Many homeless people are violent and/or insane and should be locked up

...and they were, until a court decision in 1972 (Lessard v. Schmidt) set many of them free, based on a concern for the bums' civil liberties, which the liberal do-gooders considered to be more important than public safety. 

New York City Homeless Man Goes on Stabbing Spree - Two Reported Dead.  On Monday, in New York City, a homeless man went on an insane stabbing spree that left two men dead and one woman critically injured.  A homeless man, Ramon Rivera, is in custody as the "person of interest."  Rivera has at least 8 previous arrests[,] and yet he was on the streets. [...] This is not a man who should be walking around loose[,] and yet, here he was.  Not only has New York's justice system failed to keep this unstable and violent man away from the citizenry, but it would seem several other, as yet unnamed, jurisdictions have likewise failed.  [Tweet]

Without safe cities, America's prospects are dim.  [Subway hero Daniel] Penny is charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide by one of your favorite president's favorite prosecutors, New York City DA Alvin Bragg. [...] Given the facts of the case and jurors' experiences, the likelihood of Penny's conviction seems remote.  The Penny trial echoes 1987's Bernhard Goetz trial. [...] Regardless of whether Penny's jurors represent a random cross-section of New Yorkers, or reflect his counsel's effort to stack the deck in his favor, when three-quarters of the jury has witnessed or experienced violence this confirms New York has a substantial, chronic epidemic of linked crime, mental illness, and street drugs, adding to reasons residents are fleeing the city.  Blame can be laid at the feet of the medical/pharmaceutical industry which decades ago proclaimed mental institutions obsolete thanks to drugs supposedly able to alleviate mental illness symptoms.  The failure of legislatures and courts to forcibly confine the mentally ill, for their safety and ours, is the problem.  Many afflicted individuals self-medicate with street drugs, including Jordan Neely, the deceased in the Penny case.  Neely abused K2 (aka "spice"), which causes acute psychotic episodes, dependence, intense hallucinations, severe agitation, paranoid delusions, and violence.

Resident Shoots Alleged Home Intruder Twice With Shotgun.  An alleged intruder was shot twice with a shotgun by an El Cerrito, California, resident Tuesday mid-morning and survived to receive treatment for his injuries.  Contra Costa News identified the alleged intruder as 56-year-old William Nidever.  He was "airlifted to a trauma center for treatment of his injuries."  NBC Bay Area described Nidever as "a transient" and pointed out that the resident believed Nidever had a gun.

The Editor says...
If the "intruder" broke into somebody's house with the apparent intent to commit an additional felony, it doesn't matter if he was armed or not.  Put me on that jury!

Black Homeless Man Convicted in Brutal Murder of White UCLA Student Brianna Kupfer Inside Furniture Store.  A jury convicted 34-year-old Shawn Laval Smith for the brutal murder of Brianna Kupfer.  The UCLA student was killed at a furniture store in Hancock Park two years ago.  This horrifying crime should spark outrage over the growing dangers in Democrat-led cities like Los Angeles.  Smith was convicted for the Jan. 13, 2022, attack on Kupfer.  Jurors confirmed a special circumstance of murder while lying in wait.  They also found that he used a knife during the crime.  [Tweet]

Widow speaks after husband murdered outside California home during fight between homeless men.  This is a tragic, yet all too common, pattern emerging in Newsom's state.  Nicolas Gandara, a father of six children, was killed execution-style outside of his home after trying to stop a fight between two homeless men.  [Tweet with video clip]  Why [...] are we allowing these homeless encampments to exist in California?

Addiction and the End of Personal Responsibility.  There is no more critical tenet of conservatism than the assumption of individual responsibility.  As Dennis Prager wrote in a summative essay thirty years ago for The Heritage Foundation, "just as I am rewarded for my good behavior, I am accountable for my bad behavior.  This belief was a result of ... individualism ... and of the Judeo-Christian ethic that also animated the founders of this country.  Essential to Judaism and Christianity is the notion that you are accountable for your behavior-to God, ultimately.  This has been under attack."  Nowhere is this perspective under attack more than in the use of addiction and mental illness — namely, to
  [#1]   excuse and undermine assumed responsibility,
  [#2]   eliminate punishment for illegal and anti-social behaviors and actions, and
  [#3]   require "therapeutic" compensatory behaviors on the part of alleged and real miscreants in the United States and elsewhere.

Five men randomly slashed by resident at Harlem men's homeless shelter.  Five men were hospitalized after being slashed at a Harlem men's homeless shelter.  Officers responded to multiple 911 calls from the VIP Harlem men's shelter at 170 East 123rd Street around 5:30 p.m.  Friday, police said.  The suspect allegedly came through the facility's metal detector with a large razor and started swiping at people nearby, witnesses told The [New York] Post.

Homeless Man Who Pushed A Woman In Front Of A NYC Train [is] Found Fit To Stand Trial.  Michelle Go was fatally shoved onto the subway tracks by a homeless man at Times Square on Jan. 15, 2022[.]  Martial Simon, who was previously held in a maximum-security psychiatric facility, has now passed a mental health evaluation and can face murder charges[.]  [Video clip]

Marxist Health Officials Want You Committed.  Bright minds (including the late, great Charles Krauthammer) have long pointed to changes in civil commitment statutes over the last half-century that made it more difficult for patients to be committed against their will and the subsequent closure of government-run psychiatric hospitals throughout the country as being chiefly responsible for spikes in certain categories of violent crime.  A good deal of research on homelessness, addiction, suicide, and murder suggests that the trend toward deinstitutionalization since the 1960s has produced tragic results.  On the other hand, I am extremely leery of returning certain involuntary commitment powers back to psychiatrists and government health "experts" when both professional communities pray at the altar of Marx.

Bring back asylums, and make Britain safe again.  Valdo Calocane, the man sentenced today for the brutal killing of three people in Nottingham last year, will probably spend the rest of his life in a secure hospital.  The question is why he wasn't there already.  His story is almost a case study in why this country should never have committed so completely to getting rid of asylums.  Before killing his victims last year, Calocane was already wanted by the police in connection with a previous assault on an emergency worker.  He had been previously sectioned four times in the past three years, and reportedly regularly lied to his doctor about taking his anti-psychotic medication.  The word "asylums" conjures images of institutional abuse and societal neglect, with the mentally ill locked away, out of sight and out of mind.  Yet while there were certainly problems with the previous system that needed correcting, the ideological fervour with which we moved towards a complete care-in-the-community approach was woefully misjudged.

A wanted homeless man in Philly was charged with involuntary manslaughter after pushing a man onto subway rails during an argument.  A homeless Philadelphia man is being charged with involuntary manslaughter after an altercation at a subway station led to him shoving another man onto the tracks just before a train arrived.  The suspect was on bench warrant status in a neighboring county, and his criminal record includes cases in two other Pennsylvania counties.  [Tweet]

Nearly 60 Years After Congress Killed Off Mental Hospitals, Complete Breakdown of the System Has Lawmakers Attempting to Bring Them Back.  What people think is compassion sometimes brings bad results.  Fail to confront the slacking employee and other workers have to carry more of a load.  Be a pal to your children and then be frustrated by their disrespect.  Lavish welfare and then wonder why unappreciative people won't work.  And then there's the running away from obligations to protect the mentally ill from themselves and from society.  Perhaps you've had the same thoughts as I — the grand experiment in mental health care of the past half-century or so has failed.  Just witness the aggressiveness of babbling panhandlers, the general filth of helpless people living on the sidewalks, the destruction of cities such as San Francisco.  Believe it or not, the left-leaning Politico published an article Monday that gave a nod in the direction of some kind of return to the involuntary commitment of some mentally ill people.

Tourists from South America [were] Stabbed at Grand Central Station on Christmas.  A peaceful Christmas Day turned grim at Grand Central Terminal when two tourists, girls aged 14 and 16 from South America, were unexpectedly stabbed while eating.  The assailant, identified as 36-year-old Steven Hutcherson, made racially charged threats before launching the attack, abc7NY reported.  The attack took place around 11:25 a.m. in the Dining Concourse of Grand Central Terminal while the girls were dining with their parents.  Following an altercation with the staff of Tartinery, who told him he could not sit in the restaurant's area, Hutcherson redirected his rage towards the young tourists.  Reportedly, Hutcherson exclaimed, "I want all the white people dead," and then said, "I want to sit next to the crackers," before he advanced towards the victims with a knife.

Teen tourists stabbed by deranged stranger at Grand Central.  A troubled vagrant randomly stabbed two teenage girls enjoying a Christmas morning meal with their parents at a Grand Central Terminal restaurant — after ranting that he wanted "all white people dead," authorities said.  The girls, 14- and 16-year-olds visiting from South America, were attacked at Tartinery in the Grand Central Dining Concourse around 11:25 a.m.  Monday and suffered non-life-threatening stab wounds, police and sources said.  "I want all the white people dead," the suspect, Steven Hutcherson, 36, allegedly yelled, according to police sources. "I want to sit next to the crackers."  He then allegedly lunged at the unsuspecting teens, plunging a knife into the 16-year-old's back, nicking her lungs, and stabbing the younger girl in the thigh, police and a law enforcement source said.  Hutcherson — who cops and sources said has a slew of prior arrests and a history of mental health issues — had gotten into a fight with restaurant staffers who were trying to kick him out of the eatery shortly before he allegedly went on his rant and attacked, WABC-TV reported.

Homeless Man Threatens to Shoot Atlanta News Crew While Taking Them Hostage.  A homeless man allegedly took a news crew hostage outside of a Sheriff's office in Clayton County, Georgia, late Monday night.  The suspect, Brandon Logan, appeared to be intoxicated as he approached reporter Asia Wilson and photographer Lauren Swaim and threatened to shoot them.  They were able to notify their newsroom for help without Logan knowing.  According to the New York Post, Wilson was able to send text messages to the station newsroom undetected. [...] Unfortunately, the judge set his bond at a very low amount of $11,000.  ANF news station is still waiting to see why it took officers 90 minutes to arrive at the scene.

Homeless man allegedly holds Atlanta news crew hostage, threatens to shoot them — before cops show up 90 mins later.  A homeless Georgia man has been charged with making terroristic threats for allegedly holding two TV station journalists hostage for 90 minutes — and threatening to shoot them if they called cops or refused to order him food.  Atlanta News First [WANF] reporter Asia Wilson and photojournalist Lauren Swaim were about to go live from a sheriff's office parking lot in Jonesboro late Monday when they say they were corned by a drunk man claiming to have a handgun.  Despite raising the alarm, it took more than 90 minutes for police to respond and arrest the suspect, Brandon Logan, according to their outraged station.  During that time, Logan "made verbal threats to shoot the victims if they did not order food" or "if they called law enforcement," Judge Latrevia Kates-Johnson said at his initial court hearing Tuesday, WSB-TV reported.

Michael Latt, social justice strategist with deep Hollywood ties, murdered by homeless woman.  A 36-year-old homeless woman is facing charges in the murder of Michael Latt inside his Los Angeles home Monday evening in what's being called a targeted attack.  Latt was a social justice advocate with deep ties to Hollywood.  Jameelah Elena Michl was arrested at the scene for allegedly breaking into Latt's home in the Miracle Mile area and fatally shooting the 33-year-old in the head.  Los Angeles Police Department officers responded to the 900 block of Alandele Avenue around 6 p.m. Monday, where they found Lat suffering from a gunshot wound.  Latt, the CEO of Lead With Love, died from his injuries at the hospital.  Police said Michl lived in her vehicle, which was parked nearby.

NY Times Identifies 130 Violent Acts Committed by Mentally Ill Homeless People (and Most Could Have Been Prevented).  There's no official tally of how often a member of New York's homeless population commits a random crime of violence but often when it does happen it makes news.  We've written about some of these stories over the past year. [...] The NY Times spent a year trying to identify all of the recent examples of such attacks and identified 130 of them within the past decade, all of them involving homeless people who were mentally ill.  In 94 of those cases, the person in question had been released from a facility of some kind shortly before the crime. [...] Of course no one can predict when a mentally ill person is going to become violent but in the majority of the cases the Times looked at there were people who are trained to look out for these things who had all the reason in the world to believe these people were dangerous.  And still they kept putting them back on the street with the rest of us.

It's the Eye of the Homeless Tiger.  Living In Lost Angeles assures you of non-stop dystopian entertainment.  [Video clip]

Homeless 25-year-old Topeka man arrested in rape and killing of 5-year-old girl.  A homeless Kansas man has been arrested in the rape and killing of a 5-year-old girl, authorities said Tuesday.  Officers responded just before 6 p.m. Monday to a medical call at a Topeka gas station and found a fire crew attempting to save Zoey Felix, police said in a news release.  She was rushed to a hospital and later pronounced dead.  Investigators identified a 25-year-old man as a suspect and booked him into jail Tuesday morning on suspicion of first-degree murder and rape.  His bond is set at $2 million and no attorney is listed for him, said Timothy Phelps, deputy director of the Shawnee County Department of Corrections.

Homeless Shoplifter Sets Store Clerk On Fire Who Confronted Him In California.  A store clerk who tried to stop a man from stealing a third time in one day was set on fire during the confrontation.  Surveillance video captured the moment a man poured lighter fluid on the worker and set him on fire.  The attack left Suraj, who declined to share his last name for safety reasons, with second and third-degree burns on his face, neck, chest and shoulder.  He has been hospitalized since Sept. 22.  [Video clip]

Crazy People Are Dangerous.  Everybody agrees Portia Odufuwa is dangerously crazy, and yet officials keep releasing her to terrorize others: [...] Does the judge have no concern for public safety?  Here's video of the incident that terrorized air travelers last year:  [Video clip]  So the judge rules that Odufuwa can't be sent to prison because she was insane when she committed her crimes, but if she is non compos mentis — a Latin phrase meaning "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" — shouldn't she be locked up in a psychiatric ward somewhere?  Straitjacket, padded cell, daily Thorazine injections?  She has proven herself to be a danger to the community often enough to justify such treatment.

Bring Back The Asylums:  Half The Homeless And Drug Addicted Populations Have At Least One Mental Illness.  As we watch our city streets become open drug dens, with "zombified" men and women openly shooting up drugs in public, and soft on crime policies leaving criminals on the street to continue to commit crimes, and prosecutors backed by money from George Soros groups refusing to bring charges against those committing crimes, we take note of a few points.
  •   With deinstitutionalization (shutting down all insane asylums), crimes rose exponentially.
  •   Later, as bleeding hearts decried the "abuse" of locking away criminals in prisons, and the insidious liberal policies that followed, accurate statistics on crime became impossible, because a significant number of crimes went unaddressed and uncharged.
  •   The "statistics" being used to claim overall crime is down, ignores the in your face crimes being committed, from theft to looting to openly doing drugs in the streets, because less are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted.
The downfall of our society as a whole began when the same type of bleeding hearts that created asylums to begin with, then decided they needed to be shut down, and then decided that prisons were to harsh a punishment for criminals.

The Societal and Political Decay of Pittsburgh.  Some days the Pittsburgh Renewal truck will pull up to unload a crew to clean up the feces and needles.  Today was one of those days; the crew is an effort by Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, a private nonprofit civic organization formed by local business owners to clean up the city's decay.  In short, they are treating the symptom of a disease the city refuses to address.  The problem isn't isolated; it is everywhere in the core of the city.  The homeless problem also is far from harmless:  Less than two weeks ago, just a couple of blocks from here, Larry Gilmore and his wife Shalawrae had just gotten married and were celebrating their honeymoon at the Even Hotel along Forbes Avenue when the groom was viciously assaulted by a homeless man.  The man came at Larry from behind at an elevator, put him in a chokehold, banged his head on the floor, then returned several times to kick and stomp him as he took several items, including his pants.

Homeless Man Runs Over Man Trying To Help Him In Los Angeles.  A Palos Verdes man is lucky to be alive after he was run over by a homeless man he knew.  Ken Teshima, 66, spent a night in the ICU for cracked and bleeding skull from the horrific incident that took place in Torrance.  "I almost got killed," Teshima said.  "My head's cracked and it's bleeding — if he rolled me over, I'd be dead."   Long before the crash, the homeless man had slept in his car in the parking lot of the office Teshima worked at.  Teshima, who is the complex's president, allowed the homeless man to park in the parking lot as long as he didn't cause too much trouble.  However, the homeless man wore out other business owners' welcome.  [Video clip]

Portland doctor knocked out by a 'homeless' attacker reveals bloody wounds to her face and blames the city for slow police response.  A Portland doctor who was knocked out by a 'homeless' attacker has revealed the wounds to her face, and blames the city for the slow police response.  Radiologist Mary Costantino was attacked last Friday night shortly after 10:30 in the Oregon city while walking with a friend. Shocking surveillance footage of the incident shows a man throw a large silver bottle directly at the 50-year-old, rendering her unconscious.

The NYC subway is "an insane asylum on wheels".  The subways of New York City have been in the news even more than usual over the past few years and not for the reasons the Mass Transit Authority might wish.  The tunnels have become epicenters for crimes of all types, and we're not just talking about people hopping over the turnstiles to avoid paying the fare.  There have been shootings, stabbings, and people being pushed onto the tracks.  Robberies are common.  And if the random common criminals and gang bangers aren't enough, there are still armies of homeless people (though somewhat fewer during the summer months when many go above ground) mixed in with drug addicts shooting up on the platforms.  At the New York Post, Steve Cuozzo appears to throw his arms up in despair and declares that Gotham's subway system is now "an insane asylum on wheels" and something must be done about it.

Buried News: Bums, illegals, addicts, and criminals double their assaults in hospitals.  How's this as a consequence of radical leftist policies that coddle society's troublemakers?  As of Sunday, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a Page One above-the-fold story by Paul Sisson headlined "Hospitals in County Look for Ways to Cut Attacks on Workers," which is an important story indeed because it points to the consequences to innocent hospital workers of constantly coddling bums, illegals, drug addicts and criminals, all of whom were named as perpetrators in the piece.  For some strange reason, the story not there on the San Diego Union-Tribune's website and I looked and looked.

Homeless man allegedly head-butted Florida cop after stealing gas station sandwiches.  A homeless man allegedly spat at one Florida cop and then head-butted another officer while being arrested for swiping two gas station sandwiches, police reportedly said.  Andres Ramon Negron left without paying after he chowed down on two sandwiches inside a Shell station store, according to an arrest report obtained by WPLG.  The 31-year-old suspect ended up returning to the same Coral Gables station a short time later to grab an energy drink that led to a confrontation with a store worker, police alleged.  He allegedly slammed the drink down and slugged the employee in the back of the head, according to police, WPLG reported.

Second murder in three months at Texas homeless camp adds to locals' fears over lawlessness.  Austin's homeless camps have been rocked by two murders in three months, adding to the public's fear about the tent cities being a breeding ground for drug use, violence and other illegal activity.  An unidentified man was killed after getting into a fight with another man, cops said Monday, adding a suspect has been arrested but their identity has yet to be released.  The camp in North Austin is just one of several throughout the city, all of which are illegal.  They have been allowed to operate by Texas capital's Democratic leadership, despite a voter ban on homeless encampments in May 2021.

NYC Clown World: Solution for Dangerous People Pushing Riders Onto Subway Tracks.  In New York City, crazy, violent, drug-addicted homeless people are pushing people onto tracks or into moving trains.  The politicians in charge aren't going to do anything about these dangerous people threatening the lives of New Yorkers, but they have a solution.  They will structure platforms at great cost so people don't fall onto tracks.  The problem is that these dangerous people want to kill people.  They also have knives and stab people too.  If they can't push, they'll stab them. [...] The MTA is nearing construction on its $100 million pilot project to outfit three subway stations with platform gates to prevent passengers from falling — or being pushed on the tracks.

The Editor says...
This problem can be solved for much less than $100 million, and in a way that will benefit everyone, not just the users of three subway stations.  There is already a list of the Top 50 homeless lunatics who are most in need of intervention and treatment, at the very least.  That $100 million would buy a nice hospital/prison for the criminally insane, where the Top 50, along with the Next 50, could be sequestered for the benefit of everyone else.  As the socialists say... "If it saves just one life, it's well worth it."

Homeless Illegal Alien Accused of Killing Florida Sgt. Michael Kunovich.  A homeless illegal alien teenager is accused of killing St. Johns County, Florida, Sheriff's Office Sgt. Michael Kunovich, a 52-year-old officer who served with law enforcement for 26 years.  Virjilio Aguilar Mendez, an 18-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala, has been arrested and charged with resisting an officer with violence and felony murder for the death of Kunovich.

