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Comment by agentofoblivion | Hacker News Reader

I also live in Seattle. I have no idea how to solve the problem, but I definitely don't think letting dangerous people roam the streets, committing acts of violence without consequence, is the answer.

When you have a person that's consistently assaulting random people, that person needs to be forcibly removed from the environment as a matter of public good, regardless of the causal reason for their actions.

It's a real shame they were born with a bad brain that makes them incapable of not being a violent menace to society, and that no cost-effective and humane solutions seem to be on the table. But if I have to make a short-term decision on who's rights to sacrifice first: the ill violence committer or the innocent victim, I choose the former 10 times out of 10.

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I don't disagree with the main thrust of your point, but I think this is an incorrect and very problematic framing:

It's a real shame they were born with a bad brain that makes them incapable of not being a violent menace to society

People take many years to grow into adulthood. Studies show that every dollar invested in doing right by our children saves multiple dollars down the road on prison costs and the like.

America has a terrible track record for how it treats its children, especially for a wealthy, developed country. If we want to escape our current Prison-Industrial Complex with a side of violent and insane rampant homelessness, we would do well to start by developing more family-friendly policies in this country.

Nothing that agentofoblivion wrote hinted at him not supporting "doing right by our children". And nothing you wrote touches on what you think should be done after the damage has been done.

Prevention is all to the good and should, of course, be pursued. But prevention of future problems does not solve the problem that exists NOW.

Suggesting people are simply born that way implicitly suggests that there is nothing whatsoever to do about it. "You lost in the genetic lottery. Sucks to be you."

I'm saying it's vastly more complicated than that and it's a serious problem to frame the problem that way because it leads to a mentality of "Just lock them up or ship them out for the good of other people." This tends to deepen the problem.

There are things that help. I know a lot about such things. I sometimes try to blog about such.

Agreed, claiming mental illness is due to being born with a "bad brain" is dangerous pseudoscience. Psychiatry/psychology has zero proof that mental illness is due to "bad brains" or any such objective biological cause

As with most things it's part genetic, part environmental, but enough that we aren't slaves to our destinies.

Sounds like a failure of pschiatry. I don't accept the conclusion that faulty brains are 'unlikely to be the root-cause'.

This is like a systems engineer stating 'this issue is definitely not hardware-related'. Maybe you have zero proof that it's hardware-related; maybe you need to work harder at debugging.

In this case, the hardware gets altered over time due to throughputs in the energy generating system, so isolating system failures such than you can conclusively state "it's a defect in the hardware that originated in the design and manufacture" is quite tricky, especially given the long life and myriad use cases of the hardware in question.

The thing that distinguishes human brains from computers is that the software one runs (or is forced to run by circumstance) causes the hardware to change over time.

That systems engineer would be stupid to completely rule out software related root causes to a bug that is only evident on the application i/o level when they have no tangible reason to do so.

It's not only a failure of psychiatry, but also neuroscience. The scientific community is still very much in the dark in understanding how biology transcends into consciousness

So basically the solution to violent homeless people is to fix the parenting of people who will likely(?) produce homeless people in the future...by some gov policy which will improve their parenting and childhood by providing them with more services?

A whole lot of parents could potentially fit into that category and only a few will have kids that both end up visibly homeless and violent. So that basically means improving services for low income people and other situations where a higher risk of mental issues can arise outside of lack of resources (plenty of homeless people come from middle class families due to things like domestic violence or mental illness by one of the parents or simply hereditary).

Then you'd still need a way to deal with the 5-6 generations of homeless people who are currently in adulthood as well which seems to be the pressing issue in Seattle. It's possible both could be correct.

I agree it’s not accurate to lump all mentally ill people into a category of having bad brains. And I also agree early intervention is probably the best means to prevention, although I don’t really have any evidence to base that on aside from observing life for 30+ years.

But, I think it’s also counterproductive to pretend that we currently have the knowledge and technology to turn all of these people into productive members of society. Some of them have indeed been dealt a bad genetic hand, and giving them a house isn’t going to fix it. The guy yelling nonsense at the sky and stabbing people needs more than I know how to give him, and it’s too late to make sure his parents feed him his green beans.

