Las Vegas police stoop to a new low
The Las Vegas police have been approaching homeless people with shopping carts and telling them that if they remove any possessions from them, they will be arrested for the theft of a cart. Then, after no one fesses up, they are confiscating the shopping carts and having them, along with their contents, compacted in a garbage truck right in front of the owners' eyes. We're talking about everything these people own -- including clothing, blankets (and Vegas had several inches of snow last night), identification, medication, and other possessions necessary for survival -- being completely destroyed based on an intimidation tactic. Absolutely disgusting, and about as unethical as law enforcement can get while potentially skirting the rules. You can read the Review-Journal article here. (It doesn't mention the compacting, but I've heard secondhand that this occurred to several witnesses.)
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Wow. That's terrible.
it was particularly awful that while speaking with all the people whose stuff was stolen by the fuzz, they were all shivering and gloveless. the day they did the "cart raid" it was midafternoon and close to 70, so they all had all of their warm stuff in their carts.
i spoke with several dudes who specifically pointed out that their carts had yellow spray paint on the wheels, meaning that they have been discarded by a shopping center, and making the possession of the carts not illegal. and let's be clear - the cops' justification for cracking down and taking the carts was to recover stolen property (not to clean up trash), and they then proceeded to compact and destroy this precious stolen property in front of the eyes of those whose lives depend on them and their contents. this amounts to nothing less than psychological torture.
what is the point of all this? Does goodman think if the homeless are intimidated enough they'll go away? Homeless are not the same as gypsies -- there isn't a finite supply (relative to the general population). If even places like Simsbury have a homeless population, I think Vegas is just getting itself a heap of bad publicity and hurting a lot of people for no reason.
Especially in a city whose raison d'etre, you could say, is creating homeless people.
Yeah, I understand the one way bus ticket out of town philosophy, but I'm baffled by the make the homeless less self reliant philosophy.
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