DA Bragg to Charge Marine Hero Who Defended Passengers Against Subway Monster.  When Jordan Neely assaulted a 67-year-old woman, breaking her nose and causing injuries to her head, the system colluded to set the deranged monster loose. [...] He pleaded guilty on Feb. 9 of this year, in a carefully planned strategy between the city and his lawyers to allow him to get treatment and stay out of prison. [...] He had tried to abduct a 7-year-old girl, also punched a 64-year-old man and threatened to kill a gate agent.  He was on the list of the 50 most unstable people in the subway system.  And a pro-crime regime in New York City refused to do anything to stop the monster.  Finally, on a F train, a few men, including Daniel Penny, a former Marine, stood up to him and wouldn't let him hurt any other women or young girls.  Now a leftist-BLM lynch mob working with DA Bragg's office has seen to it that Penny will be charged with manslaughter.

There are at least fifty more of them, and their names are already on a list!
Jordan Neely Was on NYC's List of 'Top 50' Mentally-Ill Homeless People in Need of Urgent Help.  The tragic death of Jordan Neely on a New York subway has shed light on the difficulty city officials and outreach groups faced getting him the treatment he needed.  Neely was on what outreach workers refer to as the "Top 50" list — a roster maintained by New York City of the homeless people living on the street most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.  An unnamed employee of the Bowery Residents' Committee, a nonprofit organization that does subway outreach for the city, told the New York Times that Neely had hundreds of encounters with social workers and was taken to hospitals numerous times, both voluntarily and involuntarily.  Neely also racked up more than three dozen arrests.  Many of them were offenses like turnstile-jumping or trespassing.  However, at least four were on charges of punching people, two in the subway system.

A city that permits the seriously mentally ill to roam free is begging for tragic outcomes.  In an incident sadly familiar to many New Yorkers, a man living on the streets with a long history of mental illness started screaming, acting erratically, and threatening the people sharing his subway car earlier this week.  "I don't mind going to jail and getting life in prison," screamed the 30-year-old Jordan Neely, who had 44 arrests under his belt and an outstanding warrant for felony assault, as he flailed around throwing items of his clothing.  "I'm ready to die!"  In response, a 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran put Neely in a chokehold, incapacitating him and releasing him after he stopped struggling and passed out.  A freelance reporter who took video of the incident, Juan Alberto Vazquez, told news outlets that no one on the train initially thought Neely was in any worse shape than being unconscious, but by the time the police who met the train at the station took him to a nearby hospital, Neely was pronounced dead.  Police questioned the young man, whose name they did not make public, but released him without charges pending an investigation.  In the next 36 hours, the usual suspects began to gin up the outrage machine.

Leftists Are Calling The Choking Death Of This Homeless Man Murder But Facts Say He's Been Arrested 44 Times, Was Acting Agressive And Threatening People.  New York's medical examiner determined that Jordan Neely, 30, who was put into a chokehold by a fellow subway passenger - a veteran Marine - on Monday, died from "compresison of neck" and stated that his death was the result of homicide.  DA Alvin Bragg is investigating the incident.  The city saw protests and anger from residents on Tuesday after the news of Neely's death was made public.  Straphangers converged on the MTA stop at Broadway Lafayette Streets in downtown Manhattan to protest the killing.  [Video clip]

Homeless people read code.  Violent behavior is being marketed to the homeless through cultural tolerance and legal leniency.  Coded behavioral marketing, without any link to consumerism of a product or service, exists in an endless-relentless campaign promoting violence from those living on our streets.  Throughout the 90's and early 2000's, homeless people fit into one of three categories:
  [#1]   homeless without addiction or mental illness,
  [#2]   homeless addicts and alcoholics, and
  [#3]   homeless mentally ill.
Since 2019, at the time of bail reform, there is a modernized major shift to a new additional category that all types of homeless fit under.  This new category is violent homeless.  Homeless people become violent by choice — but this choice is instigated by coded marketing.

San Fran drops charges against crowbar attacker.  Earlier this month, former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani was attacked by a homeless person with a crowbar.  The attacker, Garrett Doty, was one of a group of vagrants who had been blocking Carmignani's mother's driveway and acting in a threatening fashion.  The attack sent the former fire chief to the hospital for emergency surgery with a hole in the back of his skull.  He also had a broken jaw and required fifty stitches.  This looked like a fairly open-and-shut case, but last night the San Fran District Attorney's office suddenly dropped the charges against Doty and dismissed the case.  How is this happening in a major American city?

Do We Have A Mental Health Problem?  [F]or many years, the country had several psychiatric hospitals funded by the government.  As I grew up, I knew of one in Chicago and another in Cincinnati.  Perhaps you knew of one in your home town as well.  They all served a vital purpose; to help those experiencing mental disorders.  However, over the 1970's and 1980's, these were all shut down for funding reasons, and the patients transferred to jails, institutions that are not as well suited for treating people than the old psychiatric hospitals.  At least 25% of the inmates in jail today suffer from some form of mental illness, and I'm told that number is on the rise.

NYC Subway Attack Victim Slams AOC's Call to Direct Police Funding to Teachers.  A woman from Queens, New York who lost her eye in a violent attack last fall torched Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (NY) suggestion that funding for police be given to public schools, parks, and libraries.  Elizabeth Gomes, 33, was brutally attacked at a subway station by a "homeless ex-con," 41-year-old Waheed Foster, last year, according to the New York Post.  On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez slammed Democrat Mayor Eric Adams' decision to give "militarized" police their first raise in seven years.  "We are now at a point where officially, most officers are paid more than a teacher with a master's degree," Ocasio-Cortez said on the show.  "We are defunding safety, defunding our public schools, defunding our public pools, defunding our parks [and] defunding our libraries."

Woman Working At Homeless Shelter Is Brutally Butchered By Homeless Woman With An Axe.  A homeless woman fatally — and gruesomely — butchered a homeless shelter worker before she was seen wiping blood off her hands, Vermont authorities alleged this week.  Zaaina Asra Zakirrah Mahvish-Jammeh is accused of taking a small ax to social worker Leah Rosin-Pritchard inside a Vermont shelter Monday, police said, according to reports.  [Video clip]

Portland: Deranged homeless man was discharged from mental health center and moments later attacked a woman with a rock.  This story made the local news when it happened last August.  A homeless man named Dwayne A. Simpson attacked a woman named Sonya Gonzalez with a 35lb rock as she waited for her son to pick her up after work.  Gonzalez fell, hitting her head on a concrete wall and passing out.  She awoke moments later covered in her own blood and sought help.

Oakland man, 28, stabs USPS worker, 71, to death.  A homeless Oakland man is in custody and accused of stabbing a beloved mother and United States Post Office worker more than 12 times as she was on her way home from her night shift.  Wilbert Winchester, 28, was arrested shortly after the vicious attack in Dilma Franks-Spruill, 71, in the early hours of Wednesday morning.  Two days earlier, Winchester was accused of stabbing a 59-year-old woman on a bus in Oakland.  He is also the suspect in several other similar attacks involving a metal pole and a box cutter that occurred in the same area.

Man chews off another man's face believing he was a killer robot.  Early Wednesday morning police responded to a call for assistance at a nearby MAX train station in Gresham, which is just east of Portland.  They were told their had been a possible stabbing but that's not at all what they found. [...] The suspect gave police the fake name "El Baker" but they used fingerprints to identify him as 25-year-old Koryn Kraemer, a recent transplant from Georgia. [...] Kraemer apparently admitted to using alcohol and drugs (pot and fentanyl) prior to the attack.  He was recently kicked out of a room he was renting because his behavior turned destructive. [...] So in the matter of maybe six weeks he went from having a place to live to being homeless and so out of his mind he chewed a man's face off.

California dad, 22-year-old daughter stabbed to death by homeless man: cops.  A California man and his 22-year-old daughter have been stabbed to death by a homeless man while they were working on their car outside a Kohl's, police said.  Ken Evans, 54, and McKenna Evans were spending time together around noon Thursday tinkering on their sedan in Palmdale, just north of Los Angeles, when the man attacked them for no apparent reason, the LA Times reported.  Ken was rushed to a hospital, where he died, while his daughter was pronounced dead at the scene.  LA County sheriff's deputies have arrested a suspect, who they said may be a transient, the newspaper reported.

Homeless Man Pushes Random Male In Front Of Truck, Truck Stops Inches From Crushing Him.  This video gone viral is reportedly from Brazil.  A homeless man is seen in the CCTV footage walking down the sidewalk when he pushes another man walking in the opposite direction into the street where a box truck narrowly misses turning him into roadkill.  [Video clip]

Torrance woman brutally beaten, raped by homeless man released from jail hours earlier.  A Torrance woman is speaking out after being tackled, beaten, and raped while walking her two dogs in a nearby park. [...] The alleged homeless attacker, 46-year-old Darrell Waters, had just been released from jail for a misdemeanor hours earlier.  He is now being held without bail.  Marissa is trying to forgive him not only for what he did to her but for the toll it took on her loved ones, as well.

The Editor says...
[#1] This incident took place almost three months ago, so it isn't news.  [#2] Of course the attacker is black and the victim is white, but that's not mentioned in this article.

Woman, 33, fears she'll lose [an] eye after being thrown across [a] JFK airport subway station by homeless convicted murderer.  A woman arriving at JFK airport for her job as a security guard fears she'll lose her sight in one eye after she was savagely beaten by a homeless career criminal at the airport subway station.  Elizabeth Gomes, 33, arrived at the Howard Beach station in Queens, New York City, at around 5:15 am on September 20.  Waheed Foster, 41, tried to start a conversation, but when she ignored him he flung himself at her — dragging her to the ground then kicking and punching her.

Canal Street Starbucks closing over safety concerns for staff.  Starbucks announced Friday [9/16/2022] that it would be closing its Canal Street store permanently on October 3 over safety and security concerns for its employees.  Sam Jefferies, a Starbucks spokesperson, called the coffee shop on the corner of Canal Street and St.  Charles Avenue "a high incident store."  "Our stores are windows into America, and every day, our partners witness the challenges facing our communities — challenges to personal safety and security, racism, a growing mental health crisis, and issues magnified by COVID.  These challenges play out within our stores — affecting our partners, our communities, and our customers alike," Jefferies said.

The Editor says...
If I may be permitted to translate into plain English, the store at issue is located in the ghetto, and a great many violent and/or insane homeless black people have been entering the store to steal, vandalize, defecate, and disrupt.  The store is not a "window into America."  It is a glimpse of Hell.

Seattle firefighters 'are being assaulted' at homeless encampments.  Firefighters in Seattle have demanded the city take action after they were subjected to more than 40 violent attacks in the past four months — a string of assaults that have been largely carried out by the city's homeless population.  The attacks, which the city's firefighter's union says began in May, have seen the protectors repeatedly targeted by the intemperate down-and-outs, often while responding to fires started at the city's growing number of homeless encampments.  One such incident, which transpired last month, saw one fire official pelted with a rock while attempting to put out a blaze that originated from an encampment fire.

The Editor says...
Here's a suggestion:  Stay in the truck and use a water cannon on every fire.  And if a few tents get knocked over, the other nearby campers will learn to keep the fires under control.  Almost like civilization!

Homeless man on parole suspected of stabbing NASCAR star Bobby East, 37, to death at California gas station.  NASCAR star Bobby East, 37, died after being stabbed at a California gas station, with his suspected murderer killed in a SWAT raid just two days later.  East was fueling up in Westminster on Wednesday when he was stabbed to death in the chest.  East was transported to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.  'The victim was found on the ground suffering from a serious stab wound to the chest area,' Westminister Police said in a statement regarding East's murder.  'Officers attempted life saving measures until OCFA paramedics arrived and transported the victim to a local trauma center, where the victim succumbed to his injury.'

Police kill 'transient' suspect in NASCAR star Bobby East's stabbing death.  The man wanted for stabbing NASCAR star Bobby East to death in California earlier this week was gunned down by a SWAT team in Anaheim, police revealed.  East, 37, was stabbed while pumping gas in a gas station in Westminster, outside Anaheim, on Wednesday [7/13/2022].  Westminster PD previously identified the suspect in East's killing as Trent William Millsap, 27, who they described as a "transient and known to frequent Westminster, Garden Groce and Anaheim motels."  Millsap was killed Friday when a SWAT team was serving a search warrant and shots rang out, police said.

It's the Mental Health System, Stupid.  According to the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, "Research shows that 71 percent of people experiencing homelessness have a mental illness or post-traumatic stress.  Additionally, 59 percent are struggling with long- term substance use disorders," the latter often going hand in hand with mental illness in these situations.  If quality mental health care is not available, self-care through street drugs becomes the alternative.  What about mass shooters?  As Pew reports:  ["]A panel of mental health and law enforcement experts has estimated that roughly one-third of acts of mass violence — defined as crimes in which four or more people were killed — since the 1990s were committed by people with a serious mental illness.["]  A Stanford study reviewed, "35 mass shooting cases that occurred in the United States between 1982 and 2019 and involved shooters who survived and were brought to trial."  They discovered, "28 had mental illness diagnoses.  Eighteen had schizophrenia and 10 had other diagnoses including bi-polar disorder, delusional disorder, personality disorders, and substance-related disorders."  80 percent of mass shooters in this study had a mental illness, undertreated, or not treated at all.  It's not only mass shooters, but other random violent crime.

School Shootings — Beyond the Hype and Spin.  How many mass shooters are mentally ill, untreated, or inadequately treated, due to deficiencies in our mental health care system?  A Stanford University team:  "Studied 35 mass shooting cases that occurred in the United States between 1982 and 2019 and involved shooters who survived and were brought to trial." They discovered that "28 had mental illness diagnoses.  Eighteen had schizophrenia, and 10 had other diagnoses including bipolar disorder, delusional disorder, personality disorders and substance-related disorders."  America's mental health system is fragmented due to politics and money.  For some administrations, mental health is a priority and for others a pot of money that can be spent on other initiatives.  Inpatient hospitalization has given way to outpatient therapy, which may not be enough for some.  Clearly, those that need help are not getting it.

Woman On Train Sprays 70-Year-Old Man With Liquid, Sets Him On Fire.  A woman set fire to a 70-year-old man Saturday in Pasadena, California, according to local officials.  The woman, who has not yet been identified and appears to be homeless, said something to the male passenger of the local Metro system, according to Ramon Montenegro, a spokesman for the sheriff's Transit Services Bureau.  He ignored it.  She then proceeded to spray him with a flammable liquid and used a lighter to set him on fire, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Same story as above:
Metro rail passenger set ablaze in unprovoked attack.  The two did not appear to know each other.  The suspect in this case was arrested, and the victim was transported to a hospital.  He is in serious but stable condition and expected to survive.  The incident is one of a string of cases in which homeless individuals have attacked Metro riders or workers.  Violent crimes have jumped 81% for the first two months of this year on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's bus and rail system.  It comes as the agency has been grappling with a surge of homelessness on its system as riders return to commuting.  At Union Station, the system's main transit hub, workers say homeless people grappling with mental illness regularly scream insults and threats and have assaulted them.

Homeless Female Known As 'Lady Gangsta' Shanks A Man For Having Her Tent Too Close To His.  Surveillance shows wild moments before the Seattle encampment stabbing which then lead to the firing of an AK-47-style rifle.  A bench warrant has been issued for the arrest of Arias Beckett Sumpay aka 'Lady Gangster".  King County Prosecutors have charged the 28-year-old with first-degree assault.  She is accused of stabbing a man several times with a knife over an alleged dispute over a tent involving a fellow encampment resident.  [Video clip]

Florida woman told to stop panhandling sets gas station clerk on fire: sheriff.  A homeless woman told not to panhandle outside a Florida gas station doused a clerk with gasoline and set her on fire, sheriff officials said.  Betty Jean McFadden, 30, was charged with attempted murder in the gruesome attack at a Circle K gas station in Pensacola, where she was told earlier Wednesday to leave, according to the Escambia County Sheriff's Office.  McFadden left, but returned at about 1 p.m. Wednesday with a gas can and attacked the female clerk by dousing her with fuel she "panhandled" before throwing matches at her and setting her on fire, sheriff's officials said.  A second gas station employee was also burned while helping put out the flames.  McFadden proceeded to "calmly" walk out of the gas station and was arrested a few blocks away.

Boy, 6, slammed in head with laptop by homeless man on Manhattan street: 'Didn't even see him coming'.  The mother of a 6-year-old boy slammed in the head with a laptop on a Manhattan street by a homeless man says the oft-arrested suspect needs mental health help — not more time behind bars.  Sara Bonaccorsi, 25, was walking with her son near W. 114th St. and Manhattan Ave., just outside Morningside Park, when a stranger attacked her son Dominic Bonaccorsi-Alvarez without warning about 2:30 p.m.  Sunday [3/27/2022].  "We didn't even see him coming," Bonaccorsi told the Daily News.  "He came up from behind and just totally unprovoked he hit my son over the head with the laptop."  Police happened to be nearby and arrested Michael Johnson, 60, before he could hurt anyone else.

The Editor says...
Perhaps it's true that the "suspect needs mental health help — not more time behind bars."  Why can't he have both?  Which option would provide a greater benefit to the public?  Long-term incarceration.

People In California Libraries Aren't Safe From the Homeless.  Police in Anaheim are looking for a man they say attacked a library employee unprovoked.  The incident happened at the Anaheim Central Library back on March 3.  According to police, around 6:15 p.m. a male employee was approached by another man, and shoved to the ground.  Police say the employee fell back and hit his head on the tile floor, causing him to cut his head and even lose consciousness.  He was transported to a local hospital.  [Video clip]

The Power of Terrible Ideas.  In the 1960s, a mad idea was born, the notion that there is no such thing as mental illness.  Incredibly, it would become the foundation for public policy.  The idea sprang independently from two maverick psychiatrists at opposite ideological poles, on the right U.S. psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, an unsparing libertarian, and on the left the British Ronald Laing.  Szasz disposed of mental illness by verbal sleight of hand:  "Mental illnesses do not exist; indeed they cannot exist because the mind is not a bodily part or bodily organ." (Never mind that the brain is the bodily organ that malfunctions in mental illness.) [...] The tremendously subversive implications of these ideas only became apparent in the 1980s.  American society was helpless to deal with an enormous social problem destroying the quality of life of its cities.  It still is.

Some people should be locked up.  Permanently.
'Psychotic' suspect in shootings that terrorized homeless in New York and D.C. avoided prison for dozens of alleged crimes over more than a decade.  The man held in the killing of two homeless men and attacks on three others was previously found to be 'psychotic,' not fit to stand trial, and tried to hide his prison rap lyrics 'in his buttocks'.  Gerald Brevard III, 30, was arrested Tuesday for the cold-blooded killings and shootings, some of which were caught on shocking video.  Brevard has a long rap sheet including armed robbery, assault with a firearm, destruction of property and theft.  His father, Gerald Brevard Jr., told DailyMail.com in a statement that his son 'suffers from mental illness' and complained that 'the system has failed regarding the treatment of so many, including my son.'

The Editor says...
The perpetrator is not the victim.  He should have been locked up years ago.

Suspect in lethal attacks on homeless people previously had a sentence suspended after being released from a psychiatric facility.  A 30-year-old man has been arrested as a suspect in lethal attacks on homeless people in New York City and Washington, D.C.  Gerald Brevard was arrested in Washington on Tuesday morning after a multi-state manhunt for the attacks on homeless people.  NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said Brevard was a "strong person of interest" after numerous tips were sent to law enforcement.  Essig said that Brevard was taken into custody by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).  No weapon was found, but he said that the suspect was wearing similar clothing to that captured by security cameras on Saturday in two shootings.

Serial shooter who allegedly killed two homeless men is also homeless, family reveals.  The serial shooter targeting homeless men in the Big Apple and Washington, DC is also homeless, family revealed Tuesday, as officials announced charges in three of the cases.  Gerald Brevard III, 30, was taken into custody early Tuesday [3/15/2022] in the capital and charged with first-degree murder in the March 9 shooting and stabbing death of 54-year-old homeless man Morgan Holmes, the Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department Robert Contee told reporters Tuesday.  Brevard was also hit with two other charges — assault with the intent to kill and assault with a dangerous weapon — in connection with two other incidents targeting vagrants earlier in the month, Contee said.

Man Stabbed 2 MOMA Employees — MSM Silent As The Assailant Has Been Identified As A Democrat And Anti-Trump Lunatic.  Video from the Museum of Modern Art shows the moment a man leaped over a reception desk and stabbed two employees as they tried to flee Saturday [3/12/2022].  The video released by New York City police shows man police identified as 60-year-old Gary Cabana entering the museum lobby through a revolving door then climbing onto the desk and jumping over it as a man carrying what appears to be a walkie-talkie looks too scared to stop him. [...] The suspect was identified as Gary Cabana, 60.  Cabana's last-known address was a supportive housing residence in midtown operated by a nonprofit, Breaking Ground, offering shelter for the homeless, the mentally ill, and those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, police said, and he had no prior arrests.

