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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

The police aren't the problem. They're just the enforcers. The problem is that nobody wants to deal with homelessness. They just want the homeless to go somewhere else. And one mechanism is harassment by the courts.

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California has good weather and spends a ton of money every year on homeless support services.

If you’re homeless, why wouldn’t you come to California?

It makes sense to me.

However, as I recall from previous discussion, most California homeless come from California.

From self reported surveys based on basically nothing. I don’t believe it. It also doesn’t say in what way they were living here and for how long. When you talk to homeless people in San Francisco, a lot of them traveled here from out of town.

I'm suspicious too. I mean, if I became homeless, I'd head for California or the Oregon coast.

But about San Francisco, "out of town" could mean elsewhere in California.

If you’re homeless then moving isn’t easy, unless you really like to walk or can scrounge money for a bus or two. Then you’re in a new place you’ve never been, which means any of the tricks and connections you had have to be rebuilt from scratch. The stakes are pretty high when you’re living from day to day, and a change of weather is probably only worth it if you’re in a very cold place to begin with.

Good points. Hopping trains and hitchhiking don't work so well these days. But buses don't cost too much. Also, I suspect that many homeless have smartphones. And that there are social-media networks for sharing "tricks and connections".

I'm not sure that's fair on the voters of LA. We passed a $1.2B sales tax to specifically try to go after the problem here (and not just push them somewhere else).

As for the police, I honestly don't think I've ever seen one police officer harass a homeless person (or anyone really harass them, for that matter). Santa Monica police were always remarkably respectful when dealing with the homeless population there, and I don't believe I've ever witnessed an interaction between LAPD and any of the homeless near my current home.

OK, perhaps LA is doing something about it. But LA courts were harassing homeless with ridiculous fines. I suspect that $35 would be a major budget item for a homeless person. Let alone additional tickets for failure to appear and pay. The article notes that arrests of homeless accounted for over 10% of total arrests in 2011, and almost 17% in 2016.

Officers can be respectful while ticketing and arresting the homeless. And perhaps Santa Monica isn't targeting homeless as much as LA generally.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts above, part of my experience is that the homeless are frequently harassing people and businesses on a daily basis to the level that I can believe the arrest rate should / could be higher. Whether it’s the woman who walked up to me, spit in my face, and then started screaming at me, or the countless guys who have followed my wife aggressively while walking home, it’s a major safety issue. I can imagine that in many situations, the police make whatever arrest they can in the moment, but lack the supporting evidence for more major charges, leading to situations where the “fines” look like the “cause” for arrest, but it’s not really.

I say all this, but again reiterate that I hurt every day I have to walk four blocks to get groceries, and pass a dozen people in a remarkable state of sadness and disrepair. I want each and every one of them to get the help they deserve as human beings (regardless of why they got there, what their race or country of origin, just don’t care... they are human beings who deserve our support). But, i know it’s a collective action issue, and potentially a national issue, and so we have to find a way to make elect officials at a local and national level who are capable of addressing this challenge.

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