There are only so many times you can step over a potentially dead person on a running trail. Only to have them get up and run away when you look closely even from a distance.

There's only so many times you can watch a huge person crawl out from the canals and start following people around the neighborhood before you consider moving your wife and kids away forever. Don't get me started on the actual assaults and threats that he's made.

Or how about the guy who was standing beside my car with a can of gas, just looking at it swaying back and forth when we were leaving the beach. Where do my kids go when I go confront him and try to retrieve our ride?

How many times can you shrug off a break in to the mail room where all the mail is just ransacked.

That's only a couple years.

You can have empathy in abstract. But when you're in the middle of it, the 99% sob stories don't matter, the lack of public safety does. And what's most infuriating is that it's not a 'place'. these problems drift like garbage on waves, collecting in random locations, esp 'safe' neighborhoods, until they are scattered away again, usually not by police because God forbid they risk actual protests from people who don't live in the affected area. (see echo Park protests).