, 2009 10:33 AM
Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it recently -- criminals should be made to work to pay their room and board in prison and restitution for their victims...
I have always maintained that prisons should have zero cost to them. If cloistered nuns in the 17 century could support themselves without leaving the convent, why can't convicted felons in the 21st century support themselves without leaving the prison? Each person should be charged for their room/board/clothes/food and have to work to pay the state/county/country back for the cost. People might come out of prison with a skill, which increases the likelihood that they won't be back.
Although I am happy to pay to keep some people in a cage, all able bodied people should be required to work for their keep.
-Julie
Julie at September 29, 2009 11:11 AM
True-people go to great lengths to get their drug offenses transferred to travis county.
momof4 at September 29, 2009 11:20 AM
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