Woman raped at Manhattan church by homeless man: lawsuit.  A homeless man beat and raped a woman inside a Manhattan church — a "sickening" attack that ended only when a hero priest intervened, she claims in a lawsuit.  The terrifying ordeal began Jan. 30, 2019, when the 68-year-old victim, who lives nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Hamilton Heights, noticed the lights were off, which was "abnormal."  So the woman, identified in the legal filing only as "Jane Doe," went to check, found the Catholic church's doors open, called out, and was suddenly accosted.  The alleged attacker was a man who had hung around the church before and "exposed his genitals to older women," she said in the Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.

Unhinged man slashes violinist at Brooklyn subway stop.  A Brooklyn man was lucky to escape with his violin — and his life — when a crazed attacker slashed him in the neck in a subway station on Thursday night [2/24/2022].  Stephen Hanson was returning from practice at the Brooklyn College Conservatory Orchestra when he noticed a man following a woman "really closely" at the Franklin Ave.-Medgar Evers College station in Crown Heights around 8 p.m., he told the Daily News.  The woman, who "was trying to get away" from the attacker, broke into a sprint and dashed up the stairs, Hanson said.  That's when he turned his wrath on Hanson, 35. [...] Transit crews and homeless outreach workers found 29 homeless encampments in subway tunnels and another 89 in stations when they surveyed the system over 12 hours from Feb. 2 to Feb. 3, the MTA said Thursday.

Breakdancer stabbed on NYC subway train, suspect arrested.  The NYPD says it has made an arrest after a 22-year-old breakdancer was stabbed while aboard an L train in the New York City subway.  44-year-old Lateef Coleman, who is believed to be homeless, is now facing charges including assault and criminal possession of a weapon.  The victim was reportedly performing on the train when he was stabbed three times in an unprovoked attack.  He suffered two stab wounds to his leg and one to his arm.

Homeless man forces young woman into stranger's West Hollywood garage where he tries to rape her.  Harrowing surveillance footage captured the moment a homeless Los Angeles man forced a young woman into a residential garage where he 'nearly raped her' before she was able to escape.  Just 20 minutes later, the suspect tried to force his way into another woman's apartment but fled when she screamed, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.  In the first incident, surveillance footage, first obtained by ABC 7, captured the man gripping the woman by her arm as they walked through the West Hollywood neighborhood, where homes sell for an average of $1.5 million each.

Woman fatally stabbed inside NYC apartment after being followed: cops.  A woman was stabbed to death inside her Chinatown apartment early Sunday [2/13/2022] after her alleged killer followed her home — and her final moments were caught on chilling surveillance footage.  Video obtained by The [New York] Post shows the suspect tailing the 35-year-old victim on the street as she enters her Chrystie Street apartment building, following close behind as she opens the front door and strolls into the hallway.  Minutes later, a neighbor across the hallway of the victim's sixth-floor apartment at 111 Chrystie Street called 911 around 4:30 a.m. after hearing her screams during the brutal stabbing, law-enforcement sources said. [...] Cops who responded to the 911 call allegedly found the suspect, identified by sources as Assamad Nash, 25, inside the apartment and covered in blood. [...] Sources said Nash, 25, is a homeless career criminal with three open cases and a record of several escapes from police custody.

Homeless man slits woman's throat after she let him into her home for bath: cops.  A homeless man in Utah allegedly slit a woman's throat after she let him into her home to shower, cops said.  Officers responded to a call of a woman heavily bleeding from the neck around 5 p.m. last Sunday [2/6/2022] at her home in Salt Lake City, according to cops.  She was transported to a local hospital in critical condition and underwent emergency surgery.  Her condition was later upgraded to stable, but her current condition is unknown, cops said.

Terrifying moment Seattle homeless man cracks female Amazon engineer's skull with a baseball bat as she walks home in random attack.  A homeless man with a 16-year violent criminal history has been charged with first-degree assault after taking 'full body swing' with a baseball bat at a woman in the back of the head, leaving her bleeding with a fractured skull, before going for a slice of pizza.  Wantez Tulloss, 31, has been arrested 11 times going back to 2006 and was wanted by police in Washington for third degree theft.  On Monday January 31, he was filmed taking a swing at Emma Shengnan Wang, who was named by prosecutors in court documents.  He knocked Wang to the ground, hitting her on her skull and back, then fled, taking his bags with him.

Deranged and violent homeless men are taking a terrible toll on women.  Last Thursday a 70-year-old nurse named Sandra Shells showed up early at a bus stop near Union Station, not far from Skid Row in Los Angeles.  What happened to her that morning made news throughout the region:  ["]Police say they responded Thursday around 5:15 a.m. to a call of an assault at a bus stop near Union Station.  'Upon arrival, officers discovered that the suspect, later identified as Kerry Bell, had struck the victim in the face, causing her to fall to the ground and sustain a fractured skull,' according to LAPD.[" ...] In fact, she was taken to the same hospital where she had worked as an ER nurse for 37 years.  Kerry Bell, the 6'2" 220 pound homeless man who punched the elderly woman for no reason, has been charged with murder.  According to Heavy, he had a prior arrest history in California and other nearby states.  One senseless death like this would have been enough but later the same day a UCLA grad student studying architecture was murdered while working alone at a furniture store in the middle of the day.

UCLA grad student, 24, is stabbed to death while working in LA furniture store.  A UCLA grad student was stabbed to death in a random attack in the middle of the afternoon last week while she was working in a luxury furniture store in Los Angeles.  Brianna Kupfer, 24, was alone in the Croft House store on La Brea Avenue in LA's upscale Fairfax neighborhood when a man walked in around 1:50 p.m. and knifed her.  The architectural design student from Pacific Palisades was discovered 20 minutes later by another customer.

16 Injured after a Homeless Man's Scream Caused Mass Chaos at the Remembrance Day Moment of Silence.  The homeless man in the video who screamed is ironically known locally as 'The Rabbi' because of his attire.  The irony is the fact the man goes around constantly and spews anti-Semitic remarks about Israelis and Jewish people.  This time he screwed up and caused at least 16 people to be injured by screaming like a madman during Remembrance Day celebrations in the Netherlands.  [Video clip]

Democrat Controlled Philadelphia Looks like Something from a Zombie Flick!  Imagine having to explain to a bus full of children exactly what they're looking out on their field trip to the 'city of Brotherly Love, Philly'. Look at what appears to be an endless amount of Zombie-like drug addicts covering the streets and sidewalks of the Democrat controlled city, which eerily resembles many of the other Democrat controlled cities across America such as LA, San Fran, NYC, Chicago, and more.  [Video clip]

Seattle man arrested after setting up makeshift shooting range in encampment.  Seattle police arrested a man in an encampment who officers say had set up a makeshift shooting range and was firing shots into a tree for target practice.  Around 1:45 p.m. on Wednesday, officers were called to the 9100 block of Spear Place South in South Seattle for reports of gunfire.  Officers arrived and found a man in an encampment in a wooded area, where he had set up a makeshift shooting range.  The 44-year-old man told officers he'd been shooting at a tree, and officers found a tree with several bullet holes in its trunk.

Homeless Guy Attacks People With Homemade Flame Thrower On Los Angeles Train.  Watch as this methed out homeless bum attacks riders on the blue line metro in Los Angeles.  Crime has skyrocketed on the LA metro lines recently, 3 have been stabbed in just the past week.  [Video clip]

Black homeless man, 39, arrested for stabbing 14-year-old to death in random attack called Florida deputy 'white devil'.  A homeless black man from Florida who was arrested last week in the stabbing death of a 14-year-old boy got into a fight with a sheriff's deputy as he was being booked into jail and made several statements invoking race, including calling the officer a 'white devil.'  Semmie Williams, 39, was arrested on December 1 in Miami on first-degree murder charges for the November 15 slaying of Ryan Rogers, 14, whose body was found alongside an Interstate 95 overpass.

Black man accused of brutally stabbing white teen boy to death had YouTube channel filled with disturbing content.  A man accused of murder apparently had his own YouTube channel in which he recorded several videos of what appear to be mental delusions.  The YouTube channel seems to show the suspect as he gets lost down a rabbit hole of mental delusions.

Arrest made in mysterious killing of 14-year-old boy in Florida.  A homeless "monster" with a long rap sheet has been arrested for randomly stabbing to death a 14-year-old Florida schoolboy who went missing during a bike ride, police announced Thursday [12/2/2021].  Semmie Lee Williams, 39, was arrested in Miami late Wednesday in connection to the Nov. 15 slaying of high school freshman Ryan Rogers, authorities confirmed at a press conference.  Palm Beach Gardens police chief Clinton Shannon said that the teen had been "stabbed to death" by a "dangerous monster."  "This appears to be a completely random act.  We do not have a motive," Shannon said.  "I would best describe it as an innocent child victim having a chance encounter with a very violent criminal," Shannon said, calling Williams a "homeless drifter."

14-year-old stabbed and murdered after going on a bike ride in Florida.  Police arrest a 'homeless drifter' for the crime..  Police arrested a "homeless drifter" for the shocking stabbing and murder of a 14-year-old boy who had left his Florida home on a bike ride in the evening.  Ryan Rogers was reported missing after he rode off on his bike and didn't return to his home in Palm Beach Gardens.  A day later on Nov. 16, his body was found about two dozen feet away from a sidewalk near the 1-95 overpass on Central Boulevard.  Police initially released few details in the case, saying only that there was evidence that the boy had been killed intentionally.  Palm Beach Gardens police said they found headphones near the body and were able to obtain DNA evidence that linked the crime to the suspect.

NYC man predicts he'll dodge bail after 3 busts in 36 hours — and he's right.  A Brooklyn homeless man was busted three times in just 36 hours last week, boasting to NYPD cops that he would dodge bail at each turn because he "didn't have a record."  He proved to be right.  Agustin Garcia, 63, was charged with robbing two Manhattan straphangers — wielding a knife against one of them — and stealing a beer from a Bronx bodega in rapid succession, prosecutors and law-enforcement sources told The [New York] Post.  Manhattan prosecutors twice asked that Garcia be held on bail amid his alleged crime spree, only to be denied by judges.  It wasn't until the suspect was busted a third time that he was sent to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, although still without any bail to keep him locked up.

Residents in Los Angeles have to deal with violent Homeless Daily, Here's an Example.  Lifelong residents of California are fleeing for red states in droves because of what you see in this video.  The homeless epidemic has reached levels unseen in this country since the great depression.  While the media continues to claim inflation isn't hurting people and is actually a good thing (New York Times article) the truth is millions are losing their jobs and ending up homeless since Biden took over.  This video shows just a single example of how bad the homeless are to live around.  Once prosperous areas now look like third world nations.  Los Angeles could be considered the capitol of the desperate.  [Video clip]

Homeless Man Hurls A Brick At Bagel Shop Worker's Head In NYC.  The 63-year-old victim had just offered a cup of coffee and a bagel to a local panhandler when the assault began, with the homeless man — bearded and wearing a black hoodie — hurling the brick from point-blank range, video released Tuesday by police showed.  The violence escalated quickly, with the attacker first menacing the victim with a chair before hitting the handyman with a sucker punch and then finally flinging the brick at his backpedaling victim.  [Video clip]

Family of 5 allegedly attacked by two homeless people with machete in Malibu; dad loses eye.  An argument between a dad and two homeless people on a beach in Malibu took an extremely violent turn over the weekend, ending with the father losing an eye.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department responded to a call on Dan Blocker Beach on Sunday.  Deputies were told a man was with four family members when they were approached by two suspects, both believed to be homeless.  The two homeless people confronted the dad, saying they were not allowed in the area, sparking an argument between the three people.  One of the suspects, later identified as Richard Franck, whipped out a machete and began slashing the dad multiple times.

Just Another Day In San Francisco As Crazed Homeless Man Beats Cars And People With His Belt.  Somewhere between Twitter's headquarters and Nancy Pelosi's home lives an army of batshit crazy homeless, ready to greet your day with a smack of reality upside the head.  That is of course when you're not stepping in their feces.  [Video clip]

Venice Beach Has Devloved To The Point It Resembles A Scene Out Of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.  Watch as this group of mentally deranged homeless men go at each other while sane people try to pretend nothing is out of the ordinary on Venice Beach.  Venice Beach has been occupied and destroyed by massive homeless encampments for years now and no one seems to really tackle the issue.  [Video clip]

Homeless assaults ramp up in San Diego, leftist mayor offers idiotic solution.  Every solid blue city has its horrors — from murders in Chicago to organized thievery in San Francisco.  In San Diego, where I live, the problem is homeless attacks.  Seems the homeless aren't just unsightly, unsanitary, or famous spreaders of disease, they're dangerous, and when you have a lot of them, you have a lot of unprovoked random assaults on law-abiding residents.  The problem is out there, and too bad for those who don't like it.  San Diego's new leftist mayor, Todd Gloria, is de facto advising the victims that he's going to create more of it.

Homeless man with 90 prior arrests charged with anti-gay slashing of victim standing at Queens taco truck.  The arrest of a hate-spewing homeless man Thursday for his bloody knife attack on a gay man did nothing to calm the still-terrified victim's nerves.  Victim Milton Lobos Salguero, 34, said he was both lucky to be alive and plagued by horrifying nightmares after the July 6 attack where a suspect with 90 prior arrests began spouting homophobic slurs before gashing him across the face.  Ramon Castro, free at the time of the attack despite a pair of late June arrests, allegedly called the victim a "Latino [...]" before slicing Salguero's face.

Maniac punches carriage horse, attacks two others in Central Park: driver.  His name is not Mongo but a shirtless maniac stole a page from "Blazing Saddles" Monday [7/5/2021], punching — and also kicking — three carriage horses in Central Park before claiming he had a knife, one of the drivers said.  The decidedly unfunny and unprovoked alleged animal abuse took place shortly before noon just inside the park near West 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, hansom cab driver Henry Kaya, 28, said. [...] They said they recognized the man as someone who hangs out in Times Square, he said.  The NYPD said cops couldn't find the man and the case was marked unfounded because there was no evidence a crime was committed.

Michelle Goldberg, Andrew Yang and the mentally ill homeless.  Yesterday [6/18/2021], Ed wrote a post about Andrew Yang's comments on homelessness during the final mayoral debate.  The gist is that Yang was the only candidate in the debate who pointed out that the mentally ill homeless make the streets more dangerous and create a major quality of life issue for people trying to live there.  He said mental health treatment needed to be increased to get these people off the streets.  And of course this was considered heartless and wrong by left-wing critics on social media.  One of the people who thought Yang had gone too far was NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

Total Scumbag Assaults An 82 Year Old Man During Bodega Robbery In New York City.  A suspect is under arrest after disturbing video released by the NYPD showed the assault of an 82-year-old man inside a Manhattan bodega.  The incident happened just before 6:30 a.m. Wednesday at the deli on East Broadway on the Lower East Side.  Police said Thursday afternoon that 42-year-old Raoul Hyacinthe is under arrest and charged with robbery.  Authorities say he is a panhandler who frequently hangs outside the bodega.  [Video clip]

Black Man Steals 82-Year-Old Man's Cane Inside A Corner Store Assaults Him In The Process.  An 82-year-old man was punched within the head and robbed whereas shopping for espresso on the Lower East Side.  It was all caught on a digital camera shortly earlier than 6:30 a.m. Wednesday inside a bodega on East Broadway close to Clinton Street.  Surveillance video exhibits the suspect increase his fist earlier than putting the sufferer and working off along with his cane.

Riverside Police Approach Homeless Man During Outreach Program, Homeless Man Pulls Out A Gun And Shoots.  Police officers on a city team providing services to homeless people shot and killed a man who pulled a gun on them in inland Southern California, authorities said.  The shooting happened Saturday morning in an area of downtown Riverside frequented by homeless residents, the Press-Enterprise reported.  The officers were part of an outreach unit that included a code enforcement officer and two city employees who offer social services such as housing, substance abuse assistance and counseling, the newspaper said.  [Video clip]

Teen stabbed in 'random attack' while skateboarding near strip mall dies from injuries.  A North Dakota teen who was violently attacked while she skateboarded to her mother's house earlier this week has succumbed to her stab wounds, according to her family.  Daisy Paulsen, who often went by the nickname, Jupiter, died on Tuesday [6/8/2021], less than a week after what her father, Robert Paulsen, previously described as a "random attack," Valley News reported.  He said the family is working to ensure the 14-year-old's organs are donated and that her ashes are scattered across California's Bay Area, per her request.

Teen Stabbed to Death by Drifter as She Skated to Mom's House:  Cops.  A 14-year-old girl who was stabbed 25 times in a random attack while skateboarding to her mother's house in Fargo, North Dakota, has died from her injuries, her family said. [...] Arthur Prince Collie, a 22-year-old drifter with no fixed address, was arrested Friday on aggravated assault, robbery, and attempted murder charges.  He will now face a murder charge in light of Jupiter's death, according to Cass County prosecutors.  Collie's attorney, Mark Anthony Beauchene, did not respond to a request for comment.  The random attack occurred the morning of June 4 in the parking lot of a strip mall in the West Acres section of Fargo, according to a police report obtained by The Daily Beast.

LA Mayoral Candidate Threatened By Homeless Woman With Knife After Promising To Clean Up Dangerous Homeless Encampments.  A woman with a knife was arrested Monday [6/7/2021] during a Venice Beach news conference at which a city council member and mayoral candidate was speaking about Los Angeles' homelessness crisis and public safety.  Los Angeles City Councilman and mayoral candidate Joe Buscaino was speaking about the city's homelessness crisis and announcing his plan for creating a safer city during the morning news conference.  A Los Angeles Police Department captain was cut by the knife while assisting Buscaino's private security team in detaining the woman, according to the LAPD Officer Lizeth Lomeli, who said the injury was minor.  [Video clip]

Homeless man who was arrested 8 times last year charged in NYC Asian attack, cops say.  A homeless career criminal was charged Tuesday [6/1/2021] with slugging an Asian woman in Chinatown — as the city's fed-up top cop decried a revolving-door legal system that leaves New Yorkers "at risk."  Alexander Wright, 48, was hit with charges including assault as a hate crime for the unprovoked, caught-on-camera attack Monday that left the 55-year-old woman hospitalized, cops said.  The arrest adds to a rap sheet that includes a staggering 40 prior arrests — with five, including Monday's, within the past year.  "What are we doing in society when we are releasing these people right back onto the streets?" NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea raged during an appearance Tuesday on NY1. "It's putting New Yorkers at risk."

Female, Asian Cop Is Assaulted And Nearly Strangled By Racist Hobo Who Was Threatening Other Asians In San Fran.  Surveillance video captured Friday night [5/28/2021] shows a man attacking an Asian San Francisco police officer after she tried to detain him near Portsmouth Square.  The incident happened just before 7 p.m. near Clay and Kearny Streets and video of the attack was posted to Instagram Sunday morning.  Witnesses tell KTVU that the man seen on the surveillance video had been seen vandalizing rental scooters less than two hours earlier.  Police told the man that he needed to leave, but he showed up again and began yelling racist comments at Asian people as they walked by.  When police responded again, the man attacked the female officer.  [Video clip]

NYC man accused of attacking Asian man and biting off part of victim's finger busted for hate crime.  A Chinese immigrant who was beaten on a Manhattan street and told to go home has a message for the hate crime perpetrator who punched him in the eye and bit off part of his finger:  "America is my country now."  Youya Hua, 48, declared his allegiance Thursday after suspect Lloyd Revell was picked up early Thursday at the Skyline Hotel on 10th Ave. where homeless people have been staying during the pandemic.  Hua, 48, said he was on W. 43rd St. Tuesday morning, talking on the phone with his mother, when the suspect "walked to my back and punched my eye." [...] Revell, charged with assault as a hate crime, served prison time for an attempted assault conviction in the Bronx and was conditionally released by parole in April 2019.  He has numerous other arrests, a police source said.

Portland Has Turned Into Such A Dystopian Hellhole, Homeless Men Chase People Around With Knives.  According to a video by journalist Andy Ngo, a man with knives chased another man on Sunday in downtown Portland, Oregon, near the Justice Center and Central Police Station.  Ngo said the police did not respond to the attempted sting.  The area in the video has homeless tents on the sidewalk.  The victim and the attacker both appear to be white.  The attacker, who seems to come from the tent area, repeatedly used the n-word while chasing the victim.  The victim was able to flee from his attacker without being stabbed as the attacker had to stop to put on his pants.  [Video clip]

Man arrested for attacking Asian woman later vandalized NYPD car: cops.  The homeless man busted for allegedly attacking an Asian woman in Manhattan late last month vandalized a police car in Queens over the weekend — less than two weeks after his release, according to cops and prosecutors.  Eric Deoliveira, 27, smashed the window of a police car outside the 109th Precinct on Union Street near 37th Avenue in Flushing around 10:30 p.m. Friday [4/2/2021], according to authorities and police sources.  A station house security officer who was conducting a perimeter check about two hours later noticed the damage early Saturday [4/3/2021].  The footage revealed that Deoliveira was allegedly behind the vandalism — and he was arrested when an officer spotted him around 9:30 a.m., according to cops and the sources.

