Stop helping: Some homeless need tough love

IN 1982, James Q. Wilson and his Harvard colleague George Kelling offered a simple idea that had a profound effect on policing:

“If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” And that is not simply a blight for the neighbors but a clear message that the neighborhood is dangerous, which in turn makes it more dangerous.

When police maintain order and civility, there is less crime. People aren’t afraid to walk to the corner, which makes the street safer. Hoodlums look around and see trouble, not opportunity.

Shortly after writing the article, Kelling organized a group of police chiefs along with a few academics whose work focused on crime — mine was on sexual assault — to discuss the implementation of their theory. Almost every big-city police chief participated. The attorney general came regularly. There was money on the table to try it, and a new generation of chiefs like Bill Bratton, who at the time was chief of the transit police in New York and then became a widely praised com- missioner in New York and chief in Los Angeles, were ready to try.

The idea of community policing was that police officers, instead of being seen as an external force implementing whatever policies they wanted, need to be part of the community, and deciding how to enforce order and civility is something that the community needs to be part of. Police responsiveness tends to be measured by response time: how long between the 911 call and the police arrival on the scene. But every expert agrees that, in most cases, it doesn’t matter, because the crime has already been committed and the criminal has already fled before the first call is made. Once the guy escapes, it doesn’t matter whether the police arrive five minutes later or 15.

Thenewtheorywastogetthe police out of their cars and into the community, to build bonds so that the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens feel safer, not “policed.” Fear of crime exacts costs that can be greater than the crimes themselves. And fear is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more afraid people are, the more they avoid going out at night or taking the subway or the bus, the more likely it is that hoodlums start breaking all the windows to remind people that they are right to be afraid because hoodlums are in control.

Which brings me to last week’s opinion by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that homeless people have a right to sleep on the street unless there is a shelter bed waiting forthem.

Now, we have a homelessness problem in America and a major one in my city, Los Angeles. But let’s not kid ourselves. When walking on the boardwalk in Venice, which is a neighborhood in LA that faces a growing homelessness problem, I did not see a single family of hardworking parents in a tent with nowhere for their children to sleep. They are sleeping in one room at the relatives’, trying to make enough for their own place. We should help them.

Whatisaw,andwhatneighborhood leaders have found, is a slew of young white druggies who are not from Venice but came here for the beach, complete with public showers and public toilets that they often don’t bother to use. It’s not that they can’t get jobs. At one restaurant down the street from the beach — just one — there were 11 job postings, everything from dishwashers to busboys to baristas to hostesses. There are plenty of young people on the beach who could fill them. They don’twantto.whywork?whygoto a shelter, like the “transitional” tent city that the mayor is proposing and neighbors from every walk of life are opposing, when you can live freely and steal bikes and do drugs right on the beach?

A constitutional right to sleep on the streets is not the answer to anything. And that is as true in 2018 as it waswhenthechiefsgottogetherin the 1980s.

To find out more about Susan Estrich, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.