"But it is worth mentioning that we are not at Union Square or the Westfield Mall this morning because we have been advised it is simply too dangerous to be there at this hour"
Sorry, emotions are running pretty high right now. If you made this comment at her vigil, it wouldn’t have ended well I think.
We're not at her vigil, nor are we talking specifically about it.
It makes the already-shitty life of the homeless even worse when folks paint them as crazed murderers. It is -in truth- no better than asserting that any other broad group (whether you group based on ethnic, racial, state-of-origin, or any number of other overly-broad categories) are crazed murders.
Every single death is a tragedy. I very sincerely believe that, and will be angry at myself until my dying day that I did nothing to help try to fix death.
However, it does the living no good to dehumanize an entire group by saying "Oh, well they're a member of $BROAD_GROUP, so they're murderers. Better stay away.".
The sad fact is that this person was already committing crimes, was already considered violent, but our system in place gives them a free pass unless it comes out to homicide. No, don’t dehumanize the homeless, but yes, hold them to the same standards as everyone else. You commit a crime, you get arrested and go to jail; then maybe it doesn’t have to get to murder for the system to take action.
It is true that the mentally ill are overwhelmingly not dangerous. But as the number of mentally ill people in one place goes up, so do your odds of encountering that minority of mentally ill who are aggressive. In most of the world, you might see one mentally ill person in a day and they are harmless. In parts of California, sometimes it feels like you see a dozen mentally ill homeless in a day, and one of them is berating passersby or worse.
San Diego County data from 2021 showed that member of the homeless population there were murdered at 19 times the rate of the non-homeless population, and were 27 times more likely to be subjected to attempted murder—as well as 12 times more likely to be assaulted and nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted.
Please accept my apologies and thanks for the level-headed response
The line is pretty thin here, you never know what's going to prompt mentally ill person to kill you.
[1] jun 12: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/sanfrancisco/news/early-morning-...
[2] may 22 phttps://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/two-people-shot-in-f...
[3] Jun 2 https://www.ktvu.com/news/man-wounded-in-broad-daylight-shoo...
[4] jun 5 https://neighbors.ring.com/n/Z1elNLxc2Z
I’m glad you support gun confiscation and across-the-board illegalization tho! So do I, so we have something to agree about :). Have a nice evening!
"Too dangerous" obviously includes robberies and assaults, but you've neatly excluded those to narrow the focus of the conversation to murder. Where is this idea coming from, that violent crime doesn't count unless somebody is murdered (or specifically shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374483)?
This attitude exemplifies the problem; that all manner of crime should tolerated from homeless unless they shoot or murder somebody. Only then does it rise to your concern. And in the case of tlogan's comment that I just linked to, even somebody getting stabbed to death doesn't count because they weren't shot. This is how you get situations as described by seanmcdirmid here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374451 Crazy guy known to be violent is tolerated by local authorities because he hasn't yet killed anybody. No big deal until he murders somebody, only then do people care. This is why the electorate of these cities is the root of the problem, because the electorate don't give a shit about the crime until somebody gets killed.
Whenever I hear shit like this that doesn't mesh with my on-the-ground assessment, I have to wonder if there's an ulterior motive, and what that might be.
Is someone trying to get Federal funding for policing in the city? Is a group of someones trying to trigger some "I don't have to pay to break my lease because conditions around my business are 'obviously too terrible'" clause so that leaving the city is much, much cheaper? Is someone trying to prevent folks from airing yet more footage of folks sleeping on and doing drugs on the street? Something else?
Dunno.