Asian woman stabbed to death in 'random' attack in California.  An Asian woman was fatally stabbed while walking her dogs in California in what cops are calling a random attack.  Ke Chieh Meng, 64, was out with her two small pups in Riverside around 7:30 a.m. Saturday [4/3/2021] when she was stabbed and left on the ground bleeding, KTLA-TV reported.  Responding officers found her on the ground and took Meng to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead, according to the station.  Meng's suspected attacker, Darlene Stephanie Montoya, 23, was identified by police as a transient.  She was arrested near the scene and charged in what police described as a "completely random" attack.

Homeless Woman Who Was Arrested Just Days Before For Assault Stabs A Random Asian Woman To Death In Riverside.  A 64-year-old woman was stabbed to death Saturday [4/3/2021] as she walked her two dogs in the La Sierra neighborhood of Riverside and a recently arrested 23-year-old transient woman was taken into custody for suspicion of her murder in what was described as a "random" attack.  Police started getting calls about the stabbing just before 7:30 a.m. but the Riverside County coroner's office reported Ke Chieh Meng of Riverside was wounded just after 7 a.m. on Golden Avenue about 40 feet north of Stonewall Drive.  Meng was rushed to Riverside Community Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 8:39 a.m., the coroner said.  [Video clip]

Suspected hate crime attacker who beat Asian woman in NYC arrested.  The man who beat an Asian woman to the ground then kicked her in the head in a brutal, caught-on-camera hate attack in Midtown earlier this week was arrested by police early Wednesday morning [3/31/2021], cops said.  Brandon Elliot, 38, was arrested at about 2 a.m. Wednesday and hit with a number of charges, including assault as a hate crime and attempted assault as a hate crime, police said.  Elliot lives in a nearby hotel that serves as a homeless shelter, according to cops.

Homeless man confesses to killing woman at South Street Seaport: cops.  A homeless man has admitted to beating and killing a 19-year-old woman whose body was found wrapped in plastic at the South Street Seaport on Saturday [3/6/2021], according to cops and police sources.  Austin Boehm, 25, made the confession to detectives after he attempted to check himself into Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward Saturday, sources said Sunday.  Police identified the slain Fulton Fish Market victim as Rosalee Sanchez, who was also homeless.  The motive for the murder was not immediately clear.  Police said a second homeless suspect, Christian Mercado, 20, also has been charged in the case.

Homeless Man refused entry into McDonald's.  Goes on a rampage.  [Video clip]

Judge drops case against homeless woman who stole USPS truck in Brooklyn.  A Brooklyn judge dismissed the charges against the homeless woman who took a stolen US Postal Service truck on a joyride Friday and left "vehicular mayhem" in her wake, borough prosecutors said Sunday — as they vowed to push to reverse the decision.  Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Hilary Gingold ordered Martha Thaxton, 21, committed to a psychiatric facility for theft of the mail truck in Bedford-Stuyvesant after her rampage — and the criminal case against her dropped.  The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office is now pushing to reverse the decision, a spokesman for the office said Sunday [1/17/2021].  "We believe the dismissal was in error and are working with the court to correct it," DA spokesman Oren Yaniv said in a statement.

'I just feel like punching someone today': Homeless man charged five times in six months for socking strangers.  To hear law enforcement tell it, Jose Gonzalez likes to talk to strangers with his fists.  "Don't shout!" Gonzalez is accused of screaming at his most recent victim.  "I just feel like punching someone today!"  Gonzalez's Jan. 5 attack on a 74-year-old straphanger at a Bronx subway station was the latest in a string of five random attacks he carried out against strangers since August, cops said.  His arrest record got attention from Police Commissioner Dermot Shea on Tuesday [2/16/2021], who used Gonzalez's case as an example of the court system's inability to put violent predators behind bars.

Man busted for series of attacks on women in NYC subway station.  A [black] man suspected in a string of random assaults on [white] women at a Brooklyn subway station was arrested Tuesday [1/5/2021] and charged with a slew of hate crimes, authorities said.  Khari Covington, 29, is accused of attacking nine women in separate instances in East Williamsburg since last August, according to police.  Seven of the alleged assaults occurred in transit — mainly at the Morgan Avenue subway station — while two were committed nearby on street level, police said.  Covington targeted light-skinned women, sources said.

The Editor says...
Hmmm...  He "targeted light-skinned women."  Is that a gentle way of saying he's a violent racist, and that he has committed a number of racially-motivated hate crimes?

Man, 29, is charged with hate crimes for 'beating nine light-skinned women in random attacks over six weeks' in a New York City subway station.  A man has been arrested after carrying out a suspected string of random assaults on 'light-skinned' women at a Brooklyn subway station.  Khari Covington, 29, was arrested and charged with a slew of hate crimes on Tuesday [1/5/2021].  He is accused of attacking nine women on separate occasions in East Williamsburg since last August.  Seven of the alleged assaults occurred within the Morgan Avenue subway station.  Two other assaults happened on the streets above.  Covington lives at a homeless shelter two blocks from the train station.

Homeless man set free after slugging woman in random subway attack.  A homeless man with 77 prior arrests sucker-punched a 68-year-old woman in a random attack inside a Manhattan subway station — and was only issued a desk appearance ticket before being set free, according to cops and police sources.  The victim, Rosella Trombetta, was heading home from her job as a designer for a clothing company, on the northbound R train platform of the 34th Street-Herald Square station, just before 8 p.m.  Tuesday when John Chappell, 64, suddenly clobbered her in the face, breaking her nose, according to police and her boyfriend Bob Edis, 77.  "She was the only one on the platform, standing in the middle, and she was reading her Kindle," Edis told the Post Wednesday at the couple's Upper East Side apartment.  "The guy just came up on her and punched her in the face.  It threw her back, so she has whiplash now.  He was going to go after her again, but she started screaming because she was hurt.  He walked off."

Homeless 'Woman' With A Knife Is Taken Out With Beanbag Rounds, K9 Cop In San Diego.  San Diego police shot a woman with beanbag rounds and used a police dog to take her into custody in downtown Tuesday after she allegedly stabbed a man and refused to drop the knife, police said.  The arrest was recorded by a bystander, and the video was circulated on social media.  Police said a 911 caller reported seeing a woman stab a man about noon on Ninth Avenue near Broadway.  The caller gave a description of the assailant and said the victim was walking away.  Officers found him suffering from a stab wound to his left arm.  He was taken to a hospital.  [Video clip]

Homeless man charged with killing taco shop worker who fed him 'every day'.  A homeless man is accused of fatally stabbing a Las Vegas taco shop worker who befriended him and regularly gave him food, police and relatives said.  Ciro Vasquez, a 31-year-old Army veteran who worked at his family's Taqueria Del Paisano, was stabbed Sunday [10/25/2020] outside the Mexican restaurant by Angel Martinez, 29, after the homeless man went inside and asked for "money and food" from the owner, according to an arrest report obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Vasquez then escorted Martinez outside, where a fight between the pair ensued, leaving the taco shop employee stabbed in the chest and the homeless man with a stab wound to his shoulder, police said.

Homeless man charged with arson over massive fire at East Harlem building.  A 61-year-old homeless man with a lengthy rap sheet was hit with a slew of charges Sunday over a huge blaze at his ex-girlfriend's East Harlem apartment building that left several injured, according to police.  Willie Manning is accused of sparking Saturday's inferno at the six-story building on East 135th Street and Fifth Avenue after allegedly barricading himself in to avoid being taken in for violating an order of protection. [...] Manning — who has a criminal record of more than 30 priors — was charged Sunday after first being treated at a hospital, the NYPD said.

Manhattan subway train derails after 'laughing homeless man throws metal clamps onto the tracks'.  Police in New York have arrested a homeless man who placed metal clamps on subway tracks and watched, laughing, as a train derailed, injuring three people.  The incident occurred in the West Village, as the uptown A train was entering the 14th St - Eighth Avenue station at 8:17 am.  The homeless man had found a pile of tie plates, which are normally used to secure the train tracks to the foundations, on a pile of construction materials at the 14th St. station, police sources told the New York Daily News.

How Bad Is The Homeless Problem In Southern California?  This Bad!.  Watch as this tweaked out homeless woman terrorizes a random home in Southern Californa in the middle of the night.  The woman first asks for food and a blanket but then goes full zombie after the woman offers to call the police to take her to a shelter.  [Video clip]

Retired NYPD detective beaten by homeless man.  A retired NYPD detective was mercilessly beaten and knocked unconscious by a Manhattan homeless man in a harrowing attack caught on camera.  The 56-year-old retiree was at a deli on W. 39th St. near Ninth Ave. at 9:10 a.m. on Aug. 11 when he asked 20-year-old Masterjardin Roman to stop panhandling in front of the store, police sources said.  The ensuing clash between the two men was caught on surveillance video obtained by the Daily News.  After about a minute of arguing, Roman, who lives in a shelter on W. 41st St., threw a bottle at the former detective who then chased after Roman.  As the two struggled on the sidewalk, Roman tackled the older man to the ground, causing the retired cop to briefly lose consciousness, officials said.  [Video clip]

Las Vegas man arrested for attacking roommate with 'medieval' hatchet: cops.  A Las Vegas vagrant nicknamed "Cutty" cracked his pal's skull using a "medieval looking" hatchet when he was asked to leave the man's home, police said.  Tali Jackson, 54, was arrested Sunday [5/17/2020] on charges including attempted murder with a deadly weapon in an April 30 attack that left his roommate "bleeding profusely from the head," according to an arrest report obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. [...] Once the victim was able to speak to police the following day, he said he let his friend "Cutty" and the man's brother stay at his apartment because they were homeless.  "Cutty," who was later identified as Jackson, and his brother were allowed to stay with the victim for two weeks after paying him $200.  But the man later kicked the pair out after they began using drugs and inviting other people over, police said.

NYC subway operator confronted by 'defecating' straphanger on 2 train.  A veteran subway operator said she witnessed a homeless man openly "defecating" on a No. 2 train Monday — a sign the homeless have "taken over" the subway system during the coronavirus pandemic.  Angelina Malave, 46, who missed a month of work after catching the virus, said the sight of the man — kicked back on a subway bench with his legs raised in the air over his head so his full rear end was in view — was "one of the worst things I've seen in my 18 years as a train operator."  "He was definitely defecating.  I was shaken and upset," she said.  Malave said she snapped a photo of the distressing scene, which later circulated on Twitter and on worker Facebook groups, at the Flatbush Avenue 2 train terminal around 10 a.m.

Language warning:  Non-stop profanity on the part of the cameraman.  Turn the sound off.
Democrat and Disease Infested San Francisco — where people bring dead animals to restaurants.  A crazy guy brought a dead raccoon into McDonald's.  [Video clip]

Carson to Democratic congressman:  Transgender rights don't supersede rights of abused women in shelters.  Ben Carson argued during a congressional hearing this week that the rights of transgender individuals in federally funded homeless shelters do not override the rights of abused women.  The secretary of Housing and Urban Development was speaking during a congressional hearing Wednesday [3/4/2020], where Democratic Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley challenged HUD's stance that federally funded homeless shelters have the right to install bathrooms and sleep areas based on biological sex.

On Leaving the Golden State.  The fabled Ventura Highway is all that separates my artist loft from the beach where surfing first came to the United States. [...] Living here and not going to the beach every day would simply be a crime but going to the beach puts me face to face with some people that should, by all accounts, be in an asylum.  The asylum crowd is easy to spot as they tend to wear everything they own even when it is warm outside.  Another sign is how filthy they are.  Now, you might be saying that of course they are filthy because they are homeless but that shouldn't be the case as there are quite a few charities that gives clothes to the homeless or allows them to use a laundromat for free.  I have a neighbor that plays guitar to entertain the homeless the first Tuesday of every month at a laundromat that serves the homeless and does so for free.  Also, there are free public showers all up and down the beach.

Wacked Out Homeless Guy Causes Chaos At A Gas Station.  [Video clip]

Ajla Zekan, Suspect in Jeff Co Cabbie Stabbing, Arrested in St.  Louis County.  A 21-year-old woman was charged over the weekend with stabbing a cab driver in Jefferson County.  Ajla Zekan was arrested on Saturday [2/8/2020] during a traffic stop in St. Louis County, authorities say.  Police had been searching for her since Tuesday when, they say, she attacked the driver "without notice," stabbing him eleven times. [...] In her past court cases, she has listed an address at a Sappington condo complex, but the Jefferson County Sheriff's detective described her as homeless in the probable cause statement.

Homeless woman goes on carjacking spree before crashing near City Hall.  A homeless speed demon with a millionaire's taste carjacked four different rides — including three Mercedes-Benzes — as she burned rubber down an eight-mile stretch of Manhattan's east side, causing multiple crashes along the way, cops said Saturday [2/1/2020].  Aludein Marks had no weapon, but plenty of attitude, as she boozily bullied her way past the drivers of each luxe vehicle, cops said.  When she smashed one car up, she simply shoved away a new driver and commandeered their steering wheel, police said.  It took just 30 minutes for the high-octane 25-year-old to steal and crash four cars and smash into nearly 20 others — amazingly only causing minor injuries to four victims, cops said.

Homeless man busted in slaying of Brooklyn philanthropist L. Antonio Litman.  A homeless man faces murder and arson charges in the death of beloved Brooklyn philanthropist L. Antonio Litman.  Police on Tuesday [1/28/2020] arrested Dondre Richardson, 33, who lives in a shelter on Wards Island, charging him in Litman's Jan. 20 slaying.  Firefighters found Litman's body after responding to a fire at his four-story brownstone on Adelphi St. near Dekalb Ave. in Fort Greene.  He had suffered puncture wounds to his neck and chest before the fire, authorities said.

Man Tries to Kidnap a 6-Year-Old Girl in California, a U.S. Army Vet Steps in With the Takedown of a Lifetime.  A family was checking out the famed hippie haven for the first time when a homeless man tried to snatch their 6-year-old girl from her mom's lap.  Uncle Chris — that would be, U.S. Army vet Uncle Chris — didn't appreciate it none.  Therefore, he took the guy down.  When cops arrived, it took six officers to subdue the aspiring abductor.

Serial slugger busted for punching out woman's teeth has long rap sheet.  A man was arrested Thursday for allegedly slugging a 23-year-old woman so hard it knocked out two of her teeth — and he has a history of similar "completely unprovoked" attacks against women, law enforcement sources told The [New York] Post.  Eugene Webb, 26, allegedly ran up to a 23-year-old woman who was walking on West Houston Street near Sullivan Street around 6 a.m. on Wednesday and punched her in the face, authorities said.  The blow knocked out two of her pearly whites, but Webb — who police say is homeless — continued to clobber the woman, shoving her against a parked cab and then running off, police said.

Gunman [had been fed by Texas church before shooting.  The Texas shooter who opened fire at a church service had been fed by the congregation on several occasions before he gunned down parishioners in a deadly rampage, church leaders said.  [He] had visited the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement before to receive food handouts prior to the shooting Sunday [12/29/2019] that killed two congregants, The Christian Chronicle reported.  "We've helped him on several occasions with food," minister Britt Farmer told the outlet.  "He gets mad when we won't give him cash.  He's been here on multiple occasions."

The Editor says...
Christians often feel an obligation to feed wandering bums, because of Matthew 25:40.  But there's a lot to be said for wisdom and discernment.

Oregon beggar sentenced to jail after causing over $9,000 in damage because no one was giving her money, report says.  An Oregon panhandler was sentenced to 20 days in jail on Wednesday [12/11/2019] after wreaking havoc on five businesses in Portland because she said no one was giving her money.  Marlena Rochelle Neely, 30, told authorities she was homeless and had been asking people for $5. Neely said she would shatter a window every time they failed to give her money because she was tired of people not helping her out, the probable cause affidavit stated, according to The Oregonian.

Detroit's comeback is a myth.  The Social Security office in Detroit is a dispiriting place done up in industrial grays.  It is filled with the long, glum faces of those who molder in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy waiting for some faceless bureaucrat to help them.  Take a number.  Sit down.  No loud noises.  No food.  No phones.  Into this purgatory enters Gus Malone, a raggedy 52-year-old homeless man, along with his invisible dog Timmy.  Gus parades Timmy up and down the gray carpet of the waiting room as if it were the competition floor of the Westminster Kennel Club.

Judge closes Third Avenue entrance to King County Courthouse, citing security concerns.  A judge ordered Monday [12/2/2019] that the Third Avenue entrance to the King County Courthouse in downtown Seattle will be closed for the rest of the year, citing safety concerns.  The court has received continued reports of assaults outside the courthouse, Presiding Judge Jim Rogers wrote in the order.  Rogers, who has long been outspoken about what he perceives as a lack of security in the area, said litigants, jurors, attorneys and employees have reported being attacked.

Portland homeless man who menaced a woman and child gets probation despite 220 previous arrests.  A homeless man named Brian Ray Lankford who threatened a woman and her son with a large tree branch in 2017 was given a break this week.  Instead of putting Lankford in jail, the prosecutors cut a deal which gave him probation and mandatory drug treatment.  That might not seem so bad until you learn how many laps Lankford has already made around this particular block.

Homeless man accused of attacking Queens boy was a 'ticking time bomb'.  The homeless man who randomly attacked a 6-year-old Queens boy, leaving the child in critical condition, was a "ticking time bomb" with a violent past, according to police sources and court records — and even his own family says he should have been off the streets.  Laurence "Larry" Gendreau, 35, was charged with assault Friday for grabbing and picking up the boy outside the child's grandfather's home in Kew Gardens on Thursday evening [10/10/2019], slamming the 6-year-old face-first onto the ground and leaving him with horrific injuries, authorities said.

Homeless man brutally attacks six-year-old boy in front of horrified parents in New York City.  A harrowing scene reportedly unfolded in Queens, New York, when a six-year-old boy was brutally attacked by a homeless man in front of his horrified parents.  Police say the child was walking with his parents when the homeless man grabbed him and body-slammed him, hitting his head on the concrete sidewalk.  The child was rushed to a hospital with serious head and face injuries, and is listed as critical.  He is expected to survive.

Vagrant attacks and seriously injures 6-year-old boy in Queens.  A homeless man with a history of mental illness randomly attacked a 6-year-old boy in front of his grandparent's house in Queens on Thursday afternoon, seriously injuring the boy, police and sources said.  The child was sitting on the steps of his grandparent's house on Metropolitan Avenue near 123rd Street in Kew Gardens at about 5 p.m. when the vagrant walked into their driveway, said Rabbi Naftali Portnoy, the boy's grandfather.  The 35-year-old vagrant then grabbed the child, picked him up and threw him to the concrete, slamming his face on the ground, police said.

Chinatown murders are proof liberal policies put us in danger.  If the weekend slaughter in Chinatown, where one homeless vagrant allegedly beat four others to death, shocks the conscience of decent New Yorkers, that's a good sign.  Now the goal must be to instill sanity — and common sense — in public health and criminal justice policies.  Because instead of making the streets better, the city is on a course to make them worse.  And more dangerous.  The weekend horror proves again that the decision to empty the state's mental hospitals was one of the great social mistakes of the last 50 years.  But as Stephen Eide points out in Tuesday's [New York] Post, deinstitutionalization wasn't a one-off.  It continues to happen today, despite being an obvious disaster.

Florida man says he smashed car windows because 'Trump owes me 1 trillion dollars'.  A homeless Florida man went on a vandalism spree smashing the windows of at least 20 cars parked at a hotel in Fort Walton Beach, claiming President Trump owes him money.  Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies arrested Justin James Wilson, 30, on Monday after allegedly using rocks and a belt buckle to smash windows and beat cars parked at a Holiday Inn Resort.  He caused at least $30,000 in damage.

San Francisco shopkeeper considers closing his store after being bitten by a homeless person for the second time in four months.  A San Francisco shop owner who was been bitten by a homeless man for the second in time in months says he will close his store rather than put up with the 'nuisance'.  Gilles DeSaulniers, 67, said he was trying to subdue a homeless man who had pushed his sister after she tried to eject him for the second time that day from their South of Market store.  But while holding onto him, the man 'twisted his head' and bit the shopkeeper's arm in an attempt to escape.

Homeless man who beat up a musician [is] out of jail after 10 days with no bail.  Last November I told you about a man named Ryan Georg who was brutally beaten by a homeless criminal.  The perp lived in a nearby homeless encampment and was part of a group that attacked Georg with a baseball bat, beating him within an inch of his life.  Georg is now in a wheelchair and get seizures.

Suspect shot by off-duty officer arrested for allegedly assaulting officer with a rock.  El Cerrito police have arrested a man, armed with a rock, for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.  The man, described by police as a transient, was shot and injured by an off-duty San Francisco police officer during the incident.  Thomas Vincent Whalen, 44, allegedly used the rock against the off-duty officer in a residential neighborhood Sunday night [8/25/2019].

