I have a question for you.
What do you think will happen first:
- California and its 58 counties will solve the twin dilemmas/failures of homelessness and broken mental health services, or
- We will discover that space aliens are real.
My money is on the aliens; they are already in our midst, especially in Mendoland.
Six weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments have the authority to enact laws and ordinances that prohibit people from sleeping or camping on sidewalks, shopping malls, residential neighborhoods, and state, city, and county public parks and lands.
I think the Supreme Court’s decision is a much-needed step in the right direction (even a blind pig finds a truffle every now and then), and should return a bit of sanity, reason, and responsibility to a process that has been out-of-control and not serving anyone well, including the homeless.
Gov. Gav Newsom is prodding local governments to kick it into high gear after the U.S. Supreme Court gave cities and counties the OK to clear homeless encampments and enforce bans on un-housed people living and sleeping in public spaces.
Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies to adopt policies to sweep encampments on state property, and urged local governments to do the same.
“We have now no excuse with the Supreme Court decision,” Newsom explained. “This executive order is about pushing that paradigm further and getting the sense of urgency that’s required of local government to do their job.”
Under the order, state agencies should give residents at least 48-hour notice before clearing a camp, and provide storage for their belongings for at least 60 days. Agencies also should request services from local organizations for displaced residents. But encampments that pose an “imminent threat” to life, health, safety or infrastructure can be removed immediately.
We’re now beginning to see local governments in other counties and cities take certain steps to exercise their legally restored authority to deal with homeless issues. However, the action taken by San Francisco Mayor London Breed rankled our Sheriff.
Here’s the story.
This week, Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall said via facebook, “On Thursday, Ms. Breed directed city officials to offer bus tickets to homeless people before providing them a shelter bed or other services. This is what we in the policing business refer to as a “Clue” of things to come. I had heard this was coming, having serious concerns we were just a couple counties North and an easy drop spot for Greyhound, I attempted to set a meeting with the mayor. After several emails back and forth, and a whole lot of wrangling I was advised she was too busy to meet with anyone, too busy for a simple phone call. Feeling quite frustrated I called it a day and moved on. Now’s the time we should brace ourselves for an influx of folks whom likely suffer from several problems including addictions and mental health disorders. Also, we will likely see folks who were allowed to engage in some fairly anti-social behaviors arriving in our communities which simply aren’t staffed or funded to handle these issues. The genie has been let out of the bottle under the guise of compassion in San Francisco (which honestly didn’t seem compassionate to me at all). As they begin their “bussing to happiness program”, I am afraid several less affluent counties are going to struggle while attempting to get that genie back into the bottle.”
While Sheriff Kendall is rightfully miffed at the refusal of SF Mayor Breed to even take a call from him over her outta-here-one-way homeless bus plan, he needn’t fret over her insulting behavior. She doesn’t even talk to her own sheriff.
Breed has been on a four-year kamikaze mission to de-fund law enforcement in San Francisco. She calls it “reform” which is nonsense unless you consider open-air drug dealing, soaring crime rates, and citizen insecurity to be reform. She’s a spineless, PC ideologue incapable of tackling complex issues, such as homelessness, and the larger struggle between providing life-saving care and services for homeless people (who oftentimes refuse help) while balancing that reality with the other reality of the need and sworn obligation for maintaining public safety.
If you haven’t had the opportunity, read my latest piece in a series on the homeless and mental health crises in this state and county (“The Real Deal On The Homeless Mess, In Case You Want To Know”).
People need to wake up and realize why all these programs and the billions upon billions of dollars spent on them, have resulted in complete failure. The answer has always been right in front of us, but most people seem content for some reason to just talk these issues to death.
Case in point, look at this county where for years the Board of Supervisors and their staff responsible for homeless and mental health services, hold public meeting meetings discussing those issues, which are always over-larded with charts, graphs, eye-blurring reams of data, and staff presentations and non-report-reports.
I defy anyone to explain to me or anyone else, just where this county’s performance stands with its numerous homeless programs and what successes have been achieved in the last 20 years that has seen millions of dollars paid out to private and/or public-private outfits providing various homeless services.
Over the years, what have we learned? We’ve learned the official county government view, i.e., the Board of Supervisors and their ever-so-hard-working staff, is that most everything is working splendidly with mostly successful outcomes. The few things that are not quite working yet are retarded due to lack of funding. Other than that, things are spot-on, thank you, now go away.
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)
This bus ticket ploy is nothing new. San Francisco was doing this in the early 1970’s. I know because I had personal contacts with several of them. Later I had contact with x patients from MSH who were given bus tickets from San Francisco to Ukiah. I guess the people down there thought “well they used to be up there”
Ron Parker
MCSO Retired
“Imminent Threat” to infrastructure, like when just today An Oakland Homeless camp fire shut down BART?
By some counts, at least half of SF’s homeless population come from out of state. They should be sent home, and the states they came from should be sued.
The discussion on this topic always seems to zero in on “compassion” which is simply a veiled way of attacking SF’s progressives – as if they caused the problem.
Some of us are old enough to know better. In the early 80s the term ‘homeless’ was rarely used. Most people called them bums, and a few Berkeley types called them street people. Then, right around 1985, all of a sudden Civic Center Plaza was a curb-to-curb encampment. The mayor at the time was a right-wing extremist named Diane Feinstein. The president was a demented fascist who could not tell the difference between movies he had been in and actual reality. Together with the UK’s Iron Lady, they were the heroes of Neoliberalism. Only a few short years later, the Democratic Party also fell to the Neoliberals, nominating and electing future war criminal Bill Clinton.
Violent crime in the Bay Area is ONE-THIRD of what it was in 1990. Property crime fell over the same period by half. But if you live in one of the myriad filter bubbles of the Internet, the denizens of SF are dodging bullets and flying knives while stepping over mounds of human poop. It’s the same with the homeless issue – perception is greater than reality.
Meanwhile, the role of the deeply corrupt SFPD is rarely mentioned. They refuse to take down known multi-million dollar global fencing rings. They don’t bust open-air drug markets – and all the dealers are from the same gang. Dealers who are not part of the gang – get busted! It’s not that hard to put two and two together.