Ha, that's nothing. Two years ago, I walked up to a police officer in Seattle and pointed out an individual who was splayed face-first on the sidewalk a half-block away, in front of a food truck where a line of customers was patiently stepping over them.

The officer shrugged and walked off in the opposite direction. I think that was the moment that I decided it was time for a change of scenery.

>In my neighborhood in Seattle I've seen a tweaked-out individual literally just walking down the street spray-painting cars at around 6pm on a weekday.

Despite the damage to the cars, that sounds more like a mental health problem than a crime problem.

Which is one of the big problems we have with current policing models. We throw folks trained to use deadly force at issues that are better suited to mental health professionals trained in de-escalation.

I get it that many folks don't really care about their fellow humans except as threats/enemies/potential rivals for mates and resources.

And I also get that, as in your example, many folks don't care about the well-being of other people (as in your example, a 'tweaker'. How do you know that? Were they shooting meth as they spray-painted the cars?), especially if they engage in anti-social behaviors.

In fact, many folks would support it if we just killed/imprisoned anyone who makes them uncomfortable or unhappy.

The issues that we lump into a black box called "mental illness" are poorly understood and even more poorly addressed in our society.

Even worse, more often than not we dump the "mental illness" black box into a larger black box called "criminals".

As Hubert Humphrey put it[0]:

  The moral test of government is how that
  government treats those who are in the dawn of 
  life, the children; those who are in the twilight 
  of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows 
  of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

I posit that our current policies and practices fail that moral test. Those who are most distressed/needy/lost are usually abused, shunned and thrown away by our society, rather than nurtured, helped and hopefully brought into society as productive members.

Why is it generally the former rather than the latter? I'd say that it was a culture of selfishness, greed and a lack of empathy buried under several layers of soft-soaping like "personal responsibility", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", "poverty is a moral failing" and a bunch of other tropes.

Sentient life is precious. We should treat it that way, IMNSHO. But we don't. And more's the pity.

[0] https://www.columbian.com/news/2016/nov/11/letter-quote-from...

> Despite the damage to the cars, that sounds more like a mental health problem than a crime problem.

In the long term, I agree with you. In the short term, it would be nice if the people who we are forced to pay for the task of preventing antisocial behavior would stop the person who is causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage, since broadly speaking nobody else has the right to do so.

To put it another way, how much more damage does this person need to do before you consider it a crime problem?

>In the long term, I agree with you. In the short term, it would be nice if the people who we are forced to pay for the task of preventing antisocial behavior would stop the person who is causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage, since broadly speaking nobody else has the right to do so.

I don't disagree with you. At all. This is a complicated set of issues that will require complex solutions (note the plural).

It would be great if we could stop such folks from causing property damage.

Our society is governed by laws and, more importantly, respect for those laws by the vast majority of us.

Unless we kill or imprison everyone who might engage in such activities, I'd say that we'll likely always have some of that sort of activity.

Reducing the number of folks without strong ties to society/the community seems the best way to address these issues over both the medium and long term.

As for short term solutions, that's much more difficult, as we've spent centuries demonizing the mentally ill, the poor and others society has deemed as "lesser."

>To put it another way, how much more damage does this person need to do before you consider it a crime problem?

A valid question. Without a lot of reflection I'd say that it's less important to determine whether or not some act (or collection of acts) is "criminal" than it is to identify the appropriate mechanism(s) to minimize the likelihood of such behavior from that individual in the future.

And there are many mechanisms to choose from. That incarceration has been the default for a long time doesn't always (or even most of the time) make it the right mechanism.

A broad and complex set of issues underlie this discussion and I haven't done it justice here. That said, I urge people to look beyond the display and use of force as the only mechanism to address these issues.

Short-staffed? SPD has one of the largest police presences, per-capita, of any American metro area, (while Seattle has middling crime statistics).

They aren't short-staffed, as much as they are deliberately avoiding doing any work. They were also engaged in a lot of overtime grift over the past decade, which the city started to crack down on in 2019.

I don't think your understanding is correct, see this article: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/is-the-seattl...

This was also written in late 2020. There are now 1,080 deployable officers, down from 1,325 as seen here: https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department...

And that's what this "security" force would solve.

The problem with police today is that there is no single problem with them. They are near-useless for solving crime. They are useless for preventing it. They are bad at dealing with situations that don't require a thug with a gun. Sometimes, they can't follow the law, while trying to enforce it. Other times, they enforce something that is not the law. Sometimes, they ignore dangerous, illegal behaviour. Sometimes, they employ incredibly excessive force to deal with not-dangerous, maybe-illegal behaviour. When they screw up, regardless of how badly they screwed up, it's nearly impossible to hold them accountable for it.

Yes, you can cherry-pick one of those problems, and claim that uber-for-mob-justice will solve it. Will it make any of these other problems worse? Better? Worse for people who can't pay, better for people who can?

I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but I am not particularly impressed by this.

> Oh? They are going to figure out who stole my catalytic converter, and arrest the fence who bought it?

I think the idea is to try to catch it in the act. The LAPD is notorious for being slow. I was in a hit and run accident where my car was completely totaled and I was in a daze and it took them an hour to come and I'm pretty sure the only reason they actually came was because a bystander was mad and claimed there was injuries after waiting with me for a while. If they wont' come to an accident in a good time, I doubt they come to a break in. lol

For comparison's sake, New York City and Chicago have about 4x more officers per capita than Seattle

The NYC counts are bloated because they include a whole bunch of 'police' that have nothing to do with boots-on-the-street policing. Financial regulators and port inspectors, for instance, are included in those counts.