Surprisingly yes, they were caught with much credit and appreciation to the detectives of SPD. In fact the police were very helpful in accessing support and counseling, and I should be completely honest that I would have described myself as loosely "anti police" until I had this experience.

The issue was simply that these men were psychotic after using meth in an uninterrupted fashion, and emboldened by the fact that the police were not allowed to interrupt their daily drug use or property crimes. I'm very confident that if possession/use of meth had been treated criminally these men would not have been in our neighborhood and able to target me. During pretrial I was made aware that they had been contacted multiple times in the days before my assault but police were not allowed to arrest them despite the fact that they were using/in possession of methamphetamine.

I appreciate this problem and empathize with what you've been through. I live in the bay with a toddler. I presume by "treated criminally" you mean jail time. But by all accounts and data, jail time makes drug habits significantly worse [1]. The extreme version of this is just dragnet police enforcement turning every simple drug use into ever-worsening drug use (aka the weed-to-fentanyl pipeline).

In your specific case, it means a low-level drug offender going to jail and coming out hardened using more aggressive drugs, evermore ready to unleash violence at worse levels.

I'm happy to think through what a low-recidivism version of "treated criminally" could be, but it is not any of the options we currently have.

The paper I linked has some interesting suggestions as to how to change the current incarceration systems to support actual drug treatment.

P.S: I think police should have better tools, and better pay (it's a hard job!) but also higher accountability, Police vs. Anti-Police is a made-up twitter dichotomy.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234751/

I think we probably agree to a large extent. There are a lot of comments here, so I want to quote one of my responses to another person in an effort to inject some consistency, but tl;dr the reason I think decriminalization is the issue is that AFAIK our criminal justice system is the only way we can confiscate drugs or force a person into treatment such as inpatient detox and/or rehab:

""" To me it's not so much about punishing drug use (jail time), it's about stopping drug addiction (intervention and recovery). For example I think intervening in such a way that a user is confirmed to get at least a few hours of sleep before potentially using meth again would be a big start.

I'll admit that I support confiscating drugs when found, but I'm not advocating that arrest is always appropriate. I am in favor of punishing selling meth, which I acknowledge is perhaps hypocritical given my other beliefs knowing that plenty of people sell to support their habits.

I do think it's important to have a mechanism of mandatory intervention, and my non-lawyer understanding is that criminalizing drugs is really the only way to put mandatory intervention on the table. I met mothers who could not force their children into rehab, for example. I should be clear that I don't feel this way about all drugs, but I think that methamphetamine specifically poses a risk to the safety of both users and people around them that merits mandatory intervention.

If we had functional mechanisms to to enact mandatory interventions for users that were non-criminal I'm definitely open to that. Depending on the targeted success rate it seems like inpatient detox + rehab would be required in many cases, and I am simply not aware of non-judicial ways we can force a person into those circumstances against their will (which in the case of meth I admit I support even if that opinion is controversial).

I am not an expert, but nonetheless I'm now entangled with the topic as one that defines significant aspects of my life (loss of smell and hearing, PTSD, facial disfiguration). I think we can do better than we have been, both recently and since Nixon, but I think that having tough conversations is part of how we'll get better. My experience is that people in my situation frequently have our perspectives invalidated as "politically incorrect" or otherwise irrelevant [...], and I wanted to speak up to make sure people know that we exist and we don't want our numbers to grow. """

This rhetoric has only increased the suffering in the world and filled cities with an underclass of vagrants too drugged out to tell you the day of the week. People shouldn't go to jail for weed, fine, fair enough. But all you see in cities that have decriminalized harder drugs are frozen in time drug zombies. It's a terrible policy every time it's implemented in the States, but people are more concerned with the feel-good vibes of the policy.

> because the whole point behind decriminalization is that criminalizing homelessness and drug addiction does not have a net positive outcome for them or society.

This is one theory, and it's a theory that's hotly contested. Asserting it as a fact doesn't actually make it one, and we're currently watching several large scale experiments testing if decriminalization helps society. Early results are not promising.

Look, obviously there have been and continue to be all sorts of problems with the US justice system for various reasons.

But that doesn't mean it's not needed, because it is. Violent drug addicts are locked up in other countries too, and if you spend time hanging around in public high on meth then at the very least police are going to tell you off.

People who are in prison are not out committing more crimes.

