My question is, who is advocating that these criminal or mentally ill or drug-addicted persons should be exempt from the laws of society? Is this part of some Cloward-Piven strategy?

Anyway, we met some real advocates, the ones who do something about it instead of talk and showboat. We would always go to the Downtown Drop-in Center, which was new then. The manager told us that 60% of the homeless are mentally ill and 60 % are addicts. Half of each group is both. The center was staffed by former clients who were getting themselves clean and lived in local SRO hotels. We could walk outside and see the drug dealers working the street but the video cameras kept them outside the center where clients could shower and launder clothes and sleep in a bed for 8 hours. There was a waiting list for the beds.

We also visited the Midnight Mission, another no nonsense place which locked the doors at 7 PM. The men could come and go all day but after 7 they could only go out, not come in until morning. Our guide was scheduled to speak one night for cocaine anonymous. The room was packed; all black men. He was a spellbinding speaker. We were the only whites around.

There are places that try with these folks but the homeless problem exploded with the closing of the state mental hospitals in the 1960s and, until the public attitude about mental illness changes again, nothing can be done. The jails fill with people who should be in mental illness facilities.

I took the students there to show them where a lot of their patients came from and how foolish it is to prescribe a medicine that requires refrigeration to someone who lives in a refrigerator box, or a medicine to be taken every six hours to someone who does not own a clock.

There are a lot of misconceptions. One shelter manager told us that the homeless clients he saw could eat six hot meals a day if they chose to. Nobody starves. They can also keep appointments. There is a medical clinic in a motor home that makes the rounds of the shelters on a schedule. Homeless shelter residents, who are those with less pathology and better thinking, can have a blood test drawn one week and get results the next week. Most of them show up for the results.

This is a problem that can be largely solved but it will take a change in public opinion. So far, that seems unlikely. We had one patient with badly ulcerated feet who lived on the sidewalk in front of a church in Pasadena. One of the parishioners, known to one of my students, had offered to put him in a hotel room at his expense to get him off the street. The patient declined saying he was waiting for an apartment. We saw him in the County Hospital a few weeks later, where I heard the story. He was probably going to lose his foot.

Maybe they’re used to urine stench or something …

If they are from Paris they certainly are used to it.

The newly homeless are also preyed upon.
You can watch this happen like a time lapse photo.
Female shows up fairly clean in what used to be nice clothes with a bag or cart of all she has left in life.
Then you see her with a black eye, dirty, missing her good shoes and clothes wearing whatever.
She’s been beaten and robbed of her good stuff and probably raped. She has to hook up with protection quick. That’ll cost her… she’ll be pimped out for whatever. If she was not addicted to drugs and alcohol before, she is now to deal with the awful world she’s tumbled into.
Same goes for the new guys or the older ones.
I met an older guy with no money, a mental disability that required medication who was out on the streets who was pretty upset. His sister had come into town and bought him new tennis shoes, new jeans and a new sweatshirt and had insisted he change into it all and throw the old stuff away… he stood out like a sore thumb and was upset because he knew he was going to get his ass kicked and jacked for his shoes and sweatshirt before the night was over.

For whatever reason a lot of the homeless advocates I meet do not want to catergorize some of the homeless as predators and see everyone down there as innocents trapped by circumstances beyond their control.
The police can’t fix the problem, but they can provide protection from predators and momentum.
Momentum is way underrated. “Move it along” towards a shelter or up out of here at least. Move away from and seperate from the addicts, the pimps, the violent psychotics, the dealers.

The most violent places I’ve ever been was alone in hobo jungles. The predators in those areas hit hard first and ask questions later. There is always a sucker punch coming, or they just open the party with a chunk of wood, a rock, or rebar.
One was “owned” by some idiot native Americans up in the Seattle underground area when I got off a freight I’d hopped. Law of the f******* jungle… way worse than jail. I had to fight my way out and was lucky they were too drunk to get organized.
Same thing when I had to exit early up in west Oakland. Walking through the streets next to the projects that are tucked in along the bend of the freeway and rail yard there; getting punched because I wouldn’t pay the “rent” for walking through their neighborhood. They tore off my shoes looking for hidden cash, emptied my pack all over the street and tried to beat the rest of the crap out of me for being ” a white boy with no money”. (I had some cash hidden in my old, filthy pack, but the dumbasses didn’t find it) A good man shamed them away, helped me gather what was left of my stuff and walked me through the streets like a guardian angel to the far side of the rail yard where I could hop another freight to the Roseville hump yard where I could get my own box car go east across Salt Lake and over Promotory point to Wyoming, heal up a bit out in the Wind River range

anyway… wandering memories aside…

Lawless environments breed crime and despair and need more police, not less.