Homeless man suspected in Manhattan 'hate spree' smiles in court.  A homeless man smiled during his arraignment Sunday morning on a series of "hate crime" attacks this month on random Manhattan pedestrians.  Todd Lyons, 33, had been free on two previous assaults in The Bronx and Manhattan when cops suspect he committed as many as seven new attacks; all the victims in the new attacks are white.  He appeared happy as he learned he'd been charged with felony and misdemeanor assault for three of those latest attacks.

Frustrated California Woman Has Scathing Message For Gavin Newsom After Homeless Chaos Destroys Her Small Business.  A frustrated California woman took to Twitter on Friday to blast governor Gavin Newsom's disastrous policies that have created a desperate homeless problem.  The woman [...] was clearly upset as she posted a video detailing why she may be forced to close the doors of her business.

San Fran Woman After She is Savagely Beaten by Homeless Man Released From Prison by Liberal Judge.  The terrifying video shows a woman being savagely beaten by a homeless man outside of her luxury condo complex off the Embarcadero near Beale and Bryant Streets.  Security footage shows the homeless man blocking the woman from entering the building, while another woman working the front desk springs into action to help.  The victim, Paneez Kosarianfard called for the liberal judge who released the homeless man from prison to be recalled.

Homeless man violently attacks woman outside San Francisco condo.  Terrifying video shows a woman being violently attacked by a homeless man outside a luxury condominium complex in San Francisco.  Paneez Kosarian was trying to get into her apartment building when she was assaulted by a man who was trying to keep her from going inside without him.

Naked, Angry, and Alone.  Early last month, 29-year-old Christopher Morisette rampaged through the streets of Seattle, stabbing three pedestrians with a steel folding knife, then stripped off his clothes and ran naked across a freeway interchange, where he was arrested.  In the past six months, three similar "random stabbings" occurred in Seattle's downtown commercial district.  Despite the police department's repeated efforts — including a block-by-block strategy targeting open-air drug-dealing and violence — crime and anti-social behavior stubbornly persist.  In 2018, just in the downtown precinct, Seattle police received 44,246 calls for service, including 7,215 reports of violence, 3,861 reports of narcotics and public intoxication, and 1,069 reports of mental health crises and suicidal behavior.

63-year-old woman in critical condition after random attack by homeless man in California.  A 63-year-old woman taking a break at work was beaten in an alley so badly that she was unrecognizable.  She was admitted to a hospital in critical condition.  The attacker was identified by witnesses and arrested.  He is 51-year-old Hector Manuel Ulloa, a homeless man who had recently been released from jail and who has many prior convictions.  NBC 4 reports he has now been charged with attempted murder.

Hero Citizen Tackles Suspected Arsonist Setting Wildfire in Los Angeles.  Legal Insurrection readers may recall that in the autumn of 2017, a series of wildfires broke out in Southern California.  One of those blazes threatened the famed Getty Center Museum.  On Easter Sunday this year [4/21/2019], a suspected arsonist, who set off fires in the Sepulveda Pass near the Getty Center, was taken into custody after a an alert citizen saw the man lighting the fires and tackled him. [...] The suspect has been identified as Steven William Adkison, a 31-year-old transient.

A Seattle Judge Sent A Homeless Man With 72 Convictions To Jail, The City Attorney Was Furious.  A 55-year-old homeless man named Francisco Calderon punched a complete stranger in the mouth one day in November, giving him a bloody lip.  The victim called 911 and Calderon was arrested and charged with assault.  He pleaded guilty to the crime.  That turned out to be his 72nd time being convicted of a crime, fourteen of those convictions were felonies.  And yet, City Attorney Pete Holmes worked out a plea deal with Calderon's public defender which would keep him out of jail.  Instead, he would get probation and drug treatment.  Enter Municipal Court Judge Ed McKenna whose job it was to sentence Calderon.  McKenna wasn't convinced no jail time was appropriate in the case and questioned the plea deal.

Arizona man, 23, killed after homeless man punches him in face, causing him to fall into oncoming traffic: police.  An Arizona man was killed Monday after a homeless man punched him in the face, causing the 23-year-old to fall into oncoming traffic, police said.  Aaren Shivers, 37, was arrested and booked into jail on one count of second-degree murder.  Officers were called to the scene in Phoenix just before 10:30 a.m.  Monday [3/25/2019] on a report of a person being hit by a vehicle, FOX 10 Phoenix reported.

We Shut Down State Mental Hospitals.  Some People Want to Bring Them Back.  Prisons and jails are filled with inmates who exhibit symptoms of mental illness.  So do many of the homeless people crowding the streets of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.  Violent episodes, like the Webdale murder and some recent mass shootings, have brought renewed calls to entrust the state with more authority to force psychiatric care on patients against their will.

Seattle: Homeless Man Arrested For String Of Arsons Had A Long History Of Arrests.  Earlier this week I wrote about a new report commissioned by Seattle business leaders which found that 100 homeless people in the city were responsible for more than 3,500 criminal cases.  These so-called "prolific offenders" all had drug habits and about a third of them also had mental problems.  But because they were homeless and their crimes were usually petty burglaries or theft, they were cycled through the justice system and released back onto the streets time and time again.  The problem with that approach was put in stark relief this week by the arrest of Matthew Hooper, a 38-year-old homeless man who police say is responsible for a string of arsons.

Suspect in UWS home invasion is a homeless man on parole: cops.  The knife-wielding suspect who tied up an Upper West Side family was a homeless man out on parole, police said.  Daniel Omolukun, 30, was living on the streets while on parole for burglary charges when he attacked a 24-year-old woman and her mother as they walked into their apartment building on West 78 Street near West End Avenue about 3 p.m. Thursday [1/31/2019], cops said.

Upper West Siders hire private security over homeless crisis.  This isn't just "spare change."  The city's homelessness crisis is so out of control that Upper West Side residents are shelling out $120 a month each for private security guards to patrol their neighborhood seven days a week, The [New York] Post has learned.  A dozen apartment buildings are part of the desperation effort that's costing a total $140,000 a year, and they all surround the former Hotel Alexander that the de Blasio administration recently turned into a homeless shelter.

One percent of the population commits one eighth of the aggravated assaults in a city of four million.
Los Angeles Doubled its Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime.  It wasn't all that long ago that the nation watched transfixed in horror as fires tore apart California, destroying homes and claiming lives.  In all the debates about global warming and forestry management, one singular cause of the fire was left unaddressed.  Global warming wasn't starting the fires.  People were. [...] This November, the Los Angeles Zoo had to evacuate its animals over a fire in yet another homeless encampment.  That fire not only endangered lives, but diverted resources from fighting the much more serious fires in Ventura County.  But instead of shutting down the encampments, Mayor Garcetti, who has done more to legalize and subsidize homelessness in Los Angeles than any of his predecessors, sent "outreach workers" from the expanding behemoth of the LA Homeless Services Agency to ask them to please move.  That worked about as well as expected.

Olympia homeless tent camp debate heats up.  Frustrations flared Tuesday [12/11/2018] at the Olympia City Council meeting as the issue of homelessness causes more anger in that community.  The fight has already been to court with a judge issuing a temporary ruling telling the city not to allow any more people to move into a city-sponsored tent camp.  There's no doubt the homeless camp has become a very divisive issue.  Businesses owners told the City Council Tuesday [12/11/2018] that they were concerned for their businesses and the safety of their employees.

Transient arrested after pushing man under moving truck in downtown L.A..  A transient has been arrested after shocking surveillance video showed him shoving a man underneath oncoming traffic in an unprovoked attack in downtown L.A. Wednesday morning.  It happened around 10:45 am in front of the Sultan restaurant near 6th and Broadway, and was caught on the restaurants surveillance video. [...] This horrific attack isn't the only one to happen in this area recently.  FOX 11 obtained exclusive video back in June after a transient armed with a a 2x4 with a nail in it used the weapon to gash a mans face open as he walked his dog.

This homeless man is getting evicted.  The city's homeless crisis has gotten so out of hand that officials are handing out formal "eviction" notices to people who hunker down and sprawl out in some spots for too long, The [New York] Post has learned.  One-legged vagrant Thomas Harris, who's been living rent-free outside a Brooklyn subway station, is scheduled to get the boot on Wednesday [12/5/2018], according to flyers taped around his makeshift hovel of shopping carts and plastic sheeting.  The notices, which went up on Friday, say city workers — accompanied by police — will clean up the plaza at Parkside and Ocean avenues where he's camped out.  "As of the date of the clean up, you must leave this location along with your belongings," the flyers warn in bold letters.

NYPD sends 20 cops to 'evict' one-legged homeless man.  A contingent of NYPD officers spent two hours Wednesday morning kicking out Thomas Harris, 61, from the Brooklyn plaza where he'd been camped out for weeks.  Cops tore down the hovel Harris built from shopping carts and plastic sheeting outside the subway station at Parkside and Ocean avenues, and hauled away about half of his possessions, including some of the hand drums he peddles on the street.  The ordeal also involved a pair of FDNY ambulances staffed with EMTs, and several outreach workers from the Department of Homeless Services and Breaking Ground, a non-profit city contractor.

Seattle Homeless Camp Closed After Resident Beats Man With A Baseball Bat.  There are an estimated 400 unsanctioned tent encampments in Seattle.  One of those camps is being closed down after a man living there attacked a passerby who was performing at a bar across the street, putting him in the hospital with a fractured skull.

Transit cops:  Homeless sweeps are 'not a solution'.  The MTA's new policy of clearing messy vagrants out of stations comes just as the city is cracking down on transients camping on the street level.  As the weather grows colder, the city recently directed cops to stop homeless people from erecting tents, encampments and other structures on the pavement, law-enforcement sources told The [New York] Post.  City Hall acknowledged the new street sweeps. [...] The move comes just as cops underground are expected to start sending more homeless people up to the street level, where the hope is they'll go to shelters.

Government fails the seriously mentally ill.  They live on the street, often foraging through dumpsters.  Some threaten us.  Occasionally, they assault people.  Thousands of mentally ill people cycle in and out of hospital emergency rooms.  They strain our medical system, scare the public and sometimes harm themselves.  Most, says DJ Jaffe, are schizophrenic or bipolar and have stopped taking their medication.  Jaffe gave up a successful advertising career to try to improve the way America deals with such people.

The Editor says...
Instead of prioritizing the well-being of the insane, perhaps our elected officials should protect the general public instead, and lock up the crazy people who are roaming the streets.

Denver removes outdoor storage containers after reports of homeless people living in them.  An experiment that was supposed to help Denver's homeless population came to an abrupt end this week.  City officials were forced to remove large outdoor storage containers that were meant to give homeless people a safe place to store clothing and other possessions after discovering that people were living inside them.  Chris Conner, director of the city's Denver Road Home homelessness agency, told The Denver Post that they started seeing people remaining inside the 4-by-6-foot cabinets.  He said there were also unconfirmed reports of people selling narcotics and allegations of prostitution inside the storage lockers[.]

Cops arrest drifter, 22, with scratch marks on his face who said he had an 'urge to rape and kill'.  A 'homeless' man has been charged with murder after he allegedly stabbed to death former Iowa State University golf champion, Celia Barquin Arozamena, and dumped her body in a pond on a golf course.  Barquin, 22, was found dead at Coldwater Golf Links in Ames, Iowa, Monday morning.  Police were called to the golf course at 10.24 a.m. after golfers found an unattended golf bag.  Officers discovered a body some distance from the bag.  A criminal complaint says Barquin, of Spain, died after being repeatedly stabbed at the course, which is near her university campus.  Police arrested 22-year-old Collin Daniel Richards and charged him with first-degree murder.

Why Washington Square Park is still riddled with drug addicts.  Ever wonder why Bryant Park and Union Square are junkie-free but not always Washington Square Park?  That's because New York University, which owns most of the buildings surrounding the park, has a love/hate relationship with the community.  In the early 1980s, junkies and the homeless were splayed all over and sandboxes were filled with cigarette butts, glass and worse.  Today, things have changed — but not by much.  As The [New York] Post recently reported, crackpipes are now busting out all over.

SF Mayor Says Her City is Drowning in Poop: 'There's More Feces - Than I've Ever Seen'.  San Francisco Mayor London Breed said the streets of her city are flooded with the excrement of the homeless in an interview Friday [7/13/2018].  Breed, a Democrat who was inaugurated as San Francisco's mayor Wednesday [7/11/2018], urged homeless advocacy groups that receive money from the city to teach homeless people to "clean up after themselves."  "There is more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever seen growing up here," Breed told KNTV.  "That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs — we're talking about from humans."

Handing them out like candy.
Seattle authorities luring homeless off the streets with plane tickets, rent payments.  It's been almost three months since homeless tents began to crop up on the streets surrounding Seattle's famous Space Needle, but now teams of city employees have begun clearing out the encampments near the tourist attraction today [7/4/2018], after a homeless man recently attacked a tourist visiting the site.  It wasn't the first such incident this summer.  Earlier in June a family from Arizona was attacked by a man with a rope from one of Seattle's homeless camps as they stepped out of their car which was parked near a large group of tents.  The homeless man had a rope and tried to strangle and punch a father after reports said the man confused one of the family members with TV star Ellen Degeneres.

Video shows bystander taking out violent homeless man with impressive flying kick.  A Good Samaritan's impressive flying kick is being credited with taking out a homeless man who was allegedly attacking another person in Los Angeles.  The martial arts move — like one would see in an action movie — was executed flawlessly Monday [6/25/2018] in downtown Los Angeles after the transient went after a man walking his dog in an unprovoked attack, Los Angeles police told Fox 11.

Starbucks Effect?  Homeless Black Man Stabs White Man To Death In Nice Restaurant Because Police Failed To Arrest Him.  Jamal Jackson is a homeless black madman who stabbed Anthony Mele, [a] white man who was eating in a nice restaurant, the kind of place you normally don't meet black homeless men.  You know, like Starbucks used to be.  The Ventura police, alerted to the presence of a black madman "yelling and being disruptive" had pointed a camera at him briefly, but then decided to let him rave.

Couple's anniversary night out in NYC turns into nightmare.  A couple's 10-year wedding anniversary celebration turned into a nightmare in Midtown when a crazed man walked up to the pair, spit on the woman and then punched her husband in the face, police said Wednesday.  Jeremy Goldberg and his wife Paola, 35-year-old restaurateurs from West Orange, NJ, had just finished seeing the hit Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen" when they were attacked while walking along Eighth Avenue near West 35th Street at around 9:55 p.m.  Tuesday.  The assailant, identified as 40-year-old Derrick Boyce, suddenly spit at Paola — and then beat Jeremy in the face, leaving him with a bloodied mouth and bruising on his right cheek, police said.  The attacker fled the scene, but was nabbed by cops about 10 minutes later.  He was charged with assault.

Homeless man arrested in random beating of elderly LA woman.  Police say a homeless man has been arrested in the random beating of an 86-year-old woman in Los Angeles.  [2/10/2018]

NYPD sergeant blames beatdown on Starbucks feeding homeless.  An NYPD sergeant urged a Midtown Starbucks to stop giving free food to the homeless after dozens of disturbance calls at the location.  But the coffeehouse, not far from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, ignored the warning and that same cop wound up being assaulted by a vagrant — who was angry over the quality of his free croissant, the officer charges in a lawsuit.  "I warned that someone would end up getting hurt — it was an unsafe environment.  It turned out to be me," Sgt. Timothy Wall told The [New York] Post.

Homeless man 'bursts into a steakhouse and randomly stabs father to death.  A father has died after being stabbed in the neck while his five-year-old daughter sat in his lap, allegedly by a homeless man who is said to have attacked him at random during a family dinner.  Anthony Mele, 35, was having dinner with his daughter and his wife in the Aloha Steakhouse in Ventura, California, on Thursday night [4/19/2018] when homeless suspect Jamal Jackson, 49, came into the restaurant at around 9.20pm.  Someone had called police three hours earlier to report Jackson being disruptive in the area but police did not respond, claiming they did not have the resources at the time.

As waves of homeless descend onto trains, L.A. tries a new strategy: social workers on the subway.  The Metro system has been a refuge for homeless people for decades.  But as Los Angeles County's homeless population has surged, reaching more than 58,000 people last year, the sanitation and safety problems on trains and buses are approaching what officials and riders say are crisis levels.  People looking for warm, dry places to sleep have barricaded themselves inside emergency exit stairwells in stations, leaving behind trash and human waste.  Elevator doors coated in urine have stuck shut.  Mentally ill and high passengers have assaulted bus drivers and other riders.

Guns, Violence And The Mentally Ill.  A significant subset of people with severe untreated mental illness are walking around.  Rather than finding a solution to this problem, we continue to hear that it's time to ban guns or shut down the National Rifle Association.  Those are patently absurd solutions to the problem.  What one can deduce is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are walking around that are severally mentally ill.  Many are frequently in and out jail.  Their symptoms are not controlled by medication, either because they do not take it, have access to it, or they abuse drugs and alcohol.  Currently, they cannot be held against their will until they commit a major felony and are determined to be not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial, at which time they can be retained for long-term care in a state psychiatric facility.  Others are just arrested for a variety of crimes after the fact, held and released again until they either die on the street, commit another crime or kill someone or themselves.

Forget Gun Control:  Bring Back Mental Hospitals.  After another inexplicable act of violence in Parkland Florida claimed 17 lives, the usual chorus (and some of the not so usual chorus) is screaming for gun control.  We don't need gun control; we need nut control.  With the first one constructed in 1773, our country has a history of building and maintaining mental hospitals.  In 1955, the United States had more than 100 mental hospitals with a population of over 560,000 people.  The U.S. population in 1955 was around 165 million.  Today, with a population around 323 million, we can safely assume more than 1 million people would be institutionalized by 1955 standards.  Where are these millions of people who should be in mental hospitals?  Living in our communities, wandering the streets while arguing with imaginary figures, or in prison having been declared to be insane, but competent after having committed a crime.

Another Liberal-Created Failure.  According to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation.  By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients.  Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an unrestrained natural setting. [... But] shutting down mental hospitals didn't turn out the way advocates promised.  Several studies summarized by the Treatment Advocacy Center show that untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings).  They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless. [...] Many innocent people have been assaulted, robbed and murdered by mentally ill people.  Businesspeople and their customers have had to cope with the nuisance created by the mentally ill.

'National disgrace': Community fights back as California overrun by homelessness, human waste, needles.  The specter of homeless encampments steadily expanding across the downtown streets of San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco — bringing with them a public health crisis — has one southern California community taking tough action to dismantle a two-mile-long camp just a short drive from Disneyland.  In a departure from the approach taken by other local governments in the state, officials in Orange County, Calif., have started to clear out the camp — by moving occupants and hauling away literally tons of trash and hazardous waste.

Mother of four gave homeless man a helping hand.  Police say he stabbed her to death.  Family and friends are not surprised that Jeanna Leslie offered a helping hand to a stranger.  But they are shocked that the stranger, a man described as homeless, stabbed her to death with kitchen knives in a bloody attack in her own home, according to police.  She had just moved to Denver from Texas a few months ago.

To Protect Illegals from Deportation, Denver Decriminalizes Pooping on the Pavement.  What's confusing for those who regularly use restrooms is that a better life was supposed to be the excuse undocumented travelers gave for coming to America, to begin with.  How does permitting people to leave human excrement on the sidewalk cultivate an environment unlike the one migrants came from?  And if the culture illegals left behind ends up being foisted upon America — how does that improve anyone's life?  Yet pro-illegal immigrant activist-types seem to believe it is "soft bigotry" to insist illegals assimilate by finding their way to a restroom like the rest of the civilized world.  Ironically, by allowing in Denver what is common for 40-million people in Pakistan, the left not only encourages unsanitary conditions, they also tacitly insinuate that people from certain countries are incapable of learning to use the bathroom.  And who's the bigot?

Lawmakers Close Homeless Camp Of 700 Near Disneyland.  On Monday [1/22/2018] in Anaheim, California, Orange County officials will begin to dismantle a Disneyland-area tent city of about 700 homeless people who have created an environmental crisis along a riverbed.  They will leave behind tons of trash and hazardous waste along the Santa Ana River channel which feeds into the ocean next to multi-million dollar homes in Newport Beach.  The camp stretches 1.4 miles.

Denver Decriminalizes Public Defecation To Make Life Easier For Migrants, Homeless.  The Denver City Council voted Monday [5/22/2017] to approve major sentencing reform (in other words, making penalties more lenient) on Class I and II offenses.  The latter cover crimes like public defecation, panhandling and camping out on the sidewalk.

A robot security guard is terrifying homeless people in San Francisco.  The San Francisco SPCA, a non-profit whose mission is "to save and protect animals ... and enhance the human-animal bond," is reportedly doing just the opposite with its latest robot security guard.  It is terrifying homeless people that hang out near the SPCA building in the Mission section of the city, which was part of its objective, but it is freaking out residents as well.  According to San Francisco Business Times, the robot — dubbed K9 — was put into place to try and deal with the number of needles, car break-ins and other crimes that have reportedly come from a nearby encampment of homeless people.

