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Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend on Nextdoor who routinely complains of neighbors freaking out about "suspicious" people in the neighborhood, how crime is on the rise, and oh my god what are we going to do!? All that angst despite that neighborhood has one of the lowest crime rates in Denver, and there is zero evidence from publicly available police records that the crime rate is going up.

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People in Seattle are starting to sound like conspiracy theorists in their efforts to explain why crime reporting data doesn't show that Ballard is now a hellish warzone where they fear for their lives just opening the front door.

Holy crap, no kidding. Between NextDoor and /r/SeattleWA, compared to my own experience, I'm beginning to think that I live in one of The Orville's split universes. According to those forums, there are lawless hordes of vagrant gangs roaming the streets, dumping bags of used syringes onto little old ladies in walkers while stealing their bikes and running over children with RVs.

Meanwhile, I (a person with no car so I walk and bus everywhere since my neighborhood isn't cool enough to get light rail...ever) barely see any of what they describe. Yes, there are a handful of tents around freeway onramps. Yes, the trash looks a little unsightly. Yes, I wish it wasn't there. But I've not once been attacked and I rarely see a syringe or even a hint of what looks like poop (statistically, it's probably dog poop given the scourge of terrible owners of dogs in this city).

So I'm not discounting that something happens sometimes, but damn, not on the level that the screaming hysterics seem to think it does.

I like how we live in a first world country, but yet casually dismiss the fact that there are homeless people living outside in tents, and that feces and syringes are only an occasional thing so it's really not so bad. Coming from a clean, safe neighborhood in New England, where even trash on the side of the road would be offensive, I feel like we are definitely living in two different parallel universes.

I think that's a very disingenuous reading of what I wrote. I was comparing my personal experience to the hysterics I read on forums like NextDoor and local Reddit. I did not say that the problem was not a problem, but that some responses to and perceptions of it are overblown. (Oftentimes, these positions are used to justify espousing a preference for simply throwing homeless people in jail for "vagrancy" or involuntarily removing people from the state. So, yes, in a way, I do find the response to be worse than the actual problem.)

Not really disingenuous at all - I read your comment the exact same way.

I don't mean this in a confrontational way, I'm just being curious: have you been on Nextdoor?

From my experience so far, the typical attitude of an average Nextdoor "neighbor" towards the homeless is not: "This is a problem, we have to do something for these poor people." Rather, it's: "This is a problem, I don't want it near me."

I don't know about Ballard, but people on Nextdoor in the Eastside neighborhoods have a penchant for NIMBYism and, as a side effect, truly do tend to exaggerate things.

I'm not saying we should just ignore homelessness, but exaggerated complaints on Nextdoor are definitely not the way to address the underlying problems.

It's way worse on the west coast than most places and I think it's probably somewhat of a "boiling a frog" scenario. Rather than a single big influx upsetting everyone, the homeless situation has been slowly getting worse every single year to the point where we now have tent towns that stretch literally for a mile [1]. The problem is there are no clear solutions that anyone can agree on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Z3Rd0rD_I

Rhode Island (where I used to live before Seattle) is a blue state with functioning prosecutors that actually prosecute charges for misdemeanors and crimes, but they offer sentenced individuals the alternative of entering the drug court system for mandatory interned rehab, or the mental health system. People going through the system say it saved their life.

Intervention works. West coast states do have similar drug courts, but since crimes are not prosecuted and misdemeanor charges are routinely vacated there is no incentive for people to actually be helped.

For helpful information on Rhode Island's program I recommend the last 20 min of this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

I don't think criminal law/enforcement explains enough of it. The west coast has a somewhat unique combination of fair weather, public services, people willing to give money to the homeless, and cultural acceptance of vagrancy that you don't see many other places. The result is that we kind of vacuum up a bunch of homeless people from other states, which then don't have to deal with the problem themselves.

Do you mean "lack of public services"? Try New York, for instance - you don't see people camping in tents because they spent billions of dollars building shelters, to meet the constitutional requirement for shelter. Massachusetts has the same right in their constitution.

It's not about "is the homeless situation here terrible". It's that there are organized groups in Seattle that claim the city is too dangerous to live in because of homeless drug gangs, and that's nonsense.

