> Unhoused people are (sometimes) mentally ill, not murderers.
It is true that the mentally ill are overwhelmingly not dangerous. But as the number of mentally ill people in one place goes up, so do your odds of encountering that minority of mentally ill who are aggressive. In most of the world, you might see one mentally ill person in a day and they are harmless. In parts of California, sometimes it feels like you see a dozen mentally ill homeless in a day, and one of them is berating passersby or worse.
San Diego County data from 2021 showed that member of the homeless population there were murdered at 19 times the rate of the non-homeless population, and were 27 times more likely to be subjected to attempted murder—as well as 12 times more likely to be assaulted and nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted.
Damn it sucks to not have a house. Maybe crime rates are high among those communities not because they’re all crazy people waiting to stab random passerby (“or worse”), but instead because the conditions are mind numbing and brutal and scary and psyche-destroying in a way few recognize. The solution is to of course… what, beat them? Jail them? For how long? Forever?
You seem to assume from your interlocutors here hostility and hate towards the homeless. Me, I simply wish there was better housing policies and better mental-health care available to the US population, such as is found in plenty of other developed countries. A mentally ill person who gets the anti-psychotic medications and psychiatric consultations he or she should, is much less likely to trouble other people in the street.
Hey fair enough, I guess "I'm too scared to walk in my city" and "I want their lives to be improved" are not mutually exclusive opinions. I don't agree with the former, but definitely was out of line by reading intent into your comment without justification.
Please accept my apologies and thanks for the level-headed response
It is true that the mentally ill are overwhelmingly not dangerous. But as the number of mentally ill people in one place goes up, so do your odds of encountering that minority of mentally ill who are aggressive. In most of the world, you might see one mentally ill person in a day and they are harmless. In parts of California, sometimes it feels like you see a dozen mentally ill homeless in a day, and one of them is berating passersby or worse.