Opinion: Look at our streets; “harsher” homelessness/crime solutions are both warranted and kind
Let's face it: Local approaches to the crime, drug, and homelessness trifecta aren't working, says Coalition for a Better Oakland's Steve Heimoff. So-called solutions tend to be costly and contract with minimally monitored nonprofits, casting aside accountable, data-evidenced results. Heimoff calls for Bay Area cities to “stop playing around” and, instead, strengthen law enforcement responses to public safety threats.
Nothing seems to be working in Oakland or San Francisco, when it comes to crime, drugs and homelessness. Despite billions being poured into programs, there’s more of everything bad in both cities. Drug rehab programs aren’t working. San Francisco’s so-called “crackdown” on drugs and stolen goods at U.N. Plaza is a waste if time.
A $350,000 BART-Salvation Army program for homeless outreach “resulted in just one confirmed unsheltered person receiving its services.”
In Oakland, officials have no idea how much their expensive homeless schemes are working, if at all.
The city has done “a terrible job tracking the performance of the nonprofits” that get city funds for homelessness.
In some instances, half the people in Oakland homeless programs “became unhoused again after a few years.”
Crime is so bad that the the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association of the East Bay is urging its members “to pool their money and hire a security consultant for active shooter and self-defense trainings....”
Let’s face it, the two cities’ response to homelessness and crime is an abysmal failure. Nothing that either city does seems to work; in fact, everything gets worse. And yet, the same progressives who got us into this mess demand more and more money, in order to fund the same failed policies. Oakland’s progressive politicians (Bas, Thao, Fife and so on, egged on by Cat Brooks) “prioritize quantifying racial equity in the distribution of taxpayer funds over assessing whether those taxpayer funds get put to good use.”
In other words, who cares whether these programs are working? Just pour more money in to them as long as they’re for people of color! That’s the progressive way: take taxpayer money, waste it on racist programs that don’t work and never will, and when they turn out to be failures, argue that the reason they’re not working is because they’re not getting enough taxpayer money!
This article originally appeared in Coalition for a Better Oakland. Read the whole thing here.
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Image by Renee McGurk