You’re either mentally out of it or high on drugs if you’re sleeping on the streets in America’s cities, for the most part. Those are just the facts, notwithstanding what the Homeless Industrial Complex wants you to believe. The desperate tirades by drugged out and mentally ill “homeless” people scare normies, and the street milieu breeds crime and degrades the entire city — just ask Portland, Seattle, L.A., San Francisco, and San Diego.
The “homeless” in those West Coast cities are responsible for sending businesses and citizens fleeing — especially in Gavin Newsom’s California, where San Francisco has had many years’ head start on encouraging lawbreakers and homeless addicts.
As PJ Media’s Robert Spencer reported this week, even the Hilton Hotel group plans to “stop payments on a $725 million commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) loan that is secured by the Hilton Union Square and the Parc 55.” That’s right: they’ll stop paying their bills because the city is derelict about the derelicts. “That means that unless someone steps in to take them over,” he continues, “those two hotels will close up, and their shells will become new monuments to the cost of electing Leftists to run cities.”
The last thing Santa Barbara’s new police chief wants is for that luxe burg to turn into San Francisco. Santa Barbara is one of the most beautiful cities in the country and people don’t want to leave, especially freeloaders. The city’s police chief, Kelly Gordon, believes the homelessness there is turning into a problem and wants more tools to deal with the issues. The situation is getting demonstrably worse; for example, you don’t go into parking garages off the city’s main drag, State Street, without backup from people bigger than you.
Even as dangerous Seattle capitulates to the far Left and decides against enforcing drug laws driving its “homeless” dilemma, Santa Barbara is taking a different tack that may help remove a swath of people from the streets.
Gordon wants to begin taking people suffering “psychiatric distress” off the streets on so-called 5150 holds until they’re in their right mind again.
Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors 6/6/2023 receives report "Deaths Among People Experiencing Homelessness in Santa Barbara County" for 2019 & 2020.https://t.co/gu5msVPPSu
Homelessness defined as "unstable or no housing during the year prior to death." pic.twitter.com/jz6lw8UKeZ— Kevin Dayton (@DaytonPubPolicy) June 3, 2023
As you can see in the graph above, the city’s homeless death rate nearly doubled between 2016 and 2020. That’s likely due in large part to the fentanyl flooding the streets. In 2016, slightly less than half of the deaths of people on the streets were caused by drugs. By 2020, that number increased to 81%. The numbers are only getting worse.
People may be off their psych meds and end up on the streets or may suffer a mental break due to no sleep, either because of days-long benders or simply “sleeping” with one eye open due to predators. Either way, “Santa Barbara County is currently the only county in California in which law enforcement agencies lack the authority to make what are known as 5150 findings,” reports The Santa Barbara Independent, “meaning that someone is so mentally ill they pose an imminent threat either to themselves or to others.”
Chief Gordon is looking for more authority and more money to get those dangerous people off the streets. If she’s allowed to do that and follows through with her vow to use 5150 holds, she’ll be the vanguard in Governor Gavin Newsom’s otherwise dysfunctional approach to homelessness.
For Our VIP Readers: The Sickening Political Reasons the Left Doesn’t Want to Solve the ‘Homeless Crisis’
As Capitol Review’s Stephen Frank reports, California is all-in on the “housing first” model, in which billions of dollars are spent not helping the people they purport to want to help. “Mental illness is a serious problem,” he writes. “Government instead of recognizing it as the problem has made homelessness the problem. So, they build housing for the homeless, create shelters for them—but do not take care of the real issue.”
We’ll be cheering on the chief.
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