Demi Monde, I would venture to say that if an effective community court system were in place, the very type of person who attacked you would have found help for his issues earlier. I am absolutely incredulous that a victim of such a horrible crime as rape in San Francisco would ever in a million years want Chris Daly to be mayor of the city.

Police in San Francisco I belive have pretty much given up because fully 96 PERCENT of the criminals they bring in are immediately sent back out onto the street by Kamala Harris’ office — and that includes all types of criminals.

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I also don’t get what appears to be a single-minded focus on providing housing and services to homeless people. From an article about a homeless survey that Chris Daly referenced on his site- “”It verifies what we have long thought to be true, that homeless folks tend to migrate to San Francisco,” Rhorer said. “In a sense, we’re swimming upstream here.”" If housing was built for the 6000 people currently homeless in the city, what processes are in place to stop the streets and parks from filling back up again in a few years?

I agree with the quote from Greg Berman in the article- crimes should have consequences. Consequences aren’t necessarily the same as punishments. Finding consequences that aren’t punishments appears to be the goal of Community Court, which sounds different from previous practices of citing someone for living on a sidewalk.

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A.D.P.

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I wish that people who are jumping on Gavin’s bandwagon and shouting “Yeah, let’s sock it to those stinking bums. Run ‘em out of town!” and the professionals who talk of getting them help at “the proper institutions” would think for one minute about why they find this so horrible that they’d willingly pull cops off the force to arrest people when they could be needed to help solve REAL crime problems.

Quality of life! What a phrase. My quality of life and your quality of life aren’t the same thing. Suggesting that people ought to have one homogenous vision for what constitutes quality of life is horrible.

I have no problems with community service - but only for people who’ve been REAL problems. In my book a real ‘quality of life’ issue is not a ‘crime’ until a person is harmed or threatened by another.

A lot of people are not aware that the toilets that people could be using are being closed because ‘people may use illegal drugs there’. Drug hysteria is in other words, contributing to the stinky, pissy streets.

I’m all for a voluntary life skills program, but we really don’t need that NYC judge and the pompous lecturing. That is embarrassing, confrontational and will just peeve off the poor and perhaps induce actual crime.

Prostitution and drugs should not be illegal. If they were legal, they’d not be happening on the streets. They’d be happening in community centres and safer brothels, away from your children’s tender eyes. But you never support that, no, that would be…wrong. Your drinkie-poo at the dinner club is just fine, but someone without $$$ drinking it from the bottle and not the glass disgusts you.

Guilt? Self-righteousness? Or, as I think is the majority’s reason for jumping on this one, it’s a herd instinct thing. Oh, let’s complain about the homeless! It makes us feel so good, since we’re all employed and live in homes and we can come here and bitch with other people who also have money, and spend all day and often night making more of it, spending it getting into massive credit card debts, and this makes you all better people exactly why?

The only thing I agree with is that pissing and crapping on the street is a bad thing, since it’s terrible hygiene. You want to “beautify” the city, get some more shower facilities open and quit the drug hysteria long enough to make sure that anyone living in or out of a paid-for or rented building, or just visiting, can have easy access to:

a) water, for drinking and cleaning
b) toilet facilities

You get asked for spare change? Are you afraid if you don’t give it you’ll get beat up? Why is it I’ve NEVER been attacked by a panhandler, not even verbally, since I moved here in the mid 1980s? Oh, that’s right, I keep forgetting, it’s my attitude. They ask for a quarter, and I shrug and say Sorry, I don’t have a quarter for you. If I’m feeling alright I smile. If not, I have a blank face. But I never cop superciliousness on them, so they have never given me trouble.

One night, however, I was raped by a man who said he’d just gotten out of prison and wanted a piece of [racial epithet][woman’s private parts] and after being raped in my apartment for an hour, thankfully the guy, who was a crackhead I think, got paranoid and took off. I bolted shut the door and called the police.

They took FORTY FIVE MINUTES to get to me and take a statement. It happened during a big convention week, see, and the police were busy keeping the convention halls and expensive hotels free of unsightly people without fundage to deal with a, you know, RAPE. The rapist had told me he’d f’in kill me if I called the cops, too. So I risked my life to make a statement and hopefully help put this bastard away and it took 3/4 of an hour for the SFPD to come get it.

That’s wrong.

I always tell myself, if I should ever see one of the street people giving someone a bad time, I’d go over and try to talk to the person and calm them down, but I’ve never gotten a chance to do this…since I’ve just never seen it happen…weird, that.

PS: Chris Daly, please run for Mayor, as although I will give Gavin props for not censoring my obviously against-his-fave-talking-point comments, I don’t like one-candidate elections, and don’t get why we only are getting one choice this year. That’s fishy.

One last note. If that How To Cope With Work course actually gets folks jobs, bravo. But I think it will go over a lot better if it’s not made mandatory, or given as a ‘punishment’, or else it will be associated with being punished, and there’ll be less urge to attend the workshops voluntarily. Drug users, alcoholics and even straight people down on their luck need money, after all, so it will be to their benefit to check it out. So don’t start right off the bat making it an ugly punishment thing.

Thanks for the rant-space. You may now pelt me with flamethrowers, but I’ll keep smiling.

-M.

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