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Comment by berberous | Hacker News Reader

On the last bit, that was all over the news for a while. CA and NV had a big fight over it:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposa...

Correct. This was literally nuts. Nevada bused in and dumped over 50 mentally ill patients onto the streets of San Francisco, and the consequence was that you couldn't walk in downtown San Francisco without encountering 1 of these patients acting crazy on the streets.

It's somewhat lame that the City settled for a measly compensation of 400K. They should've all been rounded up and send back to Nevada, to the hospitals that they belonged to.

How do you determine what hospitals (or city) they belonged to? Just that they were checked in there first? That they had legal residence in some city at some time?

You may inspect the "case-by-case nevada patient dumping" document[1] on the SF City Attorney's site to get your answers.

[1] sfcityattorney.org - Nevada Patient Dumping => https://www.sfcityattorney.org/category/news/nevada-patient-...

Sorry, but rounding up American citizens who didn’t commit any crime and shipping them somewhere else seems extremely un-American. This is the kind of thinking that has lead to some of the worst human rights abuses in the 20th century in countries like Germany with concentration camps, and in the US with internment camps.

The term "concentration camp" can be applied to the US camps as well.

Not if you abide by the definition.

"a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area"

Not that two wrongs make a right, but isn't that what happened to begin with? Or did they go to SF voluntarily?

In any case, the legal argument was that Nevada had a duty of care. It's not about "rounding them up", it's about the state of Nevada providing them with shelter and psychiatric care. Which presumably, they would do in Nevada.

> but isn't that what happened to begin with? Or did they go to SF voluntarily?

Correct. They didn't come to SF voluntarily. Since they had mental issues, most (if not all) didn't even know what was happening to them.

It's the most cruel thing to do.

That's what happened first. I mean how do you know - these people are crazy, they may have been able to function in their home town but are lost in SF. If they dont want to go don't force them, but it seems ironic and cruel to just assume they're happy in this new place they were thrust into.

Ohhh so that's why SF downtown is unbearable! As an international tourist there I hated my stay in San Francisco because of the amount of crazy people in the street.

I am ok with homeless and poor people, but having to dodge a crazy guy almost doubling my size throwing punches in the air is not a pleasant tourist experience. Or being robbed of my water bottle while I waited my wife just outside Sephora.

It was scary for me, and definitely left me with no desire to go back.

Nevada didn’t help, but the homeless they sent are a drop in the bucket. 50 extra homeless isn’t super noticeable since there are lready 8000+. The real problem is decades of lack of enforcement of trespassing laws, letting people go to the bathroom in the street, and openly use drugs in public places. This has all led to a downward spiral.

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