Safe for who? I'm friends with a number of librarians in my city, and every single one of them has been verbally harassed by patrons and more than half of them

Safe for who? I'm friends with a number of librarians in my city, and every single one of them has been verbally harassed by patrons and more than half of them have been physically assaulted. It's not always by people with mental health issues but unfortunately it usually is. (Nannies are particularly nasty when it comes to verbal abuse, I'm told. Sometimes they get barred for a while, usually they don't.) Homelessness and mental illness are real, hard problems that have been rehashed to death here and elsewhere and I'm not even going to pretend to suggest that I have an answer. But I do know that the answer is not "Hope your MLS degree prepared you to deal with a guy literally taking s shit on the circulation desk while screaming at you for being a godless cunt dyke whore." Guess what? An MLS degree does not train you to deal with that. Librarians are not professional mental health care providers or social workers. Dumping your city's homeless population on them because you are unable and unwilling to deal with the problem and saying "get over it" is irresponsible both to the librarians and the communities that they serve.