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Comment by pseudo0 | Hacker News Reader

This interpretation of "state created danger" seems remarkably overbroad. By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity. Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger. Can the victim of a DUI therefore successfully sue the government?

I'd fully expect this to get quickly overturned on appeal.

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> By this logic, you could tie just about any danger back to the state with a similar degree of proximity.

Um, if you actually read the detailed recitation of relevant fact findings in the decision, I don’t think you can trace most dangers back to the state with similar proximity.

> Take someone hit by a drunk driver, for example. The government repealed Prohibition, regulates and licenses alcohol production and sale, and is fully aware of the risks of drivers abusing alcohol (DUI laws, PSAs, etc). That sure sounds like an active, willing, and knowing participant in creating the conditions of the danger.

That’s not nearly the specificity of the harms to particular persons that is established with the skid row containment policy.

This is somewhat begging the question, which is, at its core: “is the gov’t directly responsible for the humanitarian crisis at Skid Row.”

It was intended as more of a proof by contradiction. If we assume that the judge is correct in assessing this as a state created danger, then this standard would also apply to a wide variety of dangers that the government is also involved with, which have never been classified as such.

The notion that this reasoning would apply to an absurd (for your reductio ad absurdum) variety of cases is just a slight reframing of the point of contention.

By way of example, assume, for the sake of contradiction, that your argument is valid. Then, by similar reasoning, I could argue that any argument I disagree with can be taken to unreasonable extremes, and is therefore invalid, etc. etc. :P

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