They Left This Man Passed Out Next To A Business….
After the police was called. The caller saw the man still laying in the same position 3 hours later and called the police again. They told him they checked on him and decided to leave him there. This is the crap going on in my city.
OMG! That freaks me out, I saw something like this one time in Chicago. He was stiff. I was going to deliver a semi load. It turns out that the dude ODed on heroin and was dead. Something that I will never forget. I've seen lots of death in trucking.
@IndianaJoes They find dead transients sometimes that have passed out from drinking or drugs that have fallen in water and drowned. One was found in a lake on state property that backed up to a strip of land with dense trees & underbrush where some are known to sleep. Two others were found drowned in shallow water (one drowned in a water puddle behind a rehab center a couple blocks from a food & shelter place), another froze to death in a large wilderness park in the city after an encampment was removed and some came back. His body was found in the spring by a jogger on a trail after the weather warmed up. When they start finding them dead in front of businesses something might get done about it, maybe not though. Three people that I’ve heard about have been attacked by violent transients. The last one was a preacher on Sunday morning after church services had started. An employee in a restaurant was stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush. Another employee at a store was attacked in the business. At this point most residents are fed up with this.
@cherokeepatti you know that's what happened to Dolores. She was the lead singer from The cranberries. She got too drunk and soaking in the tub and drowned.
This is a nightly thing here. I counted eight last night and ten on Sunday on my nightly walks. This is laying on the ground sleeping in front of businesses.
They clear them out for a week or two on holidays and that's it.
BTW this is a conservative city as well as county. They don't want to spend the money. That's why they are there! You put them into jail that's exactly what the homeless want! Free room and board.
Max population 34,000. Homeless on the streets on the last official count 200.
You hear about it in the big democratic cities only because they are bigger cities. Never in the small conservative cities. The homeless just don't congregate in small cities.
The homeless are everywhere regardless of politics.
Could say the same thing in Texas when I was there in 2001. Then it was definitely conservative with homeless camping next to day labor businesses.
The president doesn't matter on this either. 2001-2009 it was Bush! I was in Texas until 2004 almost 2005.
We have several in my hometown that refuse help. The truly sad thing is they can take them to a,shelter, a mental facility, or to jail. There has to be some other way to help these folks without making them feel like they are closed in.
@Fungirlmmm There's rarely any funds to even help them these days, even if there was some hope with the lack of knowledge and Recources... They will continue to go back. This is how economy work these days with little options.
@FreestyleArt They have funds, and a lot of churches and individuals here donating to the charities. They even build a building next to the main homeless shelter-food kitchen that serves as a small FREE grocery store. People can get a cart and get what they need, there are limits on each type of item depending on how many family members but it’s all free for them. There are small walk up food pantries where anyone can bring food and donate, all a person has to do is go to them and get the food, TP etc. They also have a small laundromat that is free, a tiny home village if they qualify and are willing to get on the waiting list and abide by rules, look for work and let a social worker help council them with budgeting etc. Those tiny homes are fully furnished (including cleaning supplies, linens, etc.) for each person who moves in them, and they will be saving their money up to move in an apartment after one year. I tell you that they have a lot of money, but the more they do the more are being sent here. A good percentage of them, probably half are transients who have no interest in doing anything to make their situation better. They have an entitlement attitude and are rude to the locals. Ruining parks where families bring their children among other things.
@Fungirlmmm If they camp on private or government property and the city has to remove the encampment and trash etc. and are told to not come back they will sometimes do it especially wooded or isolated areas like around the river. There are lawmakers wanting to make a law that if they come back and build back the encampment and the police are called out again that they can be arrested if they don’t accept help that the city’s social workers will provide them to get out of their situation. It has become a sanitation issue and there are fears of diseases such as hepatitis and flesh-eating bacteria being spread by these encampments due to no bathroom facilities, rotting foods, manure accumulating from any dogs that they have on the site etc. Not to mention the huge expenses that are having to be paid for removal of trash and waste. It cost the city over $50,000 to remove one camp about a mile from here in the older part of the city a couple years ago. It was a wooded out and many tons of waste and trash was removed. The property owner was elderly and had gotten police to make them leave previously but they would always come back. He signed his property over to the city and they are planning to eventually make a park out of the large lot. All of the underbrush was removed and there is a very tall fence around the area now.
I know for many people, once they have failed a drug test, it is stored on a computer forever, always will be found by any employer who checks, thus... Finding a job will be impossible for the rest of their lives. Many employers figure that once a drug addict then always a drug addict and want no part of anybody who might possibly become intoxicated while at work causing an accident that will cause a lawsuit against the employer. We do live in a very sue happy world.
@IndianaJoes It is not impossible. There are businesses that will hire them if they can prove that they are capable of working a job. There are programs out there that work with recovering addicts to help them get into the workplace. I worked with a student from Africa who was a Christian, he became an engineer. Saved up money after he graduated and started a business contracting out workers for temporary jobs. He would sometimes hire people who had been in rehabs and ended up in halfway houses etc. Some of them were great workers. It helped build up their resume to get back into the workforce.
@Thevy29 I am thinking now it wouldn’t be different. They left a woman behind a CVS pharmacy that decided she would pitch a tent and camp there. The manager called the police and reported it and described the woman. They told her “Oh that’s Karen” and didn’t do anything about it. I think this might be the police chief setting this policy. I wonder what the sheriff would say. It’s in the city but sheriff departments have gotten involved when police refused to arrest a drunk driver that hit a vehicle in an apartment parking lot. The first time he did it the Oklahoma City police let the guy go (he was an illegal from Mexico) and didn’t issue a ticket or anything. The man’s truck he hit is also from Mexico. The same thing happened at the same apartment the next weekend. This time the apartment manager called the Sheriff’s department and they sent a deputy out and the man got arrested and taken to jail.
@NativePortlander1970 There are leftist city council members and some others. It seems like the police are overwhelmed by all of the transients wandering around. Pretty sure there’s not enough jail space for the ones that they are arresting for crimes, they let them right back out. It’s not like they have money to post bond either. The more that the homeless are taken care of, and it’s a lot of things that are being done, the more other cities are sending their homeless here. Even California is sending them here, buying them a one-way bus ticket to Oklahoma City. OKC is trying to clean up the area where a lot of them are hanging out and will send them here. That just adds to the problems.