In New England, you freeze to death if you are not under cover in the winter, so you don't really have sizable permanent populations like in places with a less godforsaken climate.

I see on average 2-3 syringes on the sidewalk and in the dirt beside the sidewalk during my weekly walks through the neighborhood around the new elementary school. I've had human diarrhea inside my compost bin, and solid feces in a giant pile in the middle of our shared townhome driveway. Used condoms beside my outdoor furniture in the week following the wind storm that took down our fence. Multiple Christmas presents of mine and my neighbors were stolen by package thieves. My wife reports multiple cases of being suddenly followed by loitering males and was screamed at once by a crazy racist lady.

This is in Licton Springs, for what it's worth. From what I've seen other neighborhoods are much cleaner.

It's both funny and sad to read my local Nextdoor comments, for exactly those reasons. The comments around me fall into a few major categories:

(1) Announcements from the local police and local government about stuff they want to let people know about. This is actually useful and informative sometimes.

(2) People who are expending titanic amounts of time and effort to save almost nonexistent sums of money, hoping they can buy stuff off their neighbors. People looking for stepladders or planters or shovels that they hope random neighbors have lying around unused in their garages so they can save like $5. These are clearly not people trying to be less wasteful, these are clearly people with a lot of money devoting hours on end to trying to save $5 instead of just going to Home Depot or whatever.

(3) People who are looking for random people in the neighborhood to do their housekeeping for them or babysit their kids or cook for them for some reason. The common theme is, whatever service they're looking for, it's always something where it's completely insane to ask a bunch of random strangers who just happen to be registered in the same Nextdoor neighborhood as them, and again appears to be people with tremendous amounts of money trying to marginally cheap out by snagging some random stranger to do whatever they need doing. I can't imagine anyone seeing one of these and thinking, "heck yeah, I have no idea who these people are but I would absolutely stop whatever I'm doing at noon every day to go over to this person's house and cook a meal for their shut-in in-laws in exchange for $10 a week because these people want to save money by cheaping out on caring for their older relatives."

(4) People who are very frightened by everything they see out the window of their wealthy, manicured neighborhood. This is the racist stuff. Most of it's either, "I saw some <ethnicity> youths walking down the street and it made me worried", or "A stranger of <ethnicity> rang my doorbell and I didn't answer and they went away and nothing's happened since but it made me worried."

(5) Occasionally informative, useful stuff about yard sales, garage sales, funny stories, lost pets, accidents, crime, mysterious loud noises, etc. Like (1), it's not often relevant to me, but it's good to have that source of information.

The local police department is on our NextDoor neighborhood, and posts on it about seemingly every single crime that happens in the city. So I see a lot of these type of posts hit my email (I rarely click them), but it's because it's the police that are doing it.

The police are on NextDoor here, too, but their posts are chiefly "Critical Incident Report," which means they shot someone again. The response is consistently and overwhelmingly "good job, thank you for staying safe." I never would have predicted this as a consequence of social media.

Have you considered that many people actually appreciate having police enforce laws and recognize that they by and large do their job well? I don't think it is that out of place.

Shooting someone is never a good outcome.

Never? I disagree.

Recently in Seattle there was an incident where a gunman was sitting in a car, ostensibly pinned down. On Twitter, posts informed residents that the suspect was in a standoff with the police, and made clear where that area was. Residents assumed that other surrounding neighborhoods that were not cordoned off were safe and continued about their business. The police who were present waited through this initial standoff, trying to avoid shooting the suspect, due to potential political fallout and the undeserved scrutiny/criticism they have received in the past when doing their jobs. This gunman ended up suddenly flooring the car to try and get away, and ended up crashing into another car elsewhere, killing the other driver. Shooting the suspect when he was pinned down and not cooperating would have absolutely been the correct outcome and would have saved an innocent life.

Article on the above incident: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-dead-2-injured-appare...

There are times when it’s the least bad outcome. It’s never a good outcome.

For context I live near to where the Daniel Shaver incident took place. Many of these look troubling for several reasons. I am very much convinced that the people expressing support for the violence do so in part because it aligns with their sense of a just society, but I am not so sure that alignment is as obvious as it maybe have appeared in the past. The allusions to racism (the real kind, i.e. “what race was he; ahh, then he had it coming”) only add to my doubt.

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