Recent protests in Los Angeles over attempts to end homeless encampments in public areas signal just how deranged many progressives have become over the pressing issue of addiction and homelessness in California and elsewhere. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
Homeless people and scores of activists protested as city crews arrived Friday for a cleanup at Echo Park Lake, publicly calling on Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell to meet with them and work out a deal allowing them to remain at the park. … If the city ejects the encampment, “it’s like breaking up a family,” said Davon Brown, who said he has lived in the Echo Park encampment for four months. “This is not a cleanup. This is a homeless eviction.”
Never mind how contradictory the notion of a “homeless eviction” actually is, what so many of these entitled activists fail to recognize is how these derelict encampments impact the working poor. It’s the working poor who have to navigate in perilous proximity to the many fatiguing criminal elements that fuel these encampments.
The working poor are the ones who are forced to deal directly with all the refuse and risk from the addiction epidemic. They have to contend with the many strung-out, dangerous individuals on their daily commutes on buses, subways, and sidewalks alongside all the trash, human waste, and hazardous needles that now infest their world.
Addicts literally took over a subway station in San Francisco according to a local CBS News affiliate. Shannon Gafford, a local commuter, documented the crisis, and the video rivals any depiction from fictional zombie apocalypse:
[O]ver the course of a week, Gafford documented his trip to work. His videos show dozens of people slumped along a hallway, open IV drug use, unconscious men and women, and piles of vomit on either side of the hallways.
Not only is drug use hopelessly prevalent in these encampments, so are drug dealing and all the nefarious consequences associated with it, including violence and prostitution. According to LAPD Captain Brian Morrison, most of these encampments are built around heroin and meth. He stated as much in a recent investigative piece for Spectrum News 1 that details just how drug use remains the driving force in these many encampments throughout California.
“That encampment, from our perspective, is predominately built around drug use,” said Captain Brian Morrison, the new head of Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Division.
Worse, law enforcement has been hamstrung by insipid policies such as Prop 47. Drug arrests are no longer tenable as there are no longer substantive consequences for such crimes. Crimes that were once met with arrests and potential jail time now receive, at best, citations and stern warnings. Captain Morrison confirms this in the same interview:
Police have made nearly a dozen arrests for selling drugs, and a half dozen for possession or drug-related warrants. However, Morrison said Proposition 47 basically decriminalized drug use, that weak sentences for possession are not enough to urge addicts into rehab.
It’s high time progressives in California put down their oat milk lattes and deal with the reality of the addiction epidemic. Their meaningless protests and myopic attempts at compassion completely disregard the working poor, never mind common sense. Their self-righteous indignation simply tramples upon those desperately trying to actually better themselves.