So, I’m definitely open to discussing medium and long term solutions, and investing tax money into helping this problem have reasonable outcomes for all the badness involved. But I’m not happy to wait a generation for these to take place, and just hope these violent maniacs don’t kill someone, or throw a five year old kid off the upper floor of a mall...oh wait, that already happened.

Stating that it's problematic to promote the idea that "People are simply born with broken brains. Done!" in no way suggests any of the policies you are inferring.

Honestly, it's going to take an innocent, kind-hearted person, who is loved by the community, getting killed by one of these mentally ill visible homeless. Only then will the community stop being so apathetic and vote in people who will make changes.

yeah honestly I don't really care if nonviolent people do drugs in the open. I want to get those people help, and I vote for policies that will help them. Like upzoning the ENTIRE city so people can actually build housing so not only the rich can afford to live here. However, if someone is violent they should go to jail. Give them help too, and pass laws so that once they are rehabilitated they can find jobs, but our current system is completely wrong.

But why should someone who spent $1 million+ on a house have to suffer a drop on the value of their property for this? It would be a serious reduction of their net worth, far more than any proposed tax to help the poor could ask for and realistically be passed.

Because people are suffering and its the right thing to do.

Forcing one group of people to pay dearly for the benefit of another group, who did not cause their ills, and actually have done a great deal to help, through paying taxes that has already gone towards their welfare, is definitely not the right thing to do.

There are four thousand homeless people and two thousand shelter places. Evening out those numbers would go a long way.

Involuntary commitment and treatment would go even further.

Downvoters should provide some supporting points. While you may not be impacted by this daily, many of us actually are accosted by aggressive homeless and even attacked in some instances. Many simply refuse to comply for treatment and at some point when a problem gets bad enough you have to step your treatments.

I read this response a lot in debates like this, about "involuntary commitment" and "refuse to comply." I didn't downvote you but I'll ask you the same thing I always ask: How, precisely, do you propose to square this with the myriad court rulings that have said that what you propose is unconstitutional?

We cannot simply clap people in a room and not let them go until they're "cured." So what do we do in the meantime? I know what I prefer, but I'm routinely told that Seattle and King County and Washington State can't afford such things, so what we do?

These are human beings, not simply objects to be dealt with.

(For what it's worth, I live in Seattle, ride public transit as my only means of transportation, and spend time on both sides of the cut in places like Pioneer Square. It is not a lawless Mad Max hellhole out here and I'm rapidly beginning to think that people who hold that view either don't live here or are deliberately looking for trouble. I'm definitely not saying that bad shit doesn't happen but both my anecdotal experience and those of my friends and family alongside the actual statistics show that it's not the uncontrollable catastrophe people make it out to be.)

> How, precisely, do you propose to square this with the myriad court rulings that have said that what you propose is unconstitutional?

It's a fair question, and the answer is not particularly appealing, but there certainly is an answer. An incident was mentioned elsewhere in the thread where a mentally ill person attempted to throw someone from a freeway overpass. That's attempted murder. Throw the book at them.

> RCW 9.94A.540 Mandatory minimum terms. > (b) An offender convicted of the crime of assault in the first degree or assault of a child in the first degree where the offender used force or means likely to result in death or intended to kill the victim shall be sentenced to a term of total confinement not less than five years.

Not less than 5 years can be a whole lot of years, and the Constitution doesn't have a whole lot to say on the matter. Pretty much any act of random violence can be met with the prosecution throwing the book at the assailant and sending them off to spend the much of the rest of their life in a small room in Louisiana. This is obviously not a great solution, and if ranking solutions by quality it's toward the low end, but it's certainly available. Punching a police officer is a felony. Shoving a bus driver is a felony. Waving a knife at a person is a felony. Clapping people in a room and not letting them go until they're "cured" isn't an option, but clapping them in a room and just leaving them there is.

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