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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

... this is probably news to people actually living in Seattle. (Edit: the title was originally, "Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs")

A place where meth heads attack people with pitchforks in the street a few days after being released from prison on a suspended sentence.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/man-accused-...

Not to mention our random piles of used syringes, which are often found in parks where kids play.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/more-than-3...

Here's a syringe pile after cleaning up a homeless camp north of Seattle:

https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

I'm all for decriminalization, but Seattle's current approach is to decriminalize not only drugs, but a host of other actual crimes, like public intoxication, public camping, shop lifting, harassment, etc.

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When people say things like this, I do have to wonder if they've ever lived in a city before. Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s.

There is just a certain amount of crime and drug use that will always exist in the big city. No amount of 'tough on crime' policing will make it go away.

In the 80s people actually reported petty crime, and expected something to come out of it.

Don't only do they no longer do, you're considered crazy, awful or entitled for even considering it.

I think people are also ignoring the fact the drug use might not correlate with the crimes these people are committing. Perhaps they are just mentally ill, with no access to proper care, and are self-medicating. Jailing them will never solve the problem. Affordable healthcare might, however.

But oh no, then we'd have to pay taxes! We don't want a safe city that badly.

Jailing someone who is committing crimes instantly solves that problem. The perpetrator is off the street, unable to commit more crimes.

Treating criminals like victims, instead of showing empathy for the actual victims of these crimes is disgusting.

Honest people should not be made to suffer at the hands of some junkies who can't control their urges and are compelled to commit crimes to feed their addictions.

"It's better now than it was during the worst crime wave in American history -- the 1980s."

You're not wrong, but you're also not setting a very high bar.

I think it's important that cities be safe, livable places. Seattle still is, for the most part. But ask some of your younger, single female friends where they will and will not go at night, and you may be surprised that it includes a large number of neighborhoods.

I'm a married 30s man and I wouldn't go to many Seattle downtown neighborhoods at night.

I do regularly, it's fine. There are a couple specific areas I do avoid in the dead of night, but that's been true of every city I've lived in.

I think he means most places south of downtown

This is exactly it. It's almost totally a non-issue. I see orange needle caps and the occasional needle, but these junkies aren't attacking everyone, in fact you can just ignore them. I walk around in a dress downtown and on cap hill with zero issues. Never been attacked, assaulted, nothing. They lay in parks on cardboard and trash, but...so? Are they doing anything illegal?

Comfortable salaried people love to make a big issue about it because Seattle isn't scrubbed clean to perfection and they see a mess every once in awhile, but really the city isn't bad at all and isn't full of rampant crime.

We do steam clean the streets in Downtown Seattle (and have been doing that for decades), its part of why Seattle is so much cleaner than other cities.

Our new Park Ambassadors are here to help make the parks more inviting to be in: https://downtownseattle.org/about/careers/park-ambassador-pa...

The root issue, severe wealth stratification leading to hopelessness and escapism via drugs is something no city can address on its own.

We need national policy change to provide opportunities for the majority of Americans. Short of that, this problem will continue :c

> Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s.

And most cities are worlds better to live in than they were in the 1980s. Why would you want to go back?

When people write responses like this I wonder if they’ve ever been to New York City. We don’t really have comparable problems.

For me visiting LA, SF or Seattle is jaw dropping. I totally reject this idea that these situations are just inevitable.

Or Tokyo, for that matter. That's about as urban as you can get on Earth, with none of the 'grittiness' that so many West coast city-dwellers seem to think is inherent to cities. And in a comparable democracy, no less.

This is a pretty important point. Everything wrong with big American cities is normalized. If you don't like it, you're told to just go to the suburb. But it's all solvable and are usually consequences of policies as well as cultural problems. Many cities in the world just don't have these problems.

Suburbs are how America does segregation and separate but equal legally. We have “cities” next to major urban centers that can keep all their taxes dollars locally and shift their problems to urban centers. If you live in a nice neighborhood in the city of Seattle a good chunk of your money goes to fund poor parts of town and the homeless industry. Half a mile away the neighboring town keeps all its money for the local school and sends its homeless people to Seattle.

