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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Supervised consumption sites would go a long way toward fixing the needle problem.

We have safe injection sites up here in Vancouver, you still find used needles lying around everywhere, depending where you go, only you also find the small saline packs and disposable spoons from the injection sites lying around with the used needles.

The police don't really seem to care. I've watched a couple of officers find a small pile of used needles at one of the skytrain stations, they laughed to each other said how they should be cleaning that up, then just left. I know about an hour later, a bunch of school kids take the bus I was waiting for. Calling and reporting it did nothing.

Nothing concrete, but often calls to complain make it into a tally or database that can be cited by a politician looking to change things.

It works both ways. If the city refuses to charge offenders and police refuse to arrest, crime goes down.

Seattle PD knows this so they take days to file basic reports. If you wanted to report the somebody broke into your car you could be waiting multiple days for someone to take the report.

Police just follow the lead of politicians.

Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters. Even emergency calls about homeless brandishing knives in broad daylight are ignored. (If someone does get stabbed, the police will show.)

Seattle politicians have shown that they have no interest in keeping violent people off the streets, so the police don't waste their time with it.

> Seattle Police ignore just about everything except active shooters.

I've been away from Seattle for a while, so excuse me if it's changed. But I still remember quite well in 2010 when Seattle police gunned down a native american for crossing the street downtown, I think it was off of Howell. That guy used to ask me and my wife for change. His big crime was making a very young officer, I believe a recent arrival from the eastern part of the state, uncomfortable due to his skin color. Shot dead, in the back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_T._Williams

While tragic, the death of JT Williams has nothing to do with the Seattle City Prosecutor and the King County Prosecutor refusing to charge or jail violent homeless junkies.

"Police accuse King County prosecutors of declining cases, not charging felons" https://www.kiro7.com/news/tonight-at-5-30-pm-police-accuse-...

Seattle has changed. A few weeks ago someone beat a police officer with a sunroof he'd just ripped of a car (after jumping on the other roofs of cars in traffic).

He was released 24 hours later.

On a simpler note I saw someone exposing themselves/defecating on a street corner in downtown. Some officers spoke to him but then they left.

The police, of course, do seem to care, and they do care. It sucks that people like you try to get away with pulling one over on those who don't know the situation well enough and have to just trust you.

How? Junkies and other folks who throw needles on the street when there’s a trash can like 5 feet away will actually make appointments to stop at these consumption sites? Who pays for this? The city of Seattle makes a mess because of their extremist policies of not enforcing laws so let’s raise taxes to make up for it?

Please cite how Seattle's policy of not locking people up to rot in prison is extremist.

You had a viable argument right up until that point!

Edit: Thanks for the bot downvotes! Going from +2 to -1 in the span of a minute on two separate comments is a bit of a red flag :P

Not arressting people for theft is pretty extremist and I can't imagine how that is a good thing for the citizens of Seattle.

Adding a comment complaining about being downvoted tends to invite more downvotes from unrelated posters.

The timing is just so interesting though!

Two of my comments saw 3 downvotes in the span of a minute, the latter of which was much further down than this comment.

Amazing: A whole three downvotes! No way more than two people are reading this comment section at the same time.

I downvoted you, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a bot. I did so because failing to lock up people that commit serious crimes is prima facie extremist - no citation is necessary.

> Who pays for this?

sadly, me and other taxpayers like me in Seattle.

It's always amusing to me to hear people complain about taxes in Seattle. Washington State doesn't have an income tax, y'all. If you haven't figured out that a lot of the weird (and bad) city tax issues arise from that, welp.

To me all of these issues seem like the same ones San Francisco is facing, which leads me to conclude that neither lowering income taxes nor raising income taxes is likely to solve them.

I've lived in both those cities this decade; the results are in some cases similar, but the issues are in fact different. The thing that's similar: both cities are warm enough so that you can reasonably live on the streets year round. Boston's an intensely liberal city and nobody uses it as an example of how liberal cities always have homeless problems.

Similarly, Google "dallas homeless problem" sometime. Warm city, poor coordination of solutions for the homeless -- whoa, homeless populations are rising! But that once more does not fit the narrative, so nobody talks about it in threads like this.

(Houston is doing much better. Houston, unlike Seattle, has put a priority on coordinating efforts to help homeless. HUH.)

That said you're right -- it's not just about taxes. Seattle is low on revenue, but that's only part of why the city has failed to produce a coordinated response to homelessness. Bad organizational skills are not restricted to the right or the left, though.

Homelessness/drug use has indeed become a problem in Boston over the last few years - see [1]Methadone Mile and the problems in the [2]Common.

[1]https://apps.bostonglobe.com/graphics/2016/07/methadone-mile...

[2]https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/08/21/boston-common-jewel-...

Those are acute issues that can be directly linked to the closure of the shelter on Long Island.

a) Probably wise not to conflate homelessness with the opioid crisis. I would be a fool to argue that the latter correlates in any way with winter temperatures.

b) Different scale, man. Seattle's issues are way bigger than Methadone Mile. (I've lived in Boston too.)

More homeless die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than in NYC.

Observation to the contrary: availability of toilets does not fix "shitting on the streets" problem in SF.

Availability of toilets barely fixed the problem of urinating and defecating on the floor of the restroom in an office I used to work.

Unfortunately, the people that such initiatives are aimed at happen to be junkies. They will consume whenever and wherever they feel like it, just as many of them will steal from the most convenient target when they need more money for a fix. Further, the optics of state-sanctioned drug use sites are pretty bad, even in the most liberal of cities.

No it wouldn’t. They wouldn’t use them. Junkies reuse needles they find on the ground because they don’t care... they aren’t going to go to a specific place to wait in line to shoot up.

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