Portland's Disgraceful Anarchy.  The disorder that has long dominated the streets of Portland, Oregon reached a new low earlier this month, when Columbia Sportswear, a major retailer headquartered just outside of nearby Beaverton, had to close its flagship store downtown for a day after protestors blocked shoppers from entering.  The protestors were reacting to an op-ed by Tim Boyle, Columbia's CEO, in which he confessed that relocating his company to downtown Portland may have been a mistake, citing the crimes and indecencies his employees have endured, including "daily defecation" by transients in the store's lobby.  Certain repeat offenders of the city's vagrant population, along with other agitators, have issued death threats and broken into cars; one Columbia employee had to run into moving traffic after a stranger followed her and threatened to kill her.  Boyle, who is considering closing his store permanently, was right to call these events "outrageous and unacceptable," yet Portland mayor Ted Wheeler has offered excuses rather than confronting the issue.  On Thursday [12/14/2017], Wheeler blamed his city's wave of homelessness on the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, attacking Secretary Ben Carson for failing to "provide solutions."  Meanwhile, the city has been reluctant to deploy the crime-prevention resources that it already has at its disposal to address the homelessness wave.

A Homeless Camp Sparked The Fire That Ravaged LA's Wealthiest Zip Code.  An illegal cooking fire at a homeless camp started the blaze that engulfed more than 400 acres in Bel Air and the surrounding area, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.  LAFD investigators said the Skirball Fire started at a homeless camp just north of Bel Air, which is ranked as Los Angeles' wealthiest zip code.  The blaze engulfed 422 acres and destroyed six structures, damaging 12 more since it began about six days ago.

Cooking fire at a homeless encampment sparked Bel-Air blaze that destroyed homes, officials say.  The blaze that swept through the hills of Bel-Air last week, destroying six homes and damaging a dozen others, was sparked by a cooking fire at a homeless encampment in a nearby ravine, Los Angeles officials said Tuesday.  The encampment was nestled in a canyon several hundred feet from Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 Freeway, hidden from passing cars.  For several years, it had been home to an unknown number of people, officials said.  Investigators said the fire had not been set deliberately and they have not found any of the people who lived there.  The camp — one of scores of makeshift communities that have grown along freeways, rivers and open space across Los Angeles — was largely destroyed in the fire, leaving authorities with little evidence.

Homeless people defecating on LA streets fuels horror hepatitis outbreak, as city faulted.  An outbreak of hepatitis A is spreading through Los Angeles County after leaping from a large homeless contingent in San Diego, threatening thousands of people and fueling criticism that local officials have not done enough to contain the deadly liver disease.  Hundreds of cases have turned up in southern California as well as Michigan — but conditions in Los Angeles, where roughly 50,000 people live on the streets, have prompted deeper concerns.  Reports compiled by volunteer organizations have faulted city officials for not providing enough accessible toilets as the homeless population sharply increased by 23 percent this year.

Homeless Crisis in Los Angeles Worst Since Great Depression.  The number of homeless people living on Los Angeles's Skid Row is the worst the city has seen since the Great Depression.  This year, nearly 2,500 homeless and near-homeless men, women and children were served Thanksgiving lunch on Skid Row and in Pasadena and Canoga Park.  "We haven't seen numbers like this since the Great Depression," Georgia Berkovich, the director of The Midnight Mission's public affairs department, told the Los Angeles Times.

Dangerous, Filthy Homeless Encampments Force Closure of Hawaii Public Park Indefinitely.  Kakaako Waterfront Park on the island of Oahu has been closed indefinitely in order to repair the damage done by a large homeless population that has been camping there in makeshift huts and tents.  This is an unprecedented move by the state of Hawaii.

Kakaako Waterfront Park to close indefinitely as homeless population grows.  Kakaako Waterfront Park will be closed to the public indefinitely — starting at 10 p.m.  Sunday [10/22/2017] — because park officials say they can no longer ensure the safety of park users following a recent series of dog bites, fires and vandalism attributed to an estimated 180 homeless people living along the Kakaako shoreline.  There is no timetable for when the park will reopen.

Miami removes homeless from streets as Irma nears.  As the window started to close for evacuating Florida before Hurricane Irma arrived, police and social workers took to the streets of Miami in search of the city's estimated 1,100 homeless people.  Their goal:  Convince the homeless to willingly enter a storm shelter — or let them know they can be held against their will for a mental health evaluation.

The Editor says...
Why can't this be done every day of the year in every city?

San Diego starts washing down sidewalks, streets to fight hepatitis A outbreak.  Crews working for a private contractor began power-washing sidewalks with a chlorine solution in downtown San Diego on Monday [9/11/2017], part of an effort to stop the spread of hepatitis A among homeless people.  The crews cleaned sidewalks around 17th and Imperial avenues, where hundreds of homeless congregate and live in tents and other shelters.

County declares health emergency for hepatitis outbreak.  San Diego County declared a local health emergency early Friday night, adding a new level of urgency to a hepatitis A outbreak that has hit the homeless population hardest, killing 15 people and hospitalizing hundreds. [...] It has been clear for some time that the local outbreak is far beyond ordinary.  With 378 cases confirmed to date, it's the largest surge seen in at least 20 years.  The first cases linked to the outbreak occurred in November 2016, but there weren't enough of them until about March for local epidemiologists to know for sure that infections were spreading more quickly than usual.  Most hepatitis A outbreaks are associated with specific foods picked or processed under unsanitary conditions.  The virus that causes the condition lives in human feces and is spread when people don't wash their hands thoroughly enough after using the bathroom.

Orange County Residents Want Homeless Encampments Cleared Out Of Public Recreation Area.  The Santa Ana River in Orange County, California doesn't look like most people's idea of a river.  It looks more like the concrete spillways you see in movies shot in Los Angeles, at least most of the time.  Along the Santa Ana River is a bike path that allows people to ride all the way from Prado Dam past Angels Stadium in Anaheim to the ocean.  Next to that path is a dirt shoulder that has increasingly become home to hundreds of homeless people living in makeshift tents.  Some OC residents are afraid to jog or ride the trail and are demanding authorities do something.

Fountain Valley residents say encroaching homeless encampment needs attention.  Jonathan An, a homeowner in the New Chase condominiums off Harbor Boulevard, points to a jacuzzi in the gated community.  "They bathe here a lot," he said, referring to his new neighbors who live in a large homeless encampment that has sprung up on the banks of the Santa Ana River bordering his complex.  Another condo resident points to a roll of toilet paper and makeshift bathroom within three feet of a gate the residents have for accessing the river trail — which most now avoid.

Homeless booted from subways so de Blasio could have 'clean' ride.  Mayor Bill de Blasio ventured into the city's decrepit subway system Sunday — but didn't have to face the foul-smelling and often crazy vagrants whom ordinary New Yorkers are forced to contend with every day.  That's because police were ordered to roust all the homeless people from two stations ahead of the mayor's four-stop press event as he rode from his Park Slope gym to his new re-election headquarters in downtown Brooklyn, law enforcement sources told The [New York] Post.

De Blasio's Homeless Hypocrisy.  Remarking on the rise in homelessness on the streets of New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio sounded uncharacteristic of a progressive fighter for the poor and disenfranchised.  He condemned people sitting outside begging for money, "who are bluntly just panhandlers, who are not even homeless," but scrounge for handouts "because somehow they think it's fun." [...] De Blasio seems angriest at what are commonly called "crusty punks" — lavishly tattooed men and women in their twenties, often with dogs in tow, who populate the corners and parks of lower Manhattan, panhandling during the day and sleeping rough at night.

Honolulu lawmaker proposes bill to have armed park rangers to deter homeless.  A state lawmaker is proposing stationing armed park rangers at Honolulu city parks, where homeless encampments are common, because of a growing amount of trash and safety concerns.  Residents have taken issue with piles of trash and smell they claim come from homeless encampments, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Sunday [7/9/2017].  Honolulu city Councilman Trevor Ozawa wants residents to vote on a 2018 City Charter amendment to place armed park rangers in the city's biggest parks.  The rangers would be able to address illegal camping, littering and vandalism and enforce no-smoking policies should the bill come to pass.

The Editor says...
This proves my point:  If the "campers" aren't mentally unstable and potentially dangerous, why do the park rangers suddenly need to be armed?

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio So 'Frustrated' with Panhandlers He Wants to Make It Illegal.  New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said [7/7/2017] he is so fed up with the city's panhandlers begging for money on the street that he wants to ban the practice. [...] "I just wish it didn't exist," he added.  "I am just expressing a frustration because I think it hurts the quality of life in many ways."  De Blasio tried to backtrack on his statement during the interview, saying that he is aware of Constitutional protections in place that bar him from implementing a panhandling ban.

Chronic criminal assassinates NYPD officer.  Alexander Bonds, an ex-con with a long rap sheet, shot and killed New York City police officer Miosotis Familia, a mother of three, as she sat in a patrol car in the Bronx.  The attack was unprovoked.  It was an assassination.

NYPD cop assassin was a drifter who once beat up an officer.  The 34-year-old man who shot an NYPD veteran in the head early Wednesday was a drifter whose rap sheet included a 2001 bust for beating up a cop in Queens, police sources said.  Alexander Bonds allegedly used brass knuckles to pummel the cop from the 111th Precinct.  Four others joined in on the beating, sources said.  The outcome of that case was not immediately known.  Bonds was paroled in 2013 for a robbery in Syracuse when he shot Miosotis Familia, 48, in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx.

Crews Build Controversial 'Homeless Wall' In San Jose.  Caltrans is building a taller, stronger wall in San Jose to stop homeless individuals from returning to an encampment.  Caltrans has repeatedly cleaned up the large encampment under I-280, but the homeless keep returning.  While this new solution has some homeowners pleased, it is generating a lot of anger in the community.

Why you might see more people peeing on the streets of NYC this summer.  New Yorkers should prepare for a loud, smelly summer.  As of Tuesday, scofflaws who commit certain quality-of-life violations — including urinating, boozing or blasting loud music in public — will get little more than a slap on the wrist.  The change is the result of the City Council's controversial Criminal Justice Reform Act, which allows law breakers who've been cited for those and other low-level offenses to face justice in administrative hearings rather than in criminal court.

NYC: "Allahu akbar" shouting Muslim threatens to blow up Times Square Church, kill Christians.  A homeless man shouting "Allahu akbar" busted a Midtown church's door with a wrench and threatened to return and shoot all Christians, police sources said Wednesday [6/7/2017].  The drama began when Noel Droni asked a 37-year-old homeless man outside the interdenominational Times Square Church, on W. 51st St., if he was a Christian on Monday [9/12/2017], cops said.  When the man told Droni he was Christian, Droni allegedly pulled a red wrench from his backpack and smashed the church's glass door.

Homeless man with lengthy rap sheet is prime suspect in fatal beating of transgender woman.  A homeless man with a lengthy criminal past is the prime suspect in the fatal beating of a transgender woman in Chelsea, the [New York] Daily News has learned.  Medics found Brenda Bostick, 59, on the ground with severe head trauma on Seventh Ave. near 29th St. at 10:30 p.m. on April 25.  The homeless woman was discovered just a few blocks from the W. 25th St. shelter where she had been staying, sources said.  She died Thursday [5/18/2017] at Bellevue Hospital, and her death has been ruled a homicide.

3 arrested in Atlanta fire underneath interstate bridge.  Three people have been arrested in connection with the raging fire that collapsed a portion of Interstate 85 a few miles north of downtown Atlanta, crippling a major traffic artery in a city already known for dreadful rush-hour congestion.

Suspects connected to I-85 fire, collapse identified.  Three people have been arrested after a massive fire under I-85 caused a huge chunk of the roadway to collapse Thursday, multiple officials confirm.  The fire began in the middle of rush hour and brought Atlanta traffic on both sides of the busy Interstate to a complete standstill, as giant flames and plumes of black smoke billowed.  It left motorists stranded on the the Interstate for hours as Georgia State Patrol Troopers worked to divert traffic and clear the roadway.

Atlanta bridge fire suspect was smoking crack before blaze began, warrant says.  The homeless man accused of starting a fire that caused a section of a major Atlanta interstate to collapse was smoking crack before the blaze erupted, his arrest warrant shows.  Basil Eleby, 39, was charged with first degree arson and criminal damage to property in connection to the fire, and is being held in Fulton County jail on a $200,000 bond.  Eleby has been arrested 20 times since 2000, mostly on drug possession and drug trafficking charges, according to Fulton County jail records.

Homeless 'Spitting Lady' had $19K on her when arrested.  The homeless woman who has been spitting on Upper East Side residents was carrying more than $19,133 in cash on her when she was arrested Thursday for allegedly attacking a child, sources said.  Hilda Barrion — nicknamed "The Spitting Lady of 77th Street" — was picked up around 7 a.m. on East 78th Street and told officers she had amassed her fortune by collecting bottles and cans, the sources said.  Besides the cash pile, Barrion, 65, was hauling around a load of random possessions that included a spaghetti strainer and sewing needles.

'Spitting Lady' has no plans to stop.  The crazed crooner tormenting residents of an Upper East Side high-rise is just the latest example of how Mayor de Blasio has turned over the streets to unhinged vagrants.  Another is a woman known to Upper East Siders as "The Spitting Lady of 77th Street."  Confronted by The Post last week, the homeless woman — who locals say has been spitting on passers-by for years — shouted:  "I'm calling the cops!  I know my rights!  I live in the streets!"

Homeless man's nonstop drunken singing is driving people crazy.  Residents of an Upper East Side high-rise are being driven out of their minds — and apartments — by a homeless man who drunkenly sings at the top of his lungs all day and night.  The caterwauling crank has been plaguing the Saratoga condo tower at East 75th Street and First Avenue, where he sits on the edge of a cement planter and screams out freestyle lyrics of a decidedly personal nature.

Ohio panhandler, cited by police 250 times, refuses to back down.  Cleveland police and a persistent panhandler have been engaged in a war of wills for years at a homely west side intersection, a conflict that appears to subside only when the man is in jail.

Hawaii lawmaker says homeless using war memorial as open latrine.  A Hawaii state lawmaker is looking to add more protection to a Korean and Vietnam War Memorial that had been desecrated by some of the homeless population.  State Rep. Bob McDermott, R-Ewa Beach, said Friday the memorial, which stretches 100 feet in its Honolulu location, that some homeless residents were using it as an open latrine, according to Hawaii News Now.  "The homeless are nesting there and defecating there because it provides a degree of concealment.  It's human waste — several piles along with clothing and needles and other trash.  It's just terrible," he said.

Homeless woman arrested for pushing stranger into oncoming subway train in Manhattan.  A 50-year-old woman was lucky to avoid serious injury after a vagrant shoved her into the side of an oncoming subway train in Manhattan, sources said Wednesday [10/26/2016].  The homeless assailant, Patricia Abraham, 62, was busted Tuesday less than 24 hours after the unprovoked attack at the Prince St. station, sources said.  The victim was waiting on the northbound platform at about 4:50 p.m.  Monday when Abraham hurled her into the train, sources said.

Homeless Couple Having Sex In Public Last Straw:  Denver Residents Moving Out.  A young couple in Denver's West City Park neighborhood have put their home up for sale saying problems with Denver's homeless population are driving them out of the city.  "It makes us extremely uncomfortable and we don't want to live here any longer," said the woman, who asked not to be identified.  "Increasingly every day it's the number one reason I want to sell is because of the homeless situation."

A scene of homeless misery greets patrons trying to use Santa Ana's award-winning library.  Haley Flores grew up poring over history books at the Santa Ana Public Library while her little brothers built up their vocabulary there and read tales about alien attacks and outer space.  But a visit to the downtown library has become, on many days, a walk through a gantlet of misery:  Homeless men and women sleep in the lawn while others plead with visitors for change.  Inside the building, signs warned people to avoid restrooms where some homeless use sinks and even toilet water to bathe themselves and wash their clothes.  Some of Santa Ana's down and out used the study carrels to look for jobs — others shot up drugs, with syringes found discarded in planters and even a box of toilet seat covers.

Doughnut shop under fire after blaming closing on city's homeless.  A Grand Rapids doughnut shop has closed and their reasoning is not going over well.  Propaganda Doughnuts was in business for nearly 3 years on South Division Avenue.  The shop posted on their Facebook page that they are closed as of last Sunday and thanked customers for their business.  The post went on to explain that they were "unable to find answers and overcome the problem of the increasing amount of homeless and disadvantaged people who now frequent the street in front of our location."

College graduate, 21, fighting for his life after 'random stabbing attack' in Santa Rosa movie theater.  The California college graduate who was stabbed repeatedly in the neck in a 'random' cinema attack tried to fight off his assailant, his brother has revealed.  Adam Lucero, 21, or Pasadena, California, was watching The Shallows at the Roxy Theater when the man sitting behind him began stabbing him with a chef's knife.  Lucero — was left with a punctured lung and injuries to his neck, arm and ear — is in a heavily sedated state in hospital following a lengthy surgery.

Poopy pants attacker has struck before.  A second woman was attacked with feces on the Upper East Side by a homeless man already suspected of shoving excrement down another woman's shorts, cops said on Thursday [6/30/2016].  "Really disgusting attacks," NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said.  Cops Thursday night were questioning a suspect at the 19th Precinct station house.  In the first attack, a 33-year-old woman was walking when a man threw feces at her, striking her face and torso at about 4:30 p.m.  Monday [6/27/2016] in front of 67 E. 91st St.

The Editor says...
Victim:  white.  Perp:  black.  Hate crime charges?  Not a chance.

NYC monitoring of some mentally ill sparks rights concerns.  The program — apparently unique among American cities — keeps tabs on a roster of people with psychiatric problems and a history of violence, hoping to help them before they reach a breaking point.

Illegal alien charged with five horrific murders in LA.  The man charged burning five people to death in Los Angeles is an illegal alien from Honduras.  He was caught by the border patrol in 2012.  However, the Obama administration ordered the border patrol to release him into the public.  The Obama administration has a "catch and release" policy because the goal is to transform the US electorate via open borders and 3rd world immigration.

Homeless Man Charged Fire Deaths Was In US Illegally.  A homeless man charged with setting a fire that killed five people at a vacant Los Angeles building was in the country illegally, and was arrested for drug possession days before the blaze.

Suspect in fire that killed 5 was here illegally, fought with another transient before slayings.  A Honduran citizen charged with murdering five homeless people in an arson fire was in the United States illegally and had been arrested three times in the months before the blaze in a vacant Westlake building where transients were squatting, officials said Friday [6/17/2016].  Johnny Josue Sanchez, 21, started the fire to avenge a beating he took in a dispute over occupying a room in the building, a law enforcement source said.

Homeless Man Stabs Times Square Worker in Neck, Police Say.  A homeless man asking for money nearly killed a worker in Times Square after stabbing him in the neck with a scissors during a fight, officials said.  Zaki Smith, 26, stabbed the Times Square Alliance sanitation worker after the victim refused to hand over cash and a fight ensued, the NYPD said. [...] Cooper suffered "severe lacerations" to his ear and neck and bled "extensively, to the point where he was losing consciousness," the DA's office said.

Homeless man stabs victim in the neck with scissors in Times Square:  NYPD.  When a passerby refused to give money to a homeless man in Times Square, the transient allegedly pulled out a pair of scissors and stabbed the man in his neck, police said. [...] Zaki Smith, 26, allegedly approached a man in his 50s and demanded money, police said.  The older man refused and Smith allegedly stabbed him in the neck with a pair of scissors he had been concealing.

Senior Brutally Beaten In Downtown Los Angeles Attack Dies.  An elderly man who was brutally beaten in broad daylight in downtown Los Angeles earlier in April has died, according to Los Angeles police. [...] LaFawn Parker, a 46-year-old transient said to be mentally unstable, punched and kicked the elderly man several times as he was walking down the street, police said.

Black thug Meechaiel Khalil Criner 'allegedly' kills UT Austin white woman.  Chalk up another one for black lives matter and the progressive extremists.  Meechaiel Khalil Criner a black 'homeless' man allegedly killed UT Austin student Haruka Weiser.  Meechaiel Khalil Criner has been charged with murder.  As is typical when a black thugs murders a white, the media goes out and tries to make the killer the victim.  The media in Texas whines about how Criner was bullied and in foster care as a child.

Homeless Teen Arrested in Killing of University of Texas Student Haruka Weiser.  The suspect — identified as Meechaiel Criner — was arrested Thursday and booked in the Travis County Jail, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said at a news conference.  Student Haruka Weiser, an 18-year-old dance and theater major, was last seen alive on the Austin campus Sunday night before she was reported missing the following morning.  Her body was discovered near a creek on Tuesday, and investigators declared her death a homicide — setting off a manhunt on the campus of 50,000 students.

