Every day I see some weird stuff going on (it's at a point where it's no longer weird to me).
https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-new-york-became-safe-f...
NYC used to be worse than SF is now.
"Bryant Park, in the heart of midtown and adjacent to the New York Public Library, was an open-air drug market; Grand Central Terminal, a gigantic flophouse; the Port Authority Bus Terminal, “a grim gauntlet for bus passengers dodging beggars, drunks, thieves, and destitute drug addicts,” as the New York Times put it in 1992."
NYC's "solution":
"In sum, a diverse set of organizations in the city—pursuing their own interests and using various tactics and programs—all began trying to restore order to their domains. Further, in contrast with early sporadic efforts like Operation Crossroads, these attempts were implemented aggressively and persistently. Biederman, for example, worked on Bryant Park for 12 years. When Kiley was struggling to restore order in the subway, he had to withstand pressure from powerful opponents: the New York Civil Liberties Union, the mayor’s office (which had suggested bringing portable kitchens and showers into the subway for the homeless), the police commissioner, and the transit police. In fact, it was after the transit cops resisted Operation Enforcement, Kiley’s first effort to restore order, that he hired Bratton.
By the early 1990s, these highly visible successes, especially in the subway, had begun to express themselves politically. Better than any other politician, Rudy Giuliani understood the pent-up demand for public order and built his successful 1993 run for mayor on quality-of-life themes. Once in office, he appointed Bratton, who had orchestrated the subway success and understood the importance of order maintenance, as New York’s police commissioner.
Under Bratton, the NYPD brought enormous capacities to bear on the city’s crime problem—particularly Compstat, its tactical planning and accountability system, which identified where crimes were occurring and held local commanders responsible for their areas. Giuliani and Bratton also gave the force’s members a clear vision of the “business” of the NYPD and how their activities contributed to it. In short, a theory previously advocated largely by elites filtered down to—and inspired—line police officers, who had constituted a largely ignored and underused capacity."
From what I've seen, there are a lot of confounding factors in the studies that both back up and refute broken-windows policing. It can be hard to tell what actually works.
Between extrapolations from https://www.panynj.gov/corporate-information/pdf/10-board-me... and this New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/11/nyregion/as-port-authority... it seems that crime at the Port Authority Bus Terminal has decreased by a factor of ten from 1983 to 2013/2014. This seems to be consistent with everything else I have found on the subject, eg statistics in http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/06/nyregion/bus-terminal-addi... which suggest an even greater reduction in robberies specifically.
I would appreciate it if anyone can find better data or spot-check these numbers against other reports, because of course an order of magnitude is very large.
My immediate reaction was to jump out of my chair and aggressively move towards her - I'm actually not sure what I would've done next because it all happened so quickly. Probably shoved her? That seems like a legitimate response to someone walking up and spitting on you. Thankfully I was with a few friends and they restrained me before I could do anything and the woman ran away unscathed.
The entire experience left me so confused. I am legitimately concerned that if I had shoved her I would've been considered the 'bad guy' here be the absurd SF hyper liberals and could've ended up in jail been fired if my employer found out.
What are you supposed to do in this situation? There needs to be some sort of disincentive to this behavior but it seems like the way things are in SF it's actually socially acceptable behavior.
We have our own spitting lady: http://nypost.com/2017/04/24/notorious-spitting-lady-loses-i...
during my normal commute hours at Civic Center I've seen ...
- used needles strewn about in busy areas
- someone defecate on the station floor in broad daylight
- meth/heroin deals
- a dealer shaking down a high junkie for money owned on the platform
- entire hallways/stairways that were no-go because of strung out transients
- pretty much a third of BART cars have a homeless person sleeping off their high in them.
I feel stressed and not safe during my commute, can't believe I pay $9/day for the privilege of commuting via a cesspool of human misery. Not being on Civic Center or Powell station or being able to take Transit Bus will definitely be a consideration for my next job hunt.
Cleaning staff should remove the needles. Security or police arrest the dealers, and remove people loitering on stations or trains.
Is it a lack of funding, laws, sympathy for the homeless, or ... what?
I lived in London for ten years, and homeless people, or beggars, were extremely rare on public transport vehicles, and even rarer within stations. I don't know what combination of law and enforcement is used, and there are homeless people on the streets, but something prevents them from overtaking the transport system.
But what exactly is Skid Row? In reality it is not, other than incidentally, a spatial concept, but a functional one. . . Skid Row is the end of the line, and there must be an end of the line somewhere. ... The whole [reform] operation has proved to be, inevitably, an ideological illusion. Since Skid Row is not a static place, it cannot be abolished or rubbed out. The most noticeable consequence of this anti-Skid Row campaign has been merely to diffuse Skid Row, for a while, throughout the City.
I've elided a lot of supporting argument, the gist of which is that the denizens of Skid Row tend to form networks of support & attract institutions that maintain them. And while that level of maintenance looks (and is) rather squalid and miserable to outsiders, breaking it up is just replacing an organic support network with an artificial one which looks at the symptoms more than the roots.
I can't speak to London except that I guarantee London has a Skid Row, even if it's not physically located in London, if that makes sense.
Final disclaimer that I don't claim to have the answer, just pointing out one point of view that seems rather pertinent to 2017 SF despite being written 53 years prior, whatever moral valence you assign to the author & his politics.
What I am suggesting is removing the homeless people from the public transportation network, so it's kept cleaner and feels safer for the users.
This figure has risen every year for the past 6 years, and it's likely to keep rising. Removing the single room supplement / imposing the bedroom tax, freezing housing benefit, cuts to local authorities (and thus cuts to drug and alcohol services, and to some mental health provision, and to some housing provision) all mean that rough sleeping is going to increase.
And that number doesn't include people who are in temporary accommodation or vulnerably housed or sofa surfing.
There are cleaning staff going through the area cleaning stuff up. But people still are doing their crap and the laws are unenforced because of those political reasons.
I also think SF police & the city decided the tenderloin was the homeless containment zone long time ago with SROs being there. That is also where the civic center station is.
That's just where they've decided to gather. I'm not entirely sure what attracts them there, other than the burger king with the huge "EBT Cards Accepted" poster.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/01/bart-janitor-grossed-2...
Homelessness is a massive problem in SF, but the attitude that they behave this way "because of the situation they're in" is untrue and counterproductive.
Here's a description: http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/community/health-and-safe...
And here's a map: