The article states that the guidance is not to break up camps- then gives examples that aren't camps, they're people congregating against storefronts and other high traffic areas. These people would be moving soon anyway, to suggest the police are somehow increasing the risk of Corona spread by asking them to move before other people get there is spurious and opportunistic.
San Diego is a very red city/county. It has always had an extremely strong military presence. It also has a very high retiree population. And add the fact that it sits right on the border with Mexico and you might start to see why it is the way it is.
I lived there for a short while after living in SF my entire life and had to cut my stay short because of the overall atmosphere of the county. To me it feels like the reddest place in CA.
Redding would certainly give them a run. I've lived in the Bay Area and San Diego, and my experience is that San Diego is the cleanest, most well organized city in California and I absolutely love it. As far as the "atmosphere", I found the people of San Diego to generally be much nicer and open to individuals with different opinions than anywhere around SF. The level of elitism in the SF Bay area is despicable.
Here we see that part of SD's cleanliness is from police fining or enforcing on the unclean, whereas SF just throws money at the homeless. SD's cleanliness is very similar to Irvine's concept of cleanliness.
10 Democrat reps for every 1 Republican, a 20% loss in the last presidential election, a sanctuary city and a Republican mayor.
That’s not a very red city or county in any sense of the phrase, it’s at best purple regardless of whether you’re comparing it to California, Californian cities, or cities in general.
Simply experiencing shades of red after an entire life spent in the bluest city in America can color one’s thinking, mind. I thought Houston of all places at the time was a very blue city when I first moved away from home.
Police mostly just follow orders. Most terrible things we like to pin on police should probably instead be pinned on police, local political leadership, and ultimately local polities.
If police are assholes in your area there's probably a good chance it's because the local political elites want them to be assholes.
I'm not convinced this is true. Surely the power afforded to police attracts a disproportionate amount of recruits that want to use that power the wrong way.
Not that any individual policeman is sadistic by default, but the likelihood is higher than a random sample of people.
Agreed. All I have to do is think back to which people from my high school went on to become police officers. Somehow it's never the types of people that were looking out for others.
"Just following orders" isn't a valid excuse. Following orders means you are still compliant in making those orders happen, I don't think it's more complicated than that.
I think the OP is just saying that people often forget about what separation of powers is and what it implies. If cops didn't have to follow orders this would mean giving them more powers than just executive. Would that really be a good thing ? Probably in some cases for sure, probably not in others ...
And in this case, the law. If the locals don’t like this, they should carve exceptions into their law.
Not pass “a City Council resolution encouraging the mayor to consider relaxing crackdowns” and a CDC encouragement “not to clear homeless camps unless they can move those living there into housing” [1].
This should be required reading for every person. I remember I thought I kind of understood the issue but the reading of this book opened my eyes to how important and fundamental the issue really is.
It is true. When a policeman breaks the law himself he might get covered by his higher ups and merely lose his rank or the job but still not face any criminal consequences.
I agree with that. Cops that get into their career because they believe in Justice will follow the letters of the law. Only as they gain experience to they see the big picture and become the best kind of cop. Someone that uses good judgement
In all honesty, I'm not really sure how the whole, "well everyone is corrupt" thing all you guys commenting here seem to be doing helps. I mean, yeah, everyone is corrupt, but you are still responsible for your actions. I mean, if the DA or mayor or whatever in a town is bent, does that mean a cop who coerces sexual favors from a prostitute he's caught in that jurisdiction is not a dirtbag?
Of course not.
It only means that your DA is a dirtbag, and your cop is a dirtbag. (It's also likely that the dirtbaggery extends to others in city leadership. The judges, the mayor, some council people. Etc. Just like the dirtbaggery in the police force likely extends to other cops in that department.)
They are not devoid of personal responsibility for following bad orders either.
Someone else on this thread already referenced "Superior Orders" which I was thinking about as well.
We as a society already determined in the 50's that doing bad things because a superior officer told me to does not negate responsibility for the actions taken.
No one tells police to beat up homeless people. Police will do it because they know they won't be held responsible. They're assholes because of the inherent power dynamic.
If there's a systemic problem, I believe it should be reiterated until an acceptable resolution is found. It is systemic, so we should recognize that an individual's reinforcement of the problem is a small part. There is a greater sum that equals a militancy towards disenfranchised groups. A discussion is to be had at both a micro and macro levels. Please don't leave it at the micro. Some people are unaware and information is key to arguing this plight.
I don’t think it’s appropriate for society to expect police to also behave as mental health care professionals. We don’t want to spend the money on mental healthcare facilities and don’t want to create a legal framework for involuntary committing of people, but we do want to blame police for not being able to handle society’s mentally ill.
Their bosses (the voters) raise hell at the politicians to push the homeless out of sight. If police don’t do that, the local politicians will have to replace the police, or else the voters will replace the politician.
I can see what you are saying, you are probably right about the cause and effect. But I think you've unfairly shifted the blame to voters. Voters don't know how to handle a societal problem as big and as endemic as a growing homeless population, that's why we put our trust in politicians, councils and governors. Voters are just signalling a desire for a clean and safe neighborhood, and suppose even that they don't care how it's done, it's still the city and police force's responsibility to figure out a way to do it humanely and in a way that helps solve the issue, not sweep it into another neighborhood.
I want to point out that I am not anti-police, I'm just lamenting what seems to be a lack of empathy and perhaps even a lack of bravery for someone in the chain to change the approach. It's by no means an easy problem to solve, I don't envy those in charge.
> Voters are just signalling a desire for a clean and safe neighborhood, and suppose even that they don't care how it's done, it's still the city and police force's responsibility to figure out a way to do it humanely and in a way that helps solve the issue, not sweep it into another neighborhood.
I’m not willing to give voters the benefit of the doubt. We have a pretty well educated population that consistently goes to the polls and votes for the person that promises the lowest taxes. We can all say we want to support our fellow citizens all we want, but I have yet to see any action on that front.
> I’m not willing to give voters the benefit of the doubt. We have a pretty well educated population that consistently goes to the polls and votes for the person that promises the lowest taxes.
No, we don't. Not even after adding in the benefit of the fact that the people who run on that platform also benefit from structural advantages in all of the elected parts of the federal government.
> Ignorance of matters for which one is responsible is a curable condition, not an excuse.
We can't be experts on every issue a council is currently responsible for. That's why we have a council in the first place, so they can be, or hire, the experts.
> Putting trust in the particular politicians voters have chosen to put their trust in is exactly why blaming voters is not an unfair shift of blame.
Yet every year we have just a handful of candidates, we pick the ones who advocate for our particular interests, and hope for the best on all the issues, because there is no way of knowing how the specifics are going to play out. We hope for good journalism to let us know of the particularly heinous issues, and then we do our best to vote correctly again next year.
> Yet every year we have just a handful of candidates
You must have very large hands, unless you are only talking about major party nominees (i.e., winners of the first round of voting from the two biggest parties.) There's a reasonable basis, arguably at least, for limiting consideration to major party candidates, but the nomination process is part of the selection process and the candidates that enter that process, not just the ones that win it, are part of the choice set. If one ignores the process until after most of the critical decisions are made, the remaining choices are quite limited, but that is itself a choice.
Homelessness doesn't equate with mental health. It closer equates to poverty or bad situations. Lots of folks are mentally ill and have housing - even severe mental illness. Lots of folks aren't really mentally ill, but lack housing. Of course, this is a bad circle since the trauma of being homeless can cause mental illness.
And yes, it is completely appropriate for society to expect police to behave as part of the mental health care system. Police are often someone's first contact for some mental illness: Simply being able to talk to someone without shooting them and getting them to emergency mental health services should completely be within their grasp. We can provide training for this.
It isn't like we are expecting comprehensive treatment from them. It is more like expecting a cop to be able to perform emergency first aid for people until an ambulance arrives.
In my experience, the strategy in the entirety of the US is to use the police to herd the homeless/mentally ill/drug abusers into the poorest areas, out of sight and mind of most middle and upper class people.
However, recently as their numbers grow, and they start becoming more and more visible, it's not as sustainable of a policy as before. I know that homelessness doesn't equal mentally ill or drug addict, but my point is that using the police as a long term tool to keep the homeless out of sight is not tenable. The police should be capable of first aid and handling initial interactions, but I don't think they should be tasked with this repetitive herding behavior. It has to be psychologically taxing for them to have to deal with people who they know they will just have to push along the next day or week.
It's 3am where I am and I'm quite surprised to see this on the front page. I've already deleted one comment because I'm not in good shape to judge if it was informative or pointlessly fighty.
But I will note that I mostly wasn't hassled by the police while homeless for nearly six years. In fact, they tended to look out for my welfare to whatever degree they could without creating a conflict of interest for themselves.
One night, the police came up to our tent (I was homeless with my two adult sons) and shined a flashlight on it and ordered us to come out with our hands up. When I opened the tent and came out, they went "Oh, it's you." and promptly dropped into social worker mode, asking if I knew about various local services, etc.
They were looking for a guy named Michael who was camped in the area. He had beat up his girlfriend and she had filed a police report.
So they were pretty keyed up, expecting to deal with a violent criminal. They were quite relieved to see it was me and my sons instead.
I knew the area well and I walked them over to where Michael stayed when he camped there and also talked about paths into and out of the little valley where I was camped and what I generally knew about Michael and his habits.
I don't drink. I don't do drugs. I do remote work online which I began doing while homeless. I am not a criminal. Etc.
I'm just desperately poor because I have too many personal challenges and too few resources. And the cops mostly didn't bother me, though I certainly had a few negative experiences with them as well.
Cops are human. They aren't a monolith. Different cops behave differently from each other and the same cop can behave differently in different circumstances and with different people.
I'm happy that your experiences with police while homeless were mostly uneventful. However using this anecdotal story as evidence that the police are adequately equipped to play the "social worker" role is exceptionally dangerous.
Nearly all the data in the US points to the fact that police are the exact opposite of your story -- abjectly incapable of handling this role.
> Cops are human. They aren't a monolith.
Yes and no. Cops are indeed humans, but the institution of policing demonstrates that they behave and act homogeneously. E.g. "the thin blue line" or the "Blue wall of silence".
It never ceases to surprise and amaze me how badly my point can and will consistently be mangled by some internet stranger. I'm not at all making the point you think I am.
The article under question isn't about the police being asked to play social worker. It's about them being asked to just leave the homeless the hell alone for the time being.
My real point is that there's a pandemic on and everyone is both under a great deal of stress and simultaneously being asked to do new things. I would bet money that some of this is just habit taking over.
I'm not defending it. I'm not justifying it. I'm just explaining how humans work.
Cops are just cogs in the machine. They play the role we assign them.
We need systemic changes. Maybe the pandemic will help foster some of that.
But vilifying cops in a sweepingly dismissive manner isn't going to help us find a path forward. It's easy to vent your spleen at the nearest target during stressful events. It almost never improves anything and typically makes things worse.
Yes, we need to do better. Trash talking the police is probably not how we get there from here.
Doreen, I usually read your comments with great interest because they are always insightful.
I think in this case you're mistaken though, your personal experience notwithstanding. Are you from the US? The police in many countries is inherently incapable of treating the defenseless well. This sometimes has to do with the local political leadership, but often times it's simply intrinsic to the force. I live in Argentina and the political leadership is desperately trying to get the cops to enforce the lockdown in a gentle manner, yet there are cases everywhere of them simply abusing people in poverty-stricken areas. The police over here prey on the weak because it makes them feel powerful (and yes, usually because there are little consequences -- and that's political). But the point here is that the police and the politicians are at odds in this case.
I think the causes for police misbehavior are multiple and indeed systemic: giving guns and power to people unqualified for it and who get a kick out of having power over people; police forces with undemocratic traditions (as in Chile and Argentina, where the force was shaped by our dictatorships; this doesn't apply to the US) don't understand how to behave in a democracy; over here the police often comes from the same low-wage background as the people they harass, and harassment becomes a form of differentiation ("I'm not like them, they dress funny, and are dumb and violent"); discrimination based on perceived skin tone of course, and this is probably a lot like in the US.
Not sure if in the US it's exactly the same, but from what I read, in many cases it's pretty similar.
I wrote you a longer reply and then deleted it. I've simply been up too many hours at this point and I feel like we're probably talking at cross purposes.
I need to either finally get to sleep or just shut up. No good will come of me continuing to post in this state.
Your lowest quality posts are far far higher quality than the average on HN, even when people read uncharitably and reply aggressively and your frustration rises. Thank you for all you share.
I seriously doubt it was intended to say anything about you.
As for our exchange:
I'm not saying that the police are all paragons of virtue or should never be criticized. I'm just saying that stress tends to push people towards absolutist thinking in a way that actively worsens problems.
In most cases, focusing on "this behavior or outcome is undesirable and needs to stop" will be more productive than framing it as "these people are simply bad people." That second tends to entrench problems and should primarily be used to justify removal of specific people after efforts to remedy the matter by other means have failed.
You are more likely to find effective solutions if you approach it with some understanding for why the police fail to behave at all times like paragons of virtue. Simply branding people as bad people tends to yield no path forward for finding better approaches to the problem.
When upset, people tend to exaggerate and to make more damning claims than they might otherwise and we should be cautious about where that leads, especially during a global crisis. Now more than ever, we need cooler heads to prevail.
Generally speaking, being fair and evenhanded is most needed when it's the hard choice to make. This is part of why police forces behave badly -- because they are asked daily to take the high road while dealing with awful stuff and they get jaded and burned out.
In their case, they are often dealing with the threat of imminent physical harm to themselves and the physiological responses that elicits, a la an adrenaline rush that causes a fight or flight reaction. That's especially hard to overcome.
Public discussion in a forum doesn't involve those same elements. If it gets too harried, we can step away from the keyboard.
Surely, this is a place where we can work at having cooler heads prevail.
Some of the first few comments on this piece were sweepingly dismissive of the police as simply straight up bad people who don't care. You showed up later, so you may have missed that context. By the time you showed up, there was meaty discussion and a variety of views.
But there mostly wasn't when I left my remark urging people to not forget that cops are human.
I think you could have added your observations about police behavior where you live without asserting that I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong, but I also don't think my point really says what you seem to see it as saying.
The discussion here is about police behavior in a specific time and place. It's not wrong to feel that it's appropriate to talk about police behavior across the globe as part of that discussion, but it's also not accurate to act like I was suggesting "Police in Argentina are all paragons of virtue." That's a bit of a stretch and leaves me not knowing how to reply because it seems like such a far fetched interpretation of my remarks.
I was actually homeless in downtown San Diego for six months and in San Diego county for more than two years. I have first-hand experience with engaging with police while homeless in San Diego. My above anecdote comes from a police encounter that occurred while I was homeless and camped in San Diego county. So I think it's directly pertinent to the discussion here.
I've never been to Argentina. I wouldn't presume to say much, if anything, about policing there.
Let me be clear I wasn't in any way implying you were saying things about the police in general or about Argentina in particular. I understand you're very careful in saying only things you've experienced yourself, which is why I -- and many others here, it would seem -- appreciate your comments. I understand you're talking about the police force(s) in the communities you know.
That said, surely you can see the asymmetry here: you don't know much about Argentina, because I presume aside our cyclic economic meltdowns we seldom make the news. But we in Argentina and the rest of the world know a lot about the US. Maybe it's not all accurate and we lack the "local" vision, maybe a lot is exaggerated or fake news or excessively influenced by pop culture, but our news, politics and culture are permeated by everything they say and do in the US. In a very real sense we know more about you than you do about us. I have read books about the police in the US (one such book: "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"), but I bet few Americans here have read any of the many exposés about corruption in Argentina's police force or their collaboration with our past dictatorship. Knowledge is not symmetrical :)
our news, politics and culture are permeated by everything they say and do in the US. In a very real sense we know more about you than you do about us.
Absolutely true. The problem is that lends itself to non Americans acting at times as if they know more about America than Americans do and that their opinions about our country outweigh ours.
I've experienced kind of a mini version of this in terms of being an outsider who was exposed to a lot of info about some place via various media. I grew up in Georgia and most American films and the like come of out California and New York.
I have long felt it was problematic for those two places to have such an outsized impact on the perception of "life in America" because what they portray is often not accurate for places outside of New York and California.
Both places are far more urban than is typical for the US. I found it actively harmful to be exposed to a lot of ideas about what was "normal for the US" when it was really more like "normal for a very urban and wealthy subset of the US that lives in certain limited areas."
I'm guilty of having opinions these days about what California is doing wrong, but those opinions are informed by having lived there for a good chunk of my life. Like upwards of ten years total. (Maybe twelve-ish?)
Living in California after seeing it depicted in films so regularly helped me makes sense of some things. I got to recontectualize those movies as being "about California" rather than as being "about America" and I got to see some of the landscapes and experience some of weather and culture and what not depicted therein.
Having spent my early years seeing a place depicted and then having moved there, I will suggest that it does tend to give one an inaccurate impression of a place. What gets shown in books and movies remains a very narrow slice that leaves out a lot of pertinent details, never mind how compelling and rich the portrait may feel while viewing it.
It's completely reasonable for non Americans to be interested in what goes on here because America is very influential on the world stage. I don't discourage non Americans from expressing said interest.
I do take some umbrage with being told at times that non Americans know more about my country than I do because they have visited it and read about it. I realize you aren't actually saying that, but I have had roughly that said to me on HN and your comment veers uncomfortably close to repeating the sentiment.
And I don't really want this to turn into a fight. I'm still not sleeping enough and I'm currently running a fever. Feel free to chalk it up to "pet peeve" if you feel I've really gone off on some wild hair here.
Have a great day. I hope to step away from this conversation at this point in time.
Wait- Argentina was a dictatorship for many years and the police were thugs enforcing the will of the ruling elite. To extrapolate from their behavior that all police everywhere are just waiting to put the boot in at every opportunity seems myopic at best.
I mentioned that, but note at this point it's not just that. Democracy here returned in '83. While there is a structural problem of the police force still employing people from the dictatorship era, it's mostly fresh blood now.
Police officers behaving brutally are a thing of new democratic governments here. Democratic neoliberal pro-business governments like our recent former president took a hardliner stance for police enforcement, encouraging a "heavy hand", but even supposedly "liberal" governments have a difficult time with police brutality. These are young officers harassing the poor, the homeless, student organizations, etc.
Other countries like the US also have a history of the police harassing the poor, activists, blacks, etc. I see it in the news and reading about the history of the US. It's not specific to Argentina.
The difference comes in the meaning behind words like 'harassing'- when the police here harass the homeless it's shining a light on them and telling them to get moving, not usually a kick or a poke in the ribs.
Of course there are other issues in the US, mostly centered around race, where we don't look that good...
Oh, I agree it's not exactly the same situation. Though I believe the power difference between someone in uniform wielding a stick and a gun and a homeless/poor person is more universal and tends to lead to abuse. (In some cases, not even a poor person, just an unarmed one, can lead to police excessive use of force. We have seen this many times, even in the US).
> using this anecdotal story as evidence that the police are adequately equipped to play the "social worker" role is exceptionally dangerous
From her experience, she is an 'expert' in this subject (with the caveats: in the US, with this particular police force and individuals). It is solid evidence in my book (with caveats, as above).
You are dismissing that because... why? It's almost as if you don't want to believe that people can be good; that everyone must be unrelentingly uncaring.
> Nearly all the data in the US points to the fact that police are the exact opposite of your story
You've not provided evidence of this.
> but the institution of policing demonstrates that they behave and act homogeneously
If they did act homogeneously then they would uniformly treat people well, as per the poster's experience. But you're claiming the opposite. You're contradicting yourself.
I may be reading too much into what you say, though, I suspect you meant something milder than what came across.
Actually, I disagree. It might surprise you but the extremely violent behavior of American policemen is primarily influenced by external factors (such as the number of criminals equipped with guns). No matter what you do, you can't solve the problem by improving the police force.
> But mostly, when people say "cops suck" they're talking about the institution
Dehumanizing groups of people isn't constructive. Telling someone they suck, chanting "fry them like bacon" at protests, etc then pretending that it isn't personal is disingenuous at best.
It's not a fair comparison to say "don't stereotype" as though race/religion/ gender is an equivalent category as an organized team of professionals who join up together for a common purpose in not just in one way but two (the force itself, and then again the union)
"Cops" isn't an organization, or an institution, they are people.
Insulting people, pretending it is a criticism of an institution, then replying with a pithy "dont take it personally" is dehumanization. That would be like saying "professors suck" then insisting that no, you aren't insulting professors, you are criticising the academia. It's intellectually dishonest. It is pretending that professors aren't people, they are nothing more than a representation of a synthetic power structure.
I do agree with the sentiment that "Cops are human".
However, I note (from your patreon) that you are both white and female. I don't normally like to pull the "demographic card", but in this case I think that will have made a huge difference to your experience. The police's stereotyping of people of colour is well documented. And I don't think most women realise how much suspicion men are treated with by default by a lot of folks.
One experience in particular really drove this home for me: I'd dressed up in "women's clothes" (a skirt, tights, a sequin top, lipstick, etc) for a party, and I had to walk my friend to the train station through a busy shopping centre. Some people gave me weird looks, but most people actually seemed a lot more friendly than normal. Smiling at me kindly, etc. It was eye-opening to me that having a feminine appearance could make people treat you so differently.
The need to have some mechanism to deal with humans behaving badly is universal and lots of people talk like the police and the military are inherently the bad guys.
It's not an argument that gets any sympathy from me.
I would like to have actual solutions available. I run multiple websites to provide useful information for homeless Americans. The local police department gives out flyers listing my websites and I get along well with the local chief of police when I run into him.
I find the local police to be much better allies for my purposes than local homeless services. They aren't subject to The Shirky Principle, so they genuinely would like to see homeless individuals get their act together so they can focus on more serious crimes.
They are much more comfortable with my agenda to empower homeless people to pursue an income and solutions from the street. They aren't at all interested in treating homeless people like a puppy that followed them home.
If someone says the police are especially bad towards the homeless, saying that they're bad to everyone just belittles and says that the concerns of the homeless aren't important.
Maybe, but it is a bit relevant in a pandemic. Even if you do not care about homeless people they will still infect others and use ICU resources. Compassionate treatment of homeless also happens to be what is best for everyone here, even the people who are not homeless.
Police is a broad term and I don’t think you can apply that attribute to a group. Police being powerless to do anything about the problem (they are law enforcement, not public health services) is probably the more reasonable question to ask. This of course goes back to local leaders, status quo thinking and self interest getting in the way of any meaningful action.
Remember the homeless are being cited for things the community itself voted on.
Do you? Do you think protecting the 'right' of the homeless (who are probably suffering from mental illness and/or addiction) to live in squalor, without basic sanitation?
Is leaving homeless encampments where they all group together a good solution? Here in Los Angeles they had a bubonic plague outbreak in their encampments and they still allowed them to live on the street.
I've heard from many San Diegans that the police are brutal to the outdoor dwellers. It's been that way for years, and will continue, probably. Many get beat up, aka assaulted. These stories is one of the reasons I chose not to move there even back when I was getting software salary and stock options. I don't think it creates a good feeling all around, something I couldn't quite put my finger on at the time. Great weather though, if you like sun and nothing else.
Is "NIMPYism" a product of investment, in that homeowners are incentived to protect their property value? I would argue that burgeoning or prospective homeowners are passive proponents of derisive action, in respect to your argument, but I hesitate to boil it down to local, popular opinion.
My understanding is that there is a predisposition in play that is influenced by a variety of factors, one including an absolute number of the law from superior influence, but another (leaning towards your point on a grander scale) is a cultural osmosis.
Would you immediately assume that a random, home-owning voter is contributing to this detriment, that there is an overplay of asymmetrical beauracracy, or that there is some factor of elements including the aforementioned interests? I would appreciate your argument (or any others'), in good faith, if I've not represented the full spectrum.
I don't think so. The featured article only mentions 1) federal encouragement to relax these citations and 2) a city council resolution encouraging the mayor to evaluate the situation. Neither of these are law.
That's a great thing to say but how do you do the enforcement like that? Do you expect the police to just know who's homeless? Take their word for it? Do you have them hand out citations and take it up in court?
I'm going to guess that if you see someone pitching a tent on the sidewalk or sleeping in the doorway of a business, there is a fairly good chance they are homeless. Sleeping in a car doesn't necessarily mean anything, but if it is full of otherwise household items, the chances of the person being homeless goes up.
You can also, you know, ask. Sure, a few folks might lie, but it is better to let them get away with the lie than to punish a bunch of folks with no choice.
