Well, thanks Austin city council.

what's to stop this guy from stealing the meat from a grocery store nearby? If the cops can't really address it with the city's direction, and the courts won't punish, it's barely worth the risk and trouble to even try to stop it. And if that keeps going, what's to stop your kids from getting hobo diseases? Disease is the natural outcome to poor sanitation, as we've seen in Seattle and LA.

Two things need to change. The county needs to do their job and install a huge mental care facility. Probably at Del Valle or ideally not in downtown Austin. When inmates are screened at jail, and they are crazy, go ahead and adjudicate them for mental healthcare. Addiction is a mental illness too. Rehab/mental health. Thousands of beds.

The city needs to end 100% of their programs relating to homelessness. Sell the ARCH, close the offices, and get rid of it all. Take the funds you saved and have a dedicated division of law enforcement solely for homeless issues. K2 overdoses, dealers (I realize these guys are generally not homeless, but neither are the beggars often times), aggressive panhandling, camping on public property, littering. Same division has people who constantly take abandoned garbage like shoppiing carts full of moldy clothes and ships them to the landfill. For a lot of these muni crimes, first time's a warning, second time's a ticket, and if they don't handle the ticket, it's an arrest. Drunk on a sidewalk? BBQ on an overpass? This department would specialize in handling it. Purell could sponsor the livery on their cars.

A few months of that, and the people who can be pushed to get better, will get clean, maybe with a stay in that mental health facility. The ones who won't will move on. Portland and Seattle are trying it Adler's way so we can just give them a bus ticket and save $100,000 on the deal. No real harm done, and lots of people protected here.

To reform the city and county, we need candidates to run on a Handcuffs not Hobos Platform. Next time Adler packs his meeting with professional hecklers to shut down the will of the people, we need those candidates to rally.

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