9th circuit judges: Gov't “shirked its most basic responsibilities” to ensure safe public spaces

Few deny that local leaders are failing our community when it comes to dealing with homelessness. However, as CA'n judges clarify in a recent dissent, a cogent—yet overlooked—consequence of progressive homelessness laws is increasingly unsafe streets. By fighting for unrestricted shelter rights on sidewalks and near schools, the Left endangers public welfare, as many unhoused individuals face substance abuse challenges. From the LA Times.

Some of the most powerful conservative judges in the United States took collective aim Wednesday at the idea that homeless people with nowhere else to go have a right to sleep in public, excoriating their liberal colleagues for ruling as much.

Their scathing comments came in a set of responses to a decision Wednesday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals not to rehear a case in which a smaller three-judge panel affirmed such rights in September.

In their responses, the court’s conservative wing painted a dystopian portrait of an American West deprived of its public spaces and under siege by an overwhelming epidemic of homelessness....

Judge Milan Smith Jr., one of the court’s older conservative judges who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote in one dissent that homelessness is “presently the defining public health and safety crisis in the western United States.”

He then zoomed in on California and Los Angeles in particular — where recent estimates have put the homeless population of L.A. County about 70,000.

“There are stretches of the city where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all,” Smith wrote. “One-time public spaces like parks — many of which provide scarce outdoor space in dense, working-class neighborhoods — are filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the broader community.”

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Read the whole thing here.

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