(c) by Mark Dempsey
Sacramento County Supervisor Rosario Rodriguez's newsletter says her contribution to the County's budget
deliberations was a success. The budget originally included "cuts to the
Sheriff’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) and Problem-Oriented Policing
(POP) units, as well as reductions that would have limited the District
Attorney’s ability to prosecute misdemeanor crimes." She negotiated
restoring those programs, but mentions nothing about how successful they
were.
Meanwhile, surveys say the majority of homeless people are
too poor to afford housing. Yet Ms. Rodriguez wants to employ the same
organization that catches and prosecutes criminals to handle poverty as
well. So, is poverty a crime? If 60% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, it's pretty widespread.
If, in addition to poverty, mental illness and addiction are responsible for a significant amount of homelessness, aren't the medical professions better equipped to deal with that than sheriffs with guns and tasers? Isn't threatening people who are ill, well, Medieval?
There are alternatives. For example, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and reaped considerable savings. After all, it's seven times more expensive to incarcerate addicts than to treat them. The state of Oregon tried the same thing, but had the police implement the decriminalization. They bungled it so badly that Oregon reversed course, repealing the decriminalization after a short trial.
Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if our public servants solved problems rather than pandering to popular prejudice?
Like
Ms. Rodriguez, once upon a time, I'd believed Hollywood's version of
sheriffs and police. Don't cops, courts, and cages always nab the bad
guy and keep us safe? That's what all those "Law & Order" and "Perry
Mason" shows say!
In reality, the police solve 13.2% of crimes--that's for California in 2022, despite $25 billion in funding. Police are terrible at solving crimes.
However,
like me, most voters bought the Hollywood fantasy. Voters didn't object
when the population increased 42%--between 1982 and 2017--and spending on
police rose more than four times faster (187%). Hollywood's fantasies
impact US incarceration rates, too. The US puts people in cages at four
to five times the world's per capita incarceration average, seven times
more than Canada and France--countries that have lower crime rates.
How
do the French and Canadians manage lower crime with fewer prisoners?
For one thing, the US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies
annually, while France and Canada have Medicare for all. Could making
half a million people financially desperate every year lead them to try
desperate things, like crime? Do we really even have to ask?
Studies
of this problem say addressing the poverty that causes homelessness
would be kinder and more effective. Given that Canada's single-payer
healthcare is roughly 30% cheaper
than the profit-driven medicine the US now enjoys, it would not only be
kinder, it would be cheaper and prevent more crime than asking the
sheriffs to become mental health professionals and addiction counselors,
never mind addressing the problem of poverty.
Public policy
matters when it comes to homelessness, too. The federal government used
to build affordable housing. Richard Nixon put a stop to that. Then, as
he cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, Reagan also reduced HUD's
affordable housing budget by 75%. The US had nothing like the current homeless population since the Great Depression before those events
Nevertheless, Ms.
Rodriguez remains in the thrall of Hollywood's mythical thinking.
Relying on cops, courts, and cages to handle a problem that's largely a result of poverty is just gratuitous cruelty.
Update: Oregon's alternative