Two people slashed by vagrants in separate attacks.  Panhandlers slashed two men in Manhattan subway stations in separate attacks on Friday — one for refusing to fork over money, and the other because he didn't give enough, cops said.  The first attack took place at the Chambers Street station around 5 a.m.  when a straphanger on the A platform was approached by a beggar and then slashed across the face when he declined to give the vagrant any money.  The slasher then fled, cops said.  The injured man left the train station and went to his workplace where he called 911.  He suffered a minor cut to his face and refused medical aid at the scene.

Seattle Underbelly Exposed as Homeless Camp Violence Flares.  So dangerous is this city's biggest homeless camp, called the Jungle — three ragged miles stitched along the underbelly of Interstate 5 — that if a fire broke out there today, firefighters would not be allowed in without an armed police escort.  State lawmakers are considering a razor-wire fence around the camp, separating it from the city at a cost of $1 million.

San Francisco homeless remain in 'unhealthy' tent city despite order to vacate.  About 30 tents remained in place Friday [2/26/2016] as the deadline for homeless people to vacate a San Francisco tent city came and went without any action.  The homeless living in the encampment had until 5 p.m. Friday to clear out, Sam Dodge, the mayor's point person on homelessness, said.  City officials and the San Francisco Police have not said what they intend to do with the tent residents.

Woman slashed in face by homeless man in Manhattan furious he was on the streets despite 32 prior arrests.  A mentally ill man, off his meds and free to roam the streets, victimized at least six women — even before cops say he randomly slashed a woman in the face in Chelsea.  The family of 41-year-old Kari Bazemore told the Daily News the accused Chelsea slasher has been in and out of psychiatric institutions for at least the last five years.  Bazemore began showing signs of psychiatric problems 15 years ago, his sister Dana Bazemore said.  He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and was hospitalized at least three times following arrests.

Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to Police.  The police are our de facto front-line mental-health workers — "armed social workers" in the pungent phrase of one observer — and jails are our de facto psychiatric-hospital system.  In its analysis of 2015 police shootings, the [Washington] Post found dozens of cases in which the police were called as a means of getting treatment.  Shirley Marshall Harrison called the Dallas police when her schizophrenic, bipolar son was out of control.  He was shot down while allegedly charging police with a screwdriver.  "I didn't call for them to take him to the morgue," she said of the cops.  "I called for medical help."  It's a poignant lament, but why do the families of the severely mentally ill need to rely on the police for medical assistance?  When someone has a heart attack or gets cancer, we don't call the police.

Homeless male prostitute suspected of murdering Philadelphia psychiatrist in hotel.  Philadelphia police say they have arrested a homeless prostitute in the strangulation of a 75-year-old psychiatrist in a city hotel room.

Woman driver intentionally plows into crowd leaving one dead, six critical and 31 injured.  Jessica Valenzuela, 32, of Buckeye, Arizona, died in the crash on Sunday night [12/20/2015], after Lakeisha N. Holloway, 24, of Portland, allegedly hit pedestrians on two different sections of the sidewalk while heading north on Las Vegas Boulevard near Bellagio Way. [...] She did not appear to be under the influence of alcohol, police said, but a drug recognition expert on the scene determined Holloway was under the influence of a 'stimulant,' although blood test results are pending.  Holloway told authorities that she had been in Las Vegas for around a week, Lombardo added, and police believe she was living in her vehicle with her daughter.

1 dead, 36 injured after intentional crash on Las Vegas Strip.  Police have now confirmed that the crash was intentional. [...] Witnesses reported that people tried to stop the driver and that her windshield was completely smashed.  She fled the scene and police caught her at Flamingo Road and Koval.  She was briefly barricaded in her car and refused to come out for a while before she was arrested.  Her vehicle has Oregon license plates and it is believed that she has been in Las Vegas for about a week.

Police: Driver in Vegas crash was seeking estranged partner.  Suspect Lakeisha N. Holloway, 24, resided in Oregon and had been in Las Vegas for about a week in her 1996 Oldsmobile sedan, parking it at garages throughout the city, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said.

Pentagon probes how civilian lived for months in Fort Bragg barracks.  Army officials are trying to figure out how a civilian managed to live for several months at Fort Bragg, eating and bunking with special forces operators despite not being a member of the military.  The unidentified man, who a source told FoxNews.com is mentally ill, was found out last month, and has been questioned.  The source said the man told the real soldiers he lived among that he was a demolition specialist and exempt from the daily activities they took part in.

Homeless Man Allegedly Lived In Army Barracks As Soldier For 8 Months.  A homeless man in North Carolina allegedly posed as an Army soldier and lived in a special forces barracks at Fort Bragg for eight months before being caught, according to a popular military Facebook page.  The incident was first reported on the Facebook page [...] in a detailed post.  The Fayetteville Observer has confirmed the hidden civilian's discovery, but otherwise military officials have yet to confirm or deny the report.

Accused rapist at Miami-Dade assisted living facility no stranger to justice system.  A mentally ill drifter with a history of sexual violence, Eric Fields stands accused of savagely raping an employee at a South Miami-Dade assisted living facility in June.  He is no stranger to the criminal justice system.  Time and again, the system could not safeguard against his behavior — underscoring the challenges authorities face in dealing with sex offenders suffering from severe mental illness.

City subways are a pervert's paradise.  Sex crimes on the city's subways have soared by nearly 20 percent this year, due to a surge in the number of gropers, flashers and voyeurs, NYPD officials said on Monday [12/14/2015]. [...] In the past five months alone, the rate of increase has more than doubled — with a total of 699 incidents reported, or 106 more than the 593 recorded for the same period last year, authorities said.  The most common offenses are forcible touching, lewdness and unwanted surveillance, NYPD Deputy Chief Vincent Coogan told MTA officials at a meeting.

Homeless reign over LaGuardia to come to an end: Port Authority.  The Port Authority said Friday [12/18/2015] it will turn La Guardia Airport into a bum-free zone -- but not until after the holidays.  The agency made the move following an exposé in The [New York] Post showing that at least 50 homeless squatters had moved into the busy airport, sleeping on vents, stealing food from shops and getting naked to wash themselves in the bathrooms.  The homeless have also been taking up chairs meant for passengers while snoring under blaring televisions.  Some hang around during the day, arguing with cleaning crews and bothering shop workers.

Homeless squatters are taking over LaGuardia Airport.  Vice President Joe Biden once compared it to a "Third World country" — but LaGuardia Airport has become so riddled with homeless that it could now even make some of those nations look good.  The number of derelicts living at the airport has increased dramatically in the past year, turning the main terminal into the city's most popular de facto flophouse, where they sleep, eat and wash up while competing for space with passengers, according to Port Authority sources.

The Left And The Mentally Ill: A Band Of Lunatic Brothers.  The Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, which had been a goal of the Left since the late 1960's, one that was fully realized by the late 1970's, has brought about nothing buy misery, violence, and death for both the sane and those people the Left supposedly sought to help. [...] Releasing the Mentally Ill into our Society and forcing us at the point of a gun to not be able to take effective measures to prevent them from causing harm, the Left is ensuring that our Society will begin to totter and will eventually fall into Mayhem and Disorder.

Crazy People Are Dangerous, Part 4.  If only we were more compassionate and understanding, liberals say, we could alleviate the suffering of these pathetic nutcases.  Yet these pleas for compassion and understanding have an effect of blinding us to the fact that mentally ill people may pose genuine risks to public safety.  Think about the Creepy Little Weirdo who committed the Sandy Hook massacre.  Think about the Creepy Little Weirdo who committed the Isla Vista massacre.  It was after Gus Deeds stabbed his father, Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds, in November 2013, that I put it bluntly:  Crazy People Are Dangerous.  And since then we have seen numerous stories that confirm this basic truth, including the German co-pilot who killed 150 people when he crashed a plane into a mountain.

Bums declare war on Christmas.  Vagrants are urinating in the street, hassling passers-by for cash — and now they've ruined Christmas in The Bronx.  The annual outdoor Christmas tree lighting in the borough's famed Little Italy section was canceled because the soaring panhandler population forced the sponsors to spend so much on security that there was no cash left for the celebration.

Crazy People are Dangerous, Part 8.  Liberals tell us it is heartless and "mean-spirited" to suggest that public safety would be best served if mentally ill people with histories of dangerous behavior were locked up in psychiatric wards.  Americans are told that it's OK to let delusional and antisocial freaks roam around free in our society, because what could possibly go wrong?  When one of these dangerous kooks who roam among us finally commits an act of crazy violence, however, liberals quickly rush to tell us that his insane actions have some kind of political significance and that the proper response to this atrocity is [...] more liberalism.

Michael Jordan's Steakhouse: We're overrun by bums!  The city's homeless plague is so rampant that it's threatening to put Michael Jordan's Steakhouse out of business, according to a new lawsuit.  The entryway to the Grand Central Terminal eatery is being overrun by bums, thanks to a long-term construction project on Vanderbilt Avenue that has created a festering enclave of vagrants, restaurant owner Matthew Glazier says in court papers.  And business is so bad as a result that revenue has dropped 24 percent, according to the suit against his landlord, the MTA.

L.A. lawmakers to declare 'state of emergency,' commit more than $100 million to fight homelessness.  Los Angeles elected leaders announced Tuesday [9/22/2015] that they will declare a "state of emergency" on the growing homelessness problem in the city and commit $100 million toward housing and other services for homeless people.  The proposal, which was presented at a City Hall press conference attended by City Council members and Mayor Eric Garcetti, coincides with a Garcetti administration proposal, issued late Monday, that aims to free up nearly $13 million in newly anticipated excess tax revenue for short-term housing initiatives.

The Editor says...
Homeless people in the streets is a chronic problem, but it's not an emergency.  It is a condition that has developed over several decades, as a result of left-wing nanny-state policy, driven by emotion rather than reason.

Those Yellow-Stain Blues.  It's a lucky thing the driver wasn't crushed when a three-story-tall lamp post fell on top of a car stopped on the corner of Pine and Taylor Streets in San Francisco on a Monday evening last month.  The base of the lamp post had been corroded after countless soakings with urine from San Francisco's ubiquitous homeless, prompting a spokesman for the city's Public Utilities Commission to encourage people and dogs alike to water fire hydrants rather than light poles because the fire hydrants are made of stronger cast iron.  That collapsing lamp post is a perfect metaphor for urban Democrat governance.  If you want to know what inevitably results from allowing the Far Left to run cities cleared of middle-class voters over decades, picture vast armies of homeless bums gleefully micturating on public infrastructure, while public officials merely beg for more clichéd choices amid terror of alienating a prominent, if noisome and not quite sane, constituency, until that piddle-drenched infrastructure inevitably topples.  That is, after all, what Democrat cities ultimately put on display.

'Homeless by Choice' in New York.  Mohamed Rasul is homeless in New York City.  But don't feel too sorry for him, he's "homeless by choice."  He's got a free laptop and free Wi-Fi in Bryant Park.  According to Mohamed, he's "never been as comfortable as under de Blasio" because no one forces him to leave the park where a miniature carousel spins children around on painted horses and a yoga lesson takes place on the main lawn.  These things, the carousel, the yoga lesson and the free Wi-Fi, only exist because the park was restored from its old days as a drug dealing hangout known as Needle Park.

Big Apple Versus Big Toilet.  Not long ago, I asked [San Francisco] Mayor Ed Lee what he sees as contributing factors to San Francisco's high P.U. quotient.  His answer:  The drought means less rain to wash away human waste.  Other cities have winters that prompt street people to move to better climates.  Development has claimed space that used to house homeless encampments.  He also credited "historic levels of drug use" from "people who don't get held responsible for their behavior."  Lee has a solid point on each of those factors.  I would add another:  pride.  San Franciscans are proud of the city's vaunted tolerance.  Lest they seem intolerant, many locals have been reluctant to complain about the pervasive smell of urine and occasional glimpses of public defecation until conditions become impossible to ignore.

Bums Bury San Francisco in Feces.  San Francisco is also a center of leftism.  The liberals running the city have laid out a red carpet for dysfunctional street people, who come from all over the country to collect their freebies and crap on the sidewalk.  Combined with the policy of no longer incarcerating any but the most obviously violent lunatics, this has reduced the city to a cross between a mental institution and a sewer.

Angry cops post pictures of vagrants online.  NYPD cops fed up with vagrants making life miserable in the city are taking matters into their own hands — by snapping photos of quality-of-life scofflaws and posting them online.  The Sergeants Benevolent Association is spearheading the effort, emailing a letter to members Monday [8/10/2015] urging them and their families and friends to take pictures to document the decline of the city.

Justice Department asks judge to block enforcement of homeless camping ban.  The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday [8/6/2015] urged a judge to block enforcement of an anti-camping ordinance in Boise, Idaho, by employing the rationale from a seminal Los Angeles homeless-rights case.  The outcome in Boise could reverberate in Los Angeles — where officials are considering resuming enforcement of the city's own anti-camping ordinance, considered among the strictest in the country.  It bans sleeping, sitting or lying on sidewalks and other public property.

Lamp post destroyed by urine falls in street, just misses driver.  Concerns about San Francisco's decaying light poles were ignited Monday night [8/3/2015] after one corroded by urine toppled onto a car, narrowly missing the driver.  The three-story-tall lamp post at Pine and Taylor streets snapped around 6:30 Monday and landed on a nearby car, almost crushing the driver.  No one was injured.  A perfect storm of conditions rusted out the base of the pole, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission officials say, and caused it to fall.  At the time, the lamp post, which was already old, was damaged by urine and weighed down by an oversized banner.

Photos Show Homeless Man Taking Bath In Columbus Circle Fountain.  It was a shocking scene at one of the city's most visited landmarks.  CBS2 political reporter Marcia Kramer obtained exclusive images of what some call the latest public insult of Mayor Bill de Blasio's New York City.  Pictures were snapped of a homeless man taking a bath in the fountain at Columbus Circle, a popular city landmark that is now the bathtub of a bum.  The man who took the photo called the incident simply appalling.  "This, for me, was the tipping point on quality of life.  This man is actually lathering up with a bar of soap," Ken Frydman said.

Bums are running amok in New York City and it needs to stop.  One day last week, a deranged, apparently homeless man screamed bloody murder outside the Marriott hotel in Downtown Brooklyn.  "I need a dollar!" he shrieked.  "I need two dollars!  I need to feed my kid!"  There was no child present.  But the man, who appeared to be in his 30s, bore the unmistakable aroma of cigarettes and urine.  He singlehandedly drove the horde of lunchtime pedestrians from the hotel's plaza.  There was no cop in sight.  On Smith Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, one afternoon, a disheveled man who looked to be in his 20s demanded spare change, but not from people exiting the F subway train station.  He targeted women pushing small kids in strollers, causing his vulnerable marks to scatter as if avoiding a virulent disease.

Apparently it's now OK to pee on the streets of New York City.  Here's an up-close look at a quality-of-life offense the City Council wants to decriminalize.  This urinating vagrant turned a busy stretch of Broadway into his own private bathroom yesterday — an offense that would result in a mere summons if Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and her pals get their way.  Wrapped in rags and a Mets blanket the hobo wandered into traffic at around 10:30 a.m. and relieved himself as cabs, cars and buses whizzed by between West 83rd and 84th streets on the Upper West Side.

Avert Your Eyes and Hold Your Nose.  Downtown San Francisco feels like a large public toilet without enough janitors.  More than once this year, I've seen men drop their pants in public places — including at Fifth and Market — to leave a smelly mess on the sidewalk.  You can walk for blocks and never escape the stench of stale urine.  At lunchtime, I see street people passed out on high-traffic sidewalks, and I am afraid to walk around them.  The homeless have been a problem in San Francisco for as far back as anyone remembers, but to me it seems this year is the worst.

Woman who tries to sneak onto planes arrested twice in 2 days.  A woman who has repeatedly tried to sneak aboard airplanes has been arrested in Chicago twice in as many days, the latest incident while trying to get through security without a ticket at O'Hare International Airport.

The Editor says...
Two obvious questions arise:  Why hasn't she locked up for a long time, and how many times has she successfully flown without a ticket?

Hmmm...  Ban machetes, or lock up insane homeless people.  Which would make more sense?
Politicians call for tougher machete laws after park attack.  Lawmakers on Wednesday [6/24/2015] demanded tougher regulations to prevent a repeat of the wild machete attack in Bryant Park.  "It is disturbing," said state Sen. Tony Avella, a day after a foreign tourist was slashed with an easy-to-get and hard-to-ban machete.  "They are deadly weapons," he said.  Smaller knives such as switchblades and gravity knives are already banned.  But machetes are considered tools, the same as butcher's knives.

Man Slashes Woman With Machete in Bryant Park, Authorities Say.  A man wielding a machete struck a 31-year-old woman in the arm in Bryant Park on Tuesday in what the police said appeared to have been a random attack. [...] The man, identified by the police as Frederick Young, 43, was charged with assault. [...] Mr. Young has 23 previous arrests, Chief Boyce said.

The Editor says...
How do I know he's a homeless man?  Just turn to the British press.  They're not afraid to say so.

Machete-wielding homeless man slashes woman, 31, in New York's Bryant Park.  A machete-wielding homeless man has slashed a stranger in a New York City park after she left a nearby yoga class.  Frederick Young, 43, was allegedly carrying the large blade through Bryant Park in Manhattan around 11.30am when he approached the woman and sliced her arm.

Fake Buddhist monks are the new squeegee men of New York.  Bands of beggars dressed like Buddhist monks have invaded the High Line and other city parks, demanding upwards of $40 from tourists — and officials are fed up.

Cops shoot hammer-wielding suspect in Midtown.  Dramatic video released by the department shows career criminal David Baril, 30, strike Police Officer Lauren O'Rourke three times with the weapon before her partner opened fire around 10 a.m. on Eighth Avenue and West 37th Street. [...] Baril had eight prior arrests, including once for assaulting a police officer trying to hand him a summons in Riverdale Park in 2013, officials said.  He's also been arrested for possessing cocaine, a stun gun and a razor.  Aubry said Baril suffers from paranoia and schizophrenia and has been living on the street since he voluntarily left a mental health facility in upper Manhattan.

The Trans Ex-Convict Who Crashed The NSA.  The individual who was shot at and apparently killed by federal police on Monday at the entrance to the NSA's main campus identified as transgender and had a long history of run-ins with the law, including charges for prostitution, robbery, and assault.  Ricky Shawatza Hall of Baltimore was identified by the FBI on Tuesday [3/31/2015] as the driver of an SUV that police fired on after it refused to yield to orders from officers to stop at the entrance to Fort Meade, Maryland.

Transgender woman who was shot dead trying to ram SUV through NSA gate was a 'homeless prostitute who was facing prison time'.  The FBI has identified two people who were shot outside the National Security Agency's headquarters on Monday after allegedly stealing an SUV they were driving from a motel.  Kevin Lamont Fleming, 20, and his friend Ricky 'Maya' Shawatza Hall, 27, were allegedly picked up in Baltimore by another man on Sunday night before 'partying' at nearby lodgings in Howard County.  The unidentified 60-year-old Baltimore driver went to the bathroom on Monday morning and discovered that both his passengers and his Ford Escape SUV had gone, he told police.

Homeless man sets [him]self on fire during St. Pat's bar crawl.  Hoboken police received a call about 11 p.m. that a man was trying to set himself on fire and found him with is jacket ablaze, Chief Kenneth Ferrante told NJ.com.  Officers shouted for him to get to the ground so they could extinguish it, but he refused.

'Serial stowaway' Marilyn Hartman arrested at Chicago's O'Hare.  Marilyn Hartman, who became known as the "serial stowaway" after numerous attempts to sneak onto airplanes, was arrested at an airport twice last month — this time in Chicago — after she was spotted in a restricted area without a ticket, authorities said. [...] In August, she sneaked onto a plane from Mineta San Jose International Airport and was arrested when she landed at Los Angeles International Airport, authorities said. Hartman told reporters she was drawn to airports because she was homeless, and they were safer than the streets.

Nationally known 'serial stowaway' arrested in Nassau County.  The woman who is known nationally as the "Serial Stowaway" was arrested Monday [2/9/2015] in Nassau County.  Marilyn Jean Hartman, 63, is charged with fraud/impersonation, defrauding an inkeeper and trespassing after she was found to have checked into the Omni Amelia Island Plantation under another person's name, according to a Nassau County Sheriff's Office arrest report.  An online search of Hartman's name will yield dozens of mugshots and stowaway arrests from all across the country.

'Infamous serial stowaway' Marilyn Jean Hartman strikes again.  Marilyn Jean Hartman boarded a plane in Minnesota and arrived in Florida on Sunday [2/8/2015], she told authorities.  There, at Jacksonville International Airport, she claimed to have hopped on a transportation van to an island resort. [...] The arrest report says Hartman is homeless.

More homeless camps are appearing beyond downtown L.A.'s skid row.  Over the last two years, street encampments have jumped their historic boundaries in downtown Los Angeles, lining freeways and filling underpasses from Echo Park to South Los Angeles.  The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county agency, received 767 calls about street encampments in 2014, up 60% from the 479 in 2013.  Some residents believe the city is exporting its downtown homeless problem to their neighborhoods.  But social service agencies and volunteers say it isn't that simple.  They say that although downtown development and skid row cleanups are squeezing out some homeless people, many camps are filled with locals.

