6 ms·

Rules. No sleeping. No drug use. No bathing in the restrooms. No shitting on anything. No violent or threatening behavior. Period. Then enforce those rules. On

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• lebanon_tn 9y ago
  The library my spouse worked at was terrified of being sued (happened to a neighboring city) and they aren't allowed to touch unattended belongings.
  • learc83 9y ago
    Why are they so afraid of being sued? There are plenty of other public spaces that don't have a problem removing people for similar behavior. Most people maintaining public spaces view unattended bags as a public safety threat.
    • ethbro 9y ago
      Exactly. Coordinate with police and enforce the rules. Public spaces are created and maintained by enforcing liberal rules of access, not no rules of access.
      • jmcgough 9y ago
        Police have been so defanged in the bay that homeless people do whatever they want with impunity.
    • emodendroket 9y ago
      It says right in the post why they were afraid of being sued.
      • learc83 9y ago
        And yet it doesn't make sense.
        • emodendroket 9y ago
          What doesn't make sense? Someone else got sued for doing something similar and even if they ultimately prevailed it probably cost them a lot of money.
• zghst 9y ago
  They already have these rules in SF however the violators outweigh the amount of enforcers.
  • irq11 9y ago
    They have these rules, but they are rarely actually enforced. Point someone to a homeless person shooting up in public or bathing in the bathroom, and see what happens. If anything, there's a shrug and a sigh and some rent-a-cop is sent to harass. Almost never is the infraction met with punishment of any consequence. Start actually arresting or forcibly evicting people who behave this way. They'll stop coming around. San Francisco is particularly feckless in this regard.
    • ZenoArrow 9y ago
      > "Start actually arresting or forcibly evicting people who behave this way." This is one of those easy solutions that sounds practical on paper, but in reality doesn't hold up. Let's say SFPD go ahead and do what you suggest. What does that achieve? If they arrest people for shooting up, are you sending them to jail? For how long? Is that going to help them get clean when smack is probably easily attainable in prison anyway? When they're released, now not only are they homeless they've got a criminal record, good luck in the job market with that hanging over you. If they go down the other route and forcibly evict them, where do they get evicted to? All it does is shift the problem to another part of the country, who are probably just as resistant to dealing with it as SF. You have to treat the root causes of involuntary homelessness as if it's a societal disease. The threat of arresting people isn't a strong enough deterrent to break people out of their addictions, which should be clear by now, otherwise the war on drugs would already have been 'won'.
      • irq11 9y ago
        Are we to overlook all criminal behavior because enforcement might make people less employable, or just selectively ignore some laws that you don't agree with? Perspective! If someone is shooting up in the library, their future employability is of (at best) tertiary concern to me. The pressing matter is making sure they don't continue the behavior. We can't just stop enforcing laws because it might make lawbreakers break more laws. The city of SF actually did adopt a policy of forcing addicts into treatment by giving them an ultimatum of jail time for accumulated minor offenses. It worked, but was stopped when some bleeding-heart sued the city. I'm a liberal, but I consider that a tragedy. You can't cure addiction by arresting people, but you sure as hell can stop enabling it on a societal scale. And also, when I say "evict", I mean "evict them from the library". I don't care where they go to shoot up; watch porn; shit in the sink; sleep or harass people, but they can't do it in the library.