Comment by codyogden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codyogden | Hacker News Reader

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I live in the heart of south Minneapolis. I really doubt the claim that this is for organized crime for some kind of financial gain. There was an organized ring last year targeting high value cars, but it got busted pretty easily. From the news I’ve seen, it’s almost always joyriding teenagers and stolen vehicles used to commit some other crime.

Uber/Lyft drivers are specifically targeted because they can be easily lured to a semi-remote location by the apps. But multiple criminals using that tactic doesn’t make it “organized crime.” It would make sense that an app driver knows other drivers who have been carjacked, but this M.O. isn’t exclusive to Minneapolis.

Crime is still really low here. I live at a dodgy intersection with major bus lines that brings a lot of characters—good and ‘bad’—around. I don’t worry about walking around even at night. I don’t worry about driving anywhere in this city, even in the areas where carjackings have been “up” (which I travel through frequently in order to reach the now infamous Lake Street Target).

Anyway, fear-mongering comments or anecdotes from people who visit here don’t really express the lived experience of people living in Minneapolis. :)

People & especially the media love to play up this stuff. I lived two blocks away from Seattle's CHAZ during the 2020 BLM protests. Watching media coverage of my area compared to the actual experience of walking around and living there was a ridiculous juxtaposition. Even people I know who disapproved of the protests commented on the difference uneasily. I had numerous people from the east side of Lake Washington refuse to come pick up things I was selling on craigslist because they thought they would be mobbed and their car torched or something. Fear sells and there are a lot of people who want to sell it.

Is wikipedia inaccurate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest#...

Your personal experience may be less relevant than actual incidents in which people were shot.

Yes, and in the GP we saw there were actual instances of people having their car stolen. This does not mean it was some violent wasteland as the media painted.

Right wingers want to paint it as a violent wasteland. Left wingers want to paint it as a promising post-police utopian experiment.

Rhetoric aside, there are empirical questions that can be answered.

I don’t know. On the one hand I get what you’re saying, that CHAZ was “peaceful” during the day in that it resembled a sort of low-tier art fair. On the other hand, it was an incredibly lawless hijacking of public property. Daily, thousands of people who use those roads or surrounding amenities (parks, businesses) were forced to find alternatives that took longer and were more crowded, right in the middle of the pandemic. This re-routing included public transit and emergency vehicles. This type of violent takeover can’t be justified by surface-level “peace” during the day in my opinion.

We should also remember that people died in CHAZ and its immediate surrounding areas. For example Travis Berge, who was a well-known repeat offender featured in the documentary “Seattle is Dying” (https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is...), killed his girlfriend there (https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/09/17/blm-chaz-proteste...). The father of another man who was shot and killed there is now suing the city for negligently abandoning that area (https://www.foxnews.com/us/seattle-lawsuit-chop-chaz-zone-sh...).

Not to mention, CHAZ set the tone for how the city has been governed and its politics thereafter. In 2020 there were near-daily blockades of roads and tunnels, none of which were legal, and yet there was little consequence for any of the rioting. For example, one article noted that out of 261 rioters, only 8 faced charges, and exactly zero those faced any real consequence subsequently (https://komonews.com/news/local/city-attorney-charges-brough...). Meanwhile the city police was forced to build a concrete barricade around their main police station because of the lawlessness and city leadership forcing them to not take necessary actions. It got to the point where BLM protesters were setting white people’s houses on fire when they were sleeping in it (https://thepostmillennial.com/seattle-blm-activist-arrested-...), and staged protests outside white neighbors’ homes demanding they leave the neighborhood (https://nypost.com/2020/08/14/seattle-blm-protesters-demand-...). All this, became normalized and accepted by city government, in part because of CHAZ.

Fast forward to the present day and we see how much worse things have become. Hundreds of police officers have quit because of defunding and bad policy. Most will never come back no matter what bonuses are paid. The city has roughly half the number of police officers the average city would have per capita. Crime is everywhere. Businesses are shutting down due to it - look at the International District for a taste, where ironically minority business owners are the ones suffering. Trash is everywhere. RV ranchers are everywhere. Tents can be found in numerous parks and green spaces, leaving behind trash and needles. Property crime, like bike thefts, car breakins, car thefts, burglaries, and so on are common to the point no one bothers to even report them, since there’s no one to investigate and insurance requires a deductible anyhow.

You might call it a ridiculous juxtaposition. But CHAZ was exactly the harbinger and enabler that those complaining about it thought it would be. Seattle was a very safe and very clean city less than 10 years ago. I don’t recognize the city as it is today.

Yes, this is the standard right-wing Seattleite bemoaning. Of course, what's always left unsaid is that the implied solution to the existence of homeless people is newly-hired & appropriately-worshipped cops kicking them out of their temporary shelter and trashing their meagre possessions. All so you don't have to look at and deal with the externalities of your nicely-appreciating property prices.

I have yet to hear a good answer to what people expect non federal governments to do, other than to keep people on the move and make it someone else’s problem.

For the same reason no single city, county, or state can offer taxpayer funded healthcare, they also cannot offer taxpayer funded mental healthcare and/or universal basic income (or whatever other welfare scheme), and still be part of a country that has freedom of movement.

The only reason the countries that do offer these things can continue to is because they have an immigration border with which they can limit the number of benefit recipients.

Canada implemented socialized healthcare regionally. Provincial hospitalization insurance was available in Saskatchewan many years before any federal program. So your assertions conflict with the historical fact of how successful social programs came into being.

With regard to homelessness, the solution is to build socialized housing with integrated health services. This will never happen at the federal level until some states (or counties, or cities) take the lead. In line with how a great many people believe federal politics should be.