We do need to reduce the prison population, but by the time someone has reached the point of heavy drug use and street violence the odds of rehabilitation are very low. No other country has a good record of rehabilitating those people. So, the only reasonable way to reduce the problem is further upstream with better opportunities and support systems for youths.

Incredible victim blaming here

Where? Can you please quote the victim blaming?

All I see is a claim that harsher drug laws would not have helped this victim.

Also rudeness, but being rude is not victim blaming.

Edit: Pretty please someone explain? Am I missing some obvious implication?

From here it looks like people hate the grandparent comment so much that even incorrect criticism will get treated as true. Which is really bad for a discussion website. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I'm failing to find another way to read things.

Likewise, the problem isn't the drunk driver, it's that the drunk driver killed your family.

Do you think an addict considers the closure rates on assault cases before harming a stranger?

> Do you think an addict considers the closure rates on assault cases before harming a stranger?

Actually, yes. These people are not instinct-driven animals completely incapable of thought.

Similarly, if you know that drunk driving is very likely to get you caught then you will do that less than if you know there's 0% of getting caught.

You can tell a lot about how someone thinks by listening for denial of agency. The CEO had to do it; that drug addict had no choice; he had to defend his honor; she couldn’t lie.

Sometimes people have only one choice, but they almost always have agency.

Your experience of addiction must be significantly different than mine.

I was referring to the language people use to convert other humans into objects or automatons.

But if you deny the addict any agency, you deny the possibility of eventual recovery. One could also point to the Sacklers as the ones with agency in that scenario. But somebody made choices; it didn’t just happen and there’s nothing that anyone could have done.

Well no, the problem is transit-poor environments that force every old trip to be a car trip [1]. What you're asking for is recompense, what I'm asking for is a system wide permanent fix.

EDIT: Rephrased retribution->recompense, that is to say recompense is good, but is not optimized for avoidance in the future (i.e. a system-wide fix)

[1]: https://urbanist.co/public-transportation-reduces-drunk-driv...

Getting assaulted sounds like the main problem. Police are a reactive force, they're useless to prevent or break up an assault unless it's a very ineffective (slow) attack

> Police are a reactive force, they're useless to prevent or break up an assault unless it's a very ineffective (slow) attack

This seems like you’re implying that stricter enforcement and tougher punishments are useless?

I tend to agree, we saw bright and clear as day with the “war on drugs” that being more vicious to addicts didn’t work and the problem only grew.

Im certainly no expert though, and what often seems to be missing from these conversations is actual experts who research and actively work amongst these addicted and homeless people.

It’s wild how often we have conversations about incredibly complicated and wildly nuanced subjects with very little back and forth from those with far more expertise than ourselves. Then we scratch our heads and tilt our heads in confusion.

>I tend to agree, we saw bright and clear as day with the “war on drugs” that being more vicious to addicts didn’t work and the problem only grew.

Drug use has grown much faster under the current regime of tolerance of drug use. There were lots of problems with the war on drugs, but the idea that it didn't reduce drug use isn't based on evidence.

As an analogy, skin cancer had been rising despite sunscreen.

Do you have any actual evidence of this? I would love to see it. I wouldn't be particularly shocked either way to find that drug use has increased faster in places that decriminalized or not, but it's an important starting point for discussions. Assuming everyone is being honest in their data-gathering as well as consistent in methods.

Sure. For one, prohibition keeps the equilibrium price higher, which reduces equilibrium consumption. This RAND report from 2000 estimated a free market cocaine price would be 3% of the price under prohibition.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP909.html

2nd, if you prefer a more direct account, this doctor describes the effects of BC's safe supply program. Basically they bought opiods and gave them out for free to addicts. These were often resold, crashing the market price, increasing consumption of these as a gateway drug. This is to illustate the expected effects of a lower price: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-we-must-end-...

This widely cited study on prohibition of alcohol in the USA found a long run 30% cut while prohibition was in force, with a sharper initial cut: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675...

Overall legal production is generally cheaper, and a cheaper price produces higher equilibrium use. You could of course tax legal drugs, but you'd need a war on illegal supply to enforce that.

Addiction may have been the root cause of GP's assault, but there are any number of reasons you may be attacked in broad daylight. Despite the risk of prosecution to the perpetrator, many thousands are assaulted every year. Not even the threat of the noose kept the Old West safe.

In the face of imminent threat, only personal preparedness is of value.