Homeless Activists in Los Angeles have chosen "We Want Drug Encampments In Front of Schools, Daycares and Parks" as their hill to die on.
Activists shut down the LA City Council meeting on Tuesday 8/9/22 during the vote on ordinance 48.11 which regulates encampments within 500 feet of schools, daycares, parks and senior centers.
Los Angeles as most major West Coast cities have an addiction and mental illness crisis disguised as a housing crisis. The activists call it “poverty” and demand zero regulations on where homeless people (and I use that term lightly) can set up not just a tent for simple shelter but a full on permanent encampments, sometimes multi-story with doors and windows, surrounded by trash usually filled with severely addicted and/or mentally ill people overtaking huge parts of public space like sidewalks and parks making them unusable for their original intention. Many of these encampments are run like a prison yard with gangs controlling the drug trade in each one. Don’t pay your drug debt? They light your tent on fire or worse.
Under current CA law as long as someone can mutter “no” when asked if they need help there’s nothing anyone can do for them. We have watered down vagrancy and quality of life laws essentially out of existence and allow these people to smoke and shoot hard drugs like fentynyl and meth out in the open as we walk by & steal up to $950 per occurrence (not per day, per occurrence. 1 occurrence = 1 store) so technically one could steal 10’s of thousands of dollars per day from multiple stores and at a maximum receive an appearance ticket for each charge that they will never show up in court for and will eventually be thrown out by a judge. Under CA’s Prop 47 petty theft and drug possession are eternal misdemeanors and can NEVER graduate into a felony no matter how many times a person is charged. Adding to that in cities like Los Angeles LAPD does not arrest suspects for misdemeanors ensuring no one is going to jail or will be prosecuted for these types of theft or drug charges… So if you can’t get arrested for open air drug use and you cant get arrested for petty theft to fund your drug habit, where’s the motivation to get clean? There isn’t one and that’s why our neighborhoods look the way they do. Look, I’m sympathetic to addiction, I have had my issues in the past that took me to dark places but that was pre-prop 47 when a judge would give you a choice: mandated treatment like drug court or jail. Now you won’t even see the inside of a courtroom.
Back to the activists. They are well organized and militant in nature. Many are self-perceived victims of an unjust, capitalistic society and use that crutch to demand free everything. Others are privileged trust fund types that feel guilty for being born with a silver spoon and seek to atone for the sins of their successful parents. Both have a united extremist view.
You’ve seen their slogans like “Housing is a Human Right” and “Criminalizing Poverty”. In fact the majority of the people on the street have major issues like trauma, untreated mental illness and addiction/alcoholism making it nearly impossible for them to hold a job, live in a group or roommate setting and adapt to societal norms like most of us are able to. I know first hand because I’ve been there myself blaming everyone around me for the woes brought on by no one but me due to addiction. This is what victim status is and I’m not saying they don’t have the right to feel that way but there is a way out. The way out takes hard work and foremost the willingness to WANT to get out. Many people I have met on my journey got clean thanks to court ordered programs and yes, even prison. The people we see on the street walking around half naked smoking a meth pipe or fentynyl off tinfoil don’t have that chance anymore. We’ve decided as a progressive society demanding accountability is barbaric and compassion equals handing out clean needles and glass pipes calling it “harm reduction” is a better option. This ensures the activists can feel good about themselves for helping (code for enabling) while people on the street are left to decompose and die a slow addicted manic death as we drive by sipping a $7 Starbucks pretending we didn’t just see what we just saw. There is no such thing as harm reduction, only prolonged misery until the person accepts help or dies.
If we want LA cleaned up the next Mayor will need to stop letting these activists control policy and stand up to their nonsense. They are a small but very loud and well organized group, so much so they are getting elected to powerful city positions like City Councilmembers and City Controller. My advice is buckle up because it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Glad to see you're writing on Substack in addition to your social media presence. This is such a huge issue, especially for people on the West coast where these radical "homeless activists" have basically taken over. It's insane. Thank you for speaking the truth and bringing attention to this very important issue that could be easily solved with rational public policy.
Your blog and ig are both great -- keep up the good work on getting the truth out there.