It’s always the same. Something needs to be done about those people. If there’s any violence at all connected to homelessness in any way, it’s the fault of those people.
As I have pointed out in the past, this never works the other way around. Almost every serial killer you have ever heard about was housed, but no one says all housing should be torn down and all housed people forced to leave the state. No one thinks that housing breeds serial killers.
No, we accept the fact that housing serves other purposes besides that. For instance, it provides legal places to get sauced. That’s important.
I doubt it will matter to anyone who is now talking about the need to clean up The Jungle that the shooters were probably not homeless themselves. People will use the murders there to win support for further criminalization of homelessness anyway. All that matters is that the murders happened at a camp in The Jungle, and homeless people were around, so something needs to be done about those homeless people.
This happens over and over again. If a gang of well-housed teenagers — or a couple or three sports fans — attack a homeless person sleeping in a park, there will be calls to rein in homeless people sleeping in parks. It’s homelessness that caused the crime.
Homelessness doesn’t even have to be involved as long as it’s just contemplated as having been involved. When a passenger shot and killed a Metro driver in 1998, and the bus ran off the Aurora Bridge with the 29 remaining occupants, it was briefly reported that the shooter was homeless. Subsequently, he was determined not to have been homeless, but his crime continued to be blamed on homeless riders of buses.
The Seattle Police Officer’s Guild has weighed in, referring to The Jungle as a Third World cesspool and talking about sending everyone there packing. But how did all those homeless people get there? By having been sent packing by the SPD and WSDOT from everywhere else.
To really appreciate the insanity of this sort of reasoning, you have to apply the same reasoning elsewhere.
Let’s suppose, for example, that a person walked into a popular cafe in Seattle and started shooting espresso drinkers. There would then be a call to shut down all cafes, because they would be seen as murder magnets.
Come to think of it, this sort of twisted thinking does happen in other cases. Look at the proposed crackdown on hookah lounges. Donnie Chin was shot near one, so we were supposed to believe that hookah lounges caused Donnie Chin to be shot.
No, hookah lounges don’t murder. Murderers murder.
Had Donnie Chin been homeless, no one would have blamed hookah lounges. They would have said Donnie Chin caused himself to be shot, by being homeless.
The fundamental impulse that I see operating here comes, as always, from fear. You want to be able to point to something identifiable that was going on before the crime, something that you can say caused it, so that you can either run away from that identifiable thing or eradicate it.
Eradicate the espresso drinkers.
Eradicate hookahs.
Eradicate camping under I-5.
Questions to propel further thought missiles:
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, right? So how was the murder in The Jungle homeless- and/or drug-related? People were killed. By people. What does the rest have to do with it? Or is the rule “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” only about protecting gun owners, and not about a principle?
It has been said that one of the murder victims owned a Mercedes Benz until recently and that the other lived in a house in Renton and was just visiting The Jungle.
If I were to propose, on the basis of that, to sweep out that Third World cesspool Renton and to ban Mercedes Benzes, tell me how crazy that would be.
Don’t hold back.