Dori: You’re kidding me — King County Jail as a homeless shelter?
Oct 12, 2018, 5:30 PM | Updated: Oct 15, 2018, 11:31 am
(KIRO 7)
I talk about it, you talk about it, we all talk about it — we’ve got homeless drug addicts all over the region. What do we need to do? We need to hire more cops, and we have to let those cops do their jobs. We have to start enforcing drug laws instead of legalizing small amounts of drugs. We have to start jailing some offenders.
And what are we doing? The exact opposite, of course. The county is converting part of the King County Jail into a homeless shelter. We’re taking part of a jail that is used to house criminals and turning it into a shelter for, predominately, criminals. We’re doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing. It has the infrastructure to act as a jail … but we’re not going to treat it as a jail.
Most of the drug vagrants on the street have made that their lifestyle of choice. They do not want help. We send out City of Seattle Navigation Teams offering services and shelter, and these people, for the most part, refuse. But instead of jailing the criminal drug vagrants, we’re providing them with non-jail housing in the King County Jail.
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King County Executive Dow Constantine said, “We do not want people being in danger out in the weather on the streets.” What about the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who are in danger because of the number of unstable drug-addicted vagrants on the streets?
I know the rebuttal to this would be, “We’re taking them off the streets, that’s what you’re asking for.” Yeah, but you’re putting them in a homeless shelter inside a jail. You know how many of those people are breaking drug laws and yet we are treating them with kid gloves. This is why our region is one of the magnet drug destinations in the United States, and that’s why we have killers, rapists, and violent assaulters coming from across the country to commit their crimes in the Puget Sound.
Dow also said that “taking a building that was once about incarceration and converting it into shelter” is “an expression of our values as a community.”
Hold on — I’m getting emotional here. So all we’re doing is taking a jail and making it a homeless shelter, and thus we are expressing our values as a community. Our values are, “give us your addicted, give us your killers, give us your rapists.” God bless Dow Constantine. This is beautiful. I’m sorry I was ranting and raving. I didn’t realize how emotional and beautiful this would feel.
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Oh, and there will be needles available, too. This is such a great use of tax money. What a region we are. The King County Jail homeless shelter will cost $2 million a year. We don’t want to spend that on cops, of course. We don’t want to spend that on actually enforcing laws.
For the tiny percentage of the homeless that are families who have fallen on hard times, we need to provide shelter. For all of the homeless, we need to provide treatment, and if they accept that treatment, we need to provide them housing during that transition. But the last thing we need to do is spend $2 million to convert the King County Jail into a homeless shelter.
As long as all of your policies are designed to attract all of the drug users from around the country to our region, there is no amount of housing that you can build that will outpace the amount of addicts we are bringing in from around the land.