That's just objectively wrong. NYC has a higher homeless population both in sheer volume and per 100,000 people. So what is NYC doing to stop the growth of their homeless population beyond making it out of sight and out of mind?

If their homeless population is far less dangerous and destructive to the lives of all the other citizens that live there, then they're doing _something_ right, even if their homeless population is somewhat bigger per capita.

NYC has a right to shelter law. They also have enforcement of basic public space issues like camping and being in parks overnight, or petty street crime.

Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.

I suspect you aren't familiar with NYC from the 70s through the mid 90s. It was as bad then as SF is now. Giuliani completely transformed Manhattan and made the streets and parks usable again, and they stayed that way for a while. It's going downhill fast, though. Penn Station and Port Authority are turning into shooting galleries again, there are encampments growing, bodily waste on the sidewalks, and plenty of harassment. Give it another few years of hands-off policies and it'll be as bad as the west coast cities.

Yeah, because it gets cold in the winter in NY. Simple as that. You can't support the year round homeless population like the west coast.

I feel the same way about Toronto. Over triple the population of SF or Seattle, yet the problems I see described in this article are almost unthinkable here.

Honest Q: how is crime rate measured? If police stopped enforcing laws against, say, shoplifting, and the rate of shoplifting did not change, would the crime rate go down?

Yes, most crime rate statistics are based on reported crimes.

This is particularly problematic in Seattle. Because many citizens now understand that police won't respond to minor crimes, especially property crimes, people just don't report them at all.

In the past few years, I've personally experienced someone climbing a fence to enter my back yard, shitting in my alley, stealing property from my porch, pissing on my garage, stealing from my trash (multiple times). None of those will show up on crime statistics even though they are illegal because I didn't call in since I knew the cops didn't have the capacity to do anything.

Yeah since drug use is no longer a crime and since possession is legal the number of crimes is down. We could decrease the numbers even more if we fired the remaining police officers.

> Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s.

Someone else says the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780632

Not sure which one is correct...

It is down: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/is-seattle-dy...

When I see conflicting stories like that, especially regarding a topic like this, I'd immediately check the definitions each party is using.

Yeah, that's why I commented. So they could resolve explain what they meant and hopefully resolve the discrepancy.

>> has been steadily declining since the 1980s

And it'll "decline" further after this now that petty theft and shooting heroin in full view of the public is not a crime. Abolish all laws and it'll go down to zero, woo-hoo!

I fear that the secondary effect of this will be to attract even more homeless heroin addicts from places where these things are still crimes.

If crime is determined by victimhood:

> public intoxication not an "actual crime"

> public camping seeking shelter is not an "actual crime"

> shop lifting is an "actual crime"

> harassment is an "actual crime"

I think there are victims for public camping but people will argue about the severity of the victimization. For example, I have to step off the sidewalk into the street in order to get by a set of tents.

Agreed on public intoxication.

By that logic, burning down a forest, defacing a public work of art, building a personal home in the middle of a public park, and dynamite fishing a coral reef are not "actual crimes" either.

A good definition of "crime" needs to be able to include action that indirectly harm a large number of potential people. Otherwise, you are powerless to address the tragedy of the commons.

In Seattle if those were performed by a drug user they wouldn’t be.

This implies that you have data around if drug users and non-drug users who commit crimes are punished differently, or that you are just flippantly responding to a well thought out comment. In the spirit of HN, I'll assume it is the former. Can you show that data?

Certain methods of punishment don’t work for people with no assets. So if the city might fine someone with money a couple hundred bucks for urinating on a public building, the city won’t bother with a destitute addict as it’s not going to gain them money and might embarrass government officials. Here is a similar example https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/03/05/25878343/when-a-...

If I park illegally and get towed well tough shit, if van dweller gets towed the city has violated their rights and it’s terrible. So homeless druggies get free pass to commit all sorts of low level offenses that everyone else gets crazy fines for.

>meth heads >>Man accused

Is there a specific name for this particular type of generalization where a one-time event gets represented as a greater-than-one quantity?

Hyperbole?

It’s only war if both sides are actively fighting. Seattle ended the war on drugs.

> A place where a meth head attacked people with a pitchfork.

Fixed that up for you - don't pluralize individual incidents to suit your narrative.

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