Can you point to non-right-wing-affiliated sources to back up your assertions?

Have you read this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42867903-open-borders

My reasoning is from first principles of dividing x resources amongst y number of recipients.

I want everyone in the world to have everything they want, but that is not compatible with the constraints of nature.

I am also aware that I and almost everyone else in the developed world consume far more than our "fair" share of the world's resources.

I have not read that book, but the caveat that throws cold water on egalitarian solutions is that we all want to maintain our disproportionately high standard of living while also increasing the amount of resources others receive, which is not going to happen without redistribution.

The majority of homeless people in Seattle are not from Seattle. The point in time surveys aren’t real data because they rely on unverified self reported claims. The reality is that homeless are coached by activists to respond falsely on these surveys as former locals, to generate sympathy.

Personal responsibility is a thing still, and people can live anywhere in America instead of trying to do so in an expensive location. And yes I expect not to have to look at open drug dens or bike chops shops, not experience property crime, not have parking spaces occupied by trashy RVs, and not see taxpayer funded amenities like parks taken over.

It has nothing to do with appreciating property prices and nothing to do with right wing politics. That’s just your inaccurate editorialization. Most people have a common sense expectation that a city be clean, lawful, and operated for the benefits of its legitimate tax paying residents, not drug addicted vagrants or irresponsible nomads.

Your bullshit assertion that homeless people aren’t from here can’t even stand up to the data, not even from any right-wing news source you can find, so you come up with an idiotic story about activists coaching the homeless to respond inaccurately to surveys.

You have no solutions to the problem. Your only recourse is to push the problem somewhere else. Utterly pathetic. No vision whatsoever.

Reread what I said about point in time surveys before talking about data - bad, purposefully misleading data is worse than no data.

My “recourse”, which is to not let the homeless steal from legitimate residents, is the only reasonable solution. I certainly have no sympathy for the large number of drug addicted homeless taking advantage of the naivety of Seattle’s policies. But even for the rest - people need to figure out their own lives like the rest of us. No one is entitled to live in Seattle or New York City or Hawaii or other high demand, desirable, expensive location. Deterring the problem via enforcement and legal consequences doesn’t shift the problem - it addresses it by forcing people to be responsible, as long as other locations don’t try to accommodate them in the same broken ways.

Since you're so worried about this problem why not try learning the first thing about it? I'm sure you know people in your life who have become addicted to various substances, which is at this point widely recognized as an issue of mental health. Hopefully those people had enough of a safety net to avoid becoming homeless. If not, well, now they're caught in a vicious cycle. Kicking a drug addiction is hugely more difficult when you're facing housing insecurity, and when you're facing housing insecurity your likelihood of self-medicating with drugs and developing an addiction is also hugely more likely. Housing insecurity also makes it much more difficult to find & keep a job to get income and alleviate the insecurity, as does having a drug addiction. Of course, there are also expensive non-addiction-related health issues which make it more difficult to work - and it's more difficult to manage the condition while homeless. All of this is rendered much worse by high housing costs - you need to make more money to achieve housing security, and your likelihood of becoming homeless from financial stress is also much higher.

You look at this problem in your community and your solution is to ignorantly push for it to be someone else's problem. I repeat, utterly pathetic. You are not a serious person.

It’s telling that at the end of your comments, all you have left is an ad hominem attack. Not getting addicted is itself an act of personal responsibility. You’re acting as if none of these people have ownership around their actions, when they do. If they weren’t enabled by the policies you support, they would act differently.

The “personal responsibility“ and carceral approach to addiction is, thankfully, hideously outdated and you should join the rest of us with the medical community in the 21st century. When you see someone destitute under a bridge, have humility and think “there but for the grace of god go I”. Anything else is vanity.

That isn't even ad hominem! Ad hominem would be like "your ideas are pathetic, therefore they are wrong" whereas what I said was "your ideas are wrong for these reasons, therefore they are pathetic". You are mixing up the premise and the conclusion! Come on!

I live in Minneapolis too, and while I absolutely agree with you that Minneapolis is still a very safe city, there's no doubt that crime has gone up in the last year--for example, the murder rate in the Twin Cities has definitely gone up: https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2021/12/09/st-paul-h...

I live in another city, but there has been significant changes in certain types of crime patterns. It’s not “organized” crime in The Godfather or gang sense, but it’s organized loosely on the internet and would be criminals basically have access to “best practices” that were only available in a truly organized crime org in the past.

Nothing like growing up in 80s NYC, but property crime in my city is way up, and police either aren’t taking reports or people don’t bother. The little league I’m on the board had the wall of a storage shed cut open and turf equipment stolen. The police took a report and the video and filed it away.

Shady people know what the police will arrest for, and what the DA will prosecute; they operate in the fringes. Basically if it’s a burglary at a house or assault the police respond and prosecute. Other thefts don’t even warrant a report unless there is an insurance angle. In general, the stupid crime done by drug addicts is basically not on the radar.

10 years ago, guys robbing sheds and plundering the little league would have prompted a mini-task force response. Today, the paperwork to book the guy would last longer that his time in custody.

I lived in Downtown Minneapolis about 10 years ago in an "upscale" loft building. This was on the outside ring of development and somewhat near a lower income neighborhood. I was there for 18 months and during that time there were multiple home invasions, break ins, and one I personally had several very disturbing encounters. Now, when I revisit that same area it has further gentrified and feels much safer.

However, I still have many friends in Minneapolis and without exception they are all very negative on the overall direction of the city. It's been particularity intersting to watch friends of mine in that area who I considered pretty far left start spouting more and more "conservative" talking points after the riots and as they view their quality of life deteriorating.

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