San Jose begins closing down 68-acre homeless encampment.  San Jose on Thursday [12/4/2014] is shutting down a sprawling homeless encampment, known as the Jungle, that has become a major embarrassment to the city.  Hundreds of homeless people turned 68 acres along Coyote Creek into a shantytown with lean-tos and underground bunkers, even a treehouse.  The Jungle had become a symbol of Silicon Valley's rampant homeless problem, and officials decided to close it down for good.

Conflicts in New York City Parks as Homeless Population Rises.  In Harlem River Park in Manhattan, homeless men can be seen sleeping on benches around the basketball courts and sprawled out on a soccer field by day, then hunkering under an overpass at night.  In Brooklyn, dog owners in Fort Greene Park have had ugly confrontations with homeless people after their dogs woke them up in the early morning when they are allowed off-leash.  And in the Bronx, there are so many homeless people in one small park, Devanney Triangle, that the community board and parks department are discussing the removal of all benches.

'Squeegee Man' busted for 226th time.  The "Squeegee Man" of Midtown was busted again — his 179th arrest — for illegally washing car windows Friday evening [9/5/2014], a law-enforcement source told The [New York] Post.  Gregg Washington, 40, was caught washing motorists' windshields at the corner of West 42nd Street and 9th Avenue around 4:30 p.m., a source said.  "It appears as if he moved towards the West Side because of the heat he was getting [on the East Side]," another police source said.

The Streets of San Francisco.  If you want to film a zombie movie on the cheap, San Francisco offers a ready-made location overflowing with extras.  The mentally ill, addicted, and homeless find a home in the City by the Bay as they do nowhere else in North America.  In this walkable Western metropolis, one walks a gauntlet of down-and-outers betraying that unmistakable drug gait and displaying lights out upstairs through their windows' 100-watt stares.

The Editor says...
The article above gives a fairly good description of Hell.  Unfortunately the writer is describing San Francisco.

Squeegee men are back terrorizing NYC streets.  They were the ultimate symbol of the lawlessness and blight of the 1980s and early 1990s — and now they're making a comeback.  Squeegee men are menacing motorists across New York City, including spots near the Holland, Lincoln and Queens-Midtown tunnels, as well as the Queensboro Bridge, The [New York] Post has learned.  Residents and drivers who pass through the areas said the panhandlers are spraying and wiping windshields without permission to shake down drivers for cash.

Dart: Up to 9,000 inmates signed up for Obamacare to help with mental health treatment.  Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, attempting to cope with what he says is a growing mental health crisis among inmates at the county jail, said up to 9,000 people who have been incarcerated have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act in an attempt to get the care they need. [...] The sheriff said that the process of closing mental health institutions under the goal of putting the mentally ill into community-based treatment has led to 3,000 of the jail's 10,000 inmates requiring treatment.

$1M bond set for suspect in slaying of Phoenix priest.  Bond was set at $1 million for a 54-year-old ex-convict arrested in the shooting death of a 28-year-old Phoenix priest.  Phoenix police confirmed Monday morning that Gary Moran, a homeless man with an extensive criminal record, was arrested about 9 p.m. Sunday [6/15/2014], almost exactly four days to the hour after the crime.  Moran was jailed on suspicion of shooting the Rev. Kenneth Walker multiple times at Mother of Mercy Mission Catholic Church in south Phoenix on Wednesday, June 11.  Police believe the motive was burglary.

NY Subways overrun with homeless.  It's an express train — to the bad old days.  Cops are giving homeless people and panhandlers in the subways the kid-glove treatment, arresting subterranean scofflaws far less frequently than just two years ago, data show.  The ranks of the homeless, meanwhile, have swelled to 1,841 this year — a 13 percent increase over last year's tally, the city's Department of Homeless Services says.  For straphangers, it has created an atmosphere of fear.

Man Wielding Scissors Stabs 5, Including Toddler.  A man wielding scissors stabbed and slashed a 1-year-old boy, his father and three other people in a series of random attacks in less than 10 minutes along a popular running and biking path on Manhattan's Upper West Side Tuesday morning [10/1/2013]. [...] Police have a 43-year-old suspect in custody who is described as a homeless man from Texas suffering from psychological problems.

S.F. library's main branch bathrooms [are] a mess.  Located in the heart of the city's Civic Center area, the modern building attracts a large transient population — on top of thousands of other visitors each day.  The steady flow means the restrooms are frequently overrun, Mathews said.  He said the custodial staff does what it can to keep things tidy, but is understaffed and struggles to deal with the homeless, who often suffer from mental illness and use the restrooms as private spaces.

Student, 21, hit by train after homeless man pushed her on the tracks because 'she refused to give him money'.  The homeless man accused of shoving a student in front of a train yesterday appeared in court this morning rambling incoherently about people trying to kill him and seeing 'colors and darkness'.  Hunter College student Maya Leggat, 21, received horrific injuries after she was allegedly shoved on to the tracks at White Plains station in New York after she refused to give money to Howard J. Mickens, 39. [...] According to The Journal News, Mickens has 11 previous arrests with a criminal record dating back more than two decades.

What's he doing outside?
Police: Man with ax shot by officer had history of mental issues.  Once, he tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a car.  Another time, by jumping into Mirror Lake.  On a different occasion, he broke free of restraints at St. Anthony's Hospital and tried to strangle himself with one of the cords attached to a machine monitoring his condition.  Since the beginning of the year, Kenneth Sprankle, a 27-year-old homeless man, run across police officers in St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park 10 times because of his mental condition, according to both agencies.  That doesn't include the eight additional occasions when police arrested Sprankle, [...]

Woman arrested after green paint found on Smithsonian statue, organ at National Cathedral.  D.C. police said Monday evening [7/29/2013] that they had charged Jiamei Tian, 58, whom they believe to be homeless, with one count of defacing property.

Arrested 396 times, woman knows how to work the system.  [Officer Tom] Rolon recognized Shermain Miles because he's seen her more times than he can count — drunk, half-naked, cursing and, on one occasion, lunging at another woman with a dinner fork.  Since 1978, Chicago Police alone have arrested Miles 396 times, mostly on the North Side — under at least 83 different aliases.  Those arrests include 92 for theft, 65 for disorderly conduct, 59 for prostitution-related crimes and five for robbery or attempted robbery.

Today's public library could be mistaken for a halfway house, homeless shelter, or federal penetentiary.
Shush!  I write from the public library, which doubles as my city's daytime homeless shelter.  I spend four hours a day there reading and writing.  Other patrons, often accompanied by all of their worldly possessions, go there to sleep, masturbate, and stare blankly at the lights.  Isn't this what the local Greyhound terminal is for?  A diversion program for juvenile delinquents apparently meets daily on the first floor. [...] A visit to the Boston Public Library invites the question:  what good is a beautiful building that smells like urine?

The coming homeless die-off.  A national study out of Pennsylvania says the median age of single adult homeless people is now 53 — and that without a big push toward getting older indigents into housing and medical care, huge swaths of them will be dying off in the next decade.

The Editor says...
The article above is, in my opinion, an effort by the San Francisco newspaper to generate unwarranted sympathy for homeless people, most likely for the purpose of building up a public outcry for more (spending on) homeless shelters.

In New York City alone...
Beware: 11,000 psychotics on streets.  The city streets are teeming with thousands of mentally ill homeless people capable of psychotic acts of random violence if left untreated, experts warned yesterday [12/29/2012].  As many as 11,000 of the city's 33,000 homeless adults have some form of mental illness, said D.J. Jaffe, executive director of the Mental Illness Policy Organization.

Fewer Guns, More Crime.  Liberal deinstitutionalization policies have liberated the mentally ill to roam the streets, giving rise to the homeless problem as well as to more mass murderers. [...] Violence-drenched movies and video games contribute to disrespect for life in our culture.  The breakdown of the family and widespread out of wedlock births give rise to more violence and crime as well.  The airhead liberal policy of piously declaring certain public areas "gun free zones" very directly contributes to mass murder.

The roots of mass murder.  Why do you think we have so many homeless?  Destitution?  Poverty has declined since the 1950s.  The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill.  In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.  A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers.

Five-Point Action Plan for President Obama to Reduce Violence by the Mentally Ill.  [Point #5]  Eliminate the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA).  SAMHSA is the epicenter of what is wrong with the American mental-health system.  SAMHSA actively encourages states to engage in mission creep and send the most seriously ill to the end of the line.  They provide massive funding to organizations that want to prevent mentally ill individuals from receiving treatment.  They have nothing positive to show for their efforts in spite of a massive bureaucracy that meets and meets and meets and never accomplishes anything.

Madness, Deinstitutionalization & Murder.  [Scroll down]  Neither a right to treatment nor a more demanding application of due process alone was particularly destructive, but in combination they made hundreds of thousands of seriously mentally ill people homeless, where many died of exposure and violence.  They fell through the cracks, living shorter, more miserable lives, and often greatly degrading the quality of urban life for everyone else.  A fraction became something quite a bit more unsettling than the mentally ill person begging on the street or disrupting the public library:  they became the mad mass murderers of the modern age.

NYC subway train kills man pushed off platform.  A 58-year-old man died Monday [12/3/2012] after he was pushed off a subway platform in Midtown Manhattan and hit by a train pulling into the station, according to news reports.

Fiend watched his victim die: Homeless man arrested in Times Square subway murder.  A homeless drifter was arrested and charged this morning for allegedly tossing a Queens dad onto a Times Square subway track, where he was fatally crushed by a Q train, law-enforcement sources told The [New York] Post.  Naeem Davis, 30, confessed yesterday while being grilled in the grisly death of Ki Suk Han, 58, who was struck in front of horrified onlookers Monday after trying desperately to scramble back to the platform. [...] He was charged with murder in the second degree and depraved indifference.

Muslim New York Subway Killer Calm After His Murder.  Everybody is talking about the New York Post cover photo showing Ki Suk Han about to be killed by the subway train, but the real story here is yet again being ignored by the mainstream media.  The real story here is that Naeem Davis is clearly a devout Muslim, and one who displayed behavior characteristic of jihadis after he committed murder.

This man should be institutionalized for his own well being.
Homeless Man Shoeless Again In NYC Despite Boots.  Asked about the $100 all-weather boots Officer Larry DePrimo gave him on Nov. 14, Hillman says he's hidden them because "they are worth a lot of money."

"Homeless man" not homeless — lives in rent-free apartment.  The barefoot homeless man who was photographed being given a pair of winter boots by a New York City police officer on a cold November night has actually been living rent-free in an apartment since late last year, the city said Tuesday [12/4/2012].  Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond had no doubt that the man captured in a tourist's picture receiving the boots from NYPD Officer Larry DePrimo was the same Jeffrey Hillman who had been on the city agency's radar for a while.

The Mysterious Stranger.  We are learning more about Hillman as time goes by.  He is not homeless.  The New York Daily News reports that the 54-year-old lived from 2009 to 2011 in transitional housing sites called "Safe Havens."  Owing to his status as a veteran, he then secured his present apartment through the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Veterans outreach services have continued to try to help but apparently for naught.  A spokeswoman for the city's outreach services reported that Hillman "has a history of turning down services."  Doubtless some day he will become ill, and the city will put him in some government program to recuperate, possibly Medicaide, possibly Obamacare.

Update:
Give him the boot.  So it now turns out that Jeffrey Hillman, the barefoot beggar who famously received a free pair of boots from a big-hearted police officer, not only has an apartment but pockets as much as several hundred dollars a day while pretending to be homeless.

Charges in stabbing at restaurant along Mag Mile.  A man who listed his address as a homeless shelter has been charged with stabbing a 67-year-old man who was dining with his family at a restaurant on North Michigan Avenue, police said.  Jimmy Harris, 56, was charged with attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery with intent to do great bodily harm and aggravated unlawful restraint, police said.

Homeless people spread disease.
Los Angeles in the grip of tuberculosis outbreak, homeless particularly at risk.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dispatched a team of scientists to Los Angeles to try and help contain an outbreak of tuberculosis being spread among the city's homeless population.  Sixty of the 78 people identified with the potentially deadly disease were homeless people who live on and around Skid Row, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Homeless people clutter up public property.
L.A. to ask high court to overturn ruling on homeless belongings.  Citing an immediate public health threat, the city of Los Angeles will ask the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday 2/28/2013] to overturn a lower-court ruling preventing the random seizure and destruction of belongings that homeless people leave temporarily unattended on public sidewalks.  If the court takes up the matter, the case could have broad implications for cities nationwide grappling with how to keep streets clean and safe while respecting the property rights of those who live there.

Honolulu Shores Up Tourism With Crackdown on Homeless.  This tourist mecca has had a surge in its homeless population, which is up 32 percent over the past five years.  The explosion has prompted one of the toughest police crackdowns in the nation, sounded alarms among civic leaders that aggressive panhandlers are scaring off tourists, and set off an anguished debate on how to deal with the destitute in a state that prides itself on its friendly and easygoing ways.

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2024 by Andrew K. Dart

Editor's note:
The "poor" seem to always have money for cigarettes, beer, multiple tattoos, lottery tickets, purple hair, elaborate manicures, satellite dishes, and expensive sneakers for the kids.  Even the poorest of the poor sometimes buy wine. 

We don't have a homeless or mass shooter problem, we have a mental illness problem.  After the Maine massacre, we are hearing the familiar response to a mass shooting by a mentally ill man, which is to deprive everyone of their civil rights.  The reality is that if you have violent and dangerous people on the loose, they will get their hands on guns or other weapons, regardless of whatever laws there are.  Gun control doesn't stop killers, it stops people from protecting themselves.  If you want to stop mentally unstable mass shooters, institutionalize them. [...] There's a persistent bias against institutionalization in America, as opposed to Europe, fed by movies featuring patients being abused within the system.  As a result, we have crazies wandering the streets and other crazies shooting up bowling alleys.

'Glam migration:' The illegal immigrant wore Versace.  A U.S. senator was stunned during his recent border trip when he saw an illegal immigrant who'd just jumped the boundary in a Versace dress.  Sen. James Lankford, fresh off a Memorial Day trip to the border in Yuma, Arizona, reported back to colleagues this week on the piles of wall-building materials he saw rusting in the elements, just a mile down the road from a gap in the border wall where migrants could pour through with ease.  The Oklahoma Republican said illegal crossers will step over the boundary and wait for Border Patrol agents to come to pick them up, figuring — usually correctly — that they'll be processed and quickly released into the U.S. to go on to their destinations.

Las Vegas homeless man admits to killing three on Labor Day.  A homeless man in Nevada suspected of killing three men and shooting a dog in a 90-minute spree on Labor Day told cops "anything without a home gets terminated," police said.  Tristan Tidwell, 35, was arrested early Tuesday [9/7/2021] in North Las Vegas, where he told police he was homeless and targeted the three victims and a dog because he thought they were also transients, according to an arrest report obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Tidwell told investigators he had to "put down" the men, who were shot between 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. Monday.  Two of the victims have been identified as Jorge Godoy-Lua, 43, and 53-year-old Oliver Hillman — both of whom died from gunshot wounds to the back and neck, respectively, the newspaper reported.  Tidwell is also accused of gunning down a third man near East Cheyenne Avenue and Civic Center Drive who had yet to be identified as of Thursday.  Video from the three crime scenes showed Tidwell calmly walking the streets prior to the slayings, the report indicates.

The homeless may not be homeless.  He went on to tell me he had done five years in state prison before being released.  I asked him if he was receiving Social Security benefits for the loss of his leg, and he acknowledged that he was receiving about $1,350 per month.  I asked him where he lived, and he told me about five miles from the intersection.  He pointed out his Monte Carlo that he drove to the location.  He told me he received subsidized housing, electricity, internet, rent, and utilities.  I asked him how often he was at the location on the median, and he told me about 360 days a year.  He said that Christmas Day was always "very good" and that he never missed "working" that day.  I asked him how much money he generated begging for donations, and he told me about $2,500 [to] 3,500 a month in the slow summer months, but about $3,500 [to] 4,000 per month during the good months.  He also told me that since he is unemployed, the State of Arizona gives him about $300 per month in food stamps.  He also receives full medical care through the program the state runs for indigent persons.  His net income is between $35,000 and $40,000 from panhandling.  About $3,600 in food stamps, and about $16,200 in SSI disability.  He is pulling in about $55,000 tax free, every year, and he gets subsidized everything.  He was not ashamed of what he did; rather, he was proud.

Time to Set the Record Straight on Slavery.  The poorest people in America are better off than people in most other nations.  A recent study found that when you include the myriad welfare programs available to Americans, the bottom 20 percent of income-earners in the U.S. are better off materially than everyone in most of the nations of Europe.  Another study found that the bottom 10 percent in the U.S. do better than the top 10 percent in Russia and that our nation's poor do better than virtually everyone in India and better than 85 percent of those living in China.  The Left media ignore all this.

America's Poorest Are Richer Than 60 Percent of Developed Countries.  A new study debunks liberal claims about grinding poverty in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. [...] On average, a person among the poorest 20 percent of Americans consumes more goods and services than the average person in Canada, Greece, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Slovakia, Israel, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Chile, Hungary, Turkey, and Mexico.

Police chief:  Non-homeless, non-handicap man making $1,000/weekend panhandling.  An Abilene man — who appears to be homeless and handicap — is making a good living by panhandling on weekends, according to the police chief.  Chief Stan Standridge said the man panhandles every Saturday and Sunday at the intersection of Hwy 83/84 and FM 707.  He sits in a wheelchair and the police department has gotten calls from people concerned about the man thinking he's homeless.

Do You Understand that Democrats will Destroy America?  Virtually all of the Democratic candidates have advocated for opening the border to all who want to come.  All the Democratic candidates on the second night of the debate supported free health benefits for illegal immigrants and several have advocated for free college for all.  But even without these additional incentives, the level of living available in the US, even to the poorest Americans, far exceeds what many of the world's peoples can hope for in their own countries.  No one starves in America.  Our poor have cars, large screen TVs, air conditioning, video games for their kids and eat better than the average GI in World War II.

Many ostensibly poor people, especially street corner beggars, are too lazy to work.
Panhandler refuses man's offer of money for work.  So man returns with his own sign — and panhandler loses it.  Ryan Bray told WTVT-TV he was in his vehicle recently at an intersection in Bradenton, Florida, when a panhandler approached him for cash. [...] Bray — who works for Bray Remodeling, his family's business — offered the panhandler work for money as opposed to a handout:  $15 an hour to do yard work, WTVT said.  Bray told the station the panhandler didn't take too kindly to his offer.  "He said, 'Absolutely not,'" Bray recalled to WTVT.  "Started getting belligerent and cursing."  He added to the station that the panhandler kicked his Jeep and told him to leave.

Sporting cell phones, brand-name clothes — and babies, another 1,000-strong migrant caravan heads for the U.S..  Get ready for another migrant caravan coming up from Honduras to the U.S. border, organized by activist groups there calling for volunteers to beef up the numbers.  OANN reports that the latest one taking off is 1,000 strong and loaded with people carrying babies.

Homeless beggars are making £200-a-DAY: Adventurer and world record holder Ed Stafford reveals what tramps earn.  An adventurer and Guinness World Record holder has revealed that living on the UK's streets was 'more lucrative' than he imagined.  Ed Stafford, a former army captain and amazon trekker, spent two months being homeless in Glasgow, Manchester, and London.  He found that as well as gaining 11 [pounds] because passers-by kept giving him fast food, sandwiches, and burgers, he could also make up to £200 a night.

Homeless Man Connected to $400,000 Alleged GoFundMe Scam Arrested in Philadelphia.  The Philadelphia Police Department said Wednesday that Johnny Bobbitt Jr., the homeless man linked to an alleged GoFundMe scam that raised more than $400,000, was arrested after he failed to appear in court in New Jersey the previous day.  A spokesperson for the Philadelphia department, Jeff Chrusch, confirmed the arrest to CBS News, which reported that Bobbitt would be processed before being transferred to the custody of authorities in New Jersey.

Annoyed Baltimore Drivers Want City To Crack Down On 'Squeegee Kids'.  When 17-year-old Jaylen Brown found himself in need of extra cash last summer, he did what many of his classmates had begun doing years ago.  He stuck a tree branch into a sponge and started to squeegee.  Now a seasoned window-washer, Brown has traded in the contraption for a Mallory — a sturdy-handled squeegee with a thick, spongey top.  In between school and his 6 p.m. shift at Burger King, Brown will walk the median of President Street in Baltimore with his cousin Tony Jackson.  If they get a nod from a driver, the teens will give the windshield a quick scrub and pocket whatever bills get dangled out the window.  "We catch hundos, 20s, 50s sometimes, fives, and dollars," says Jackson.  On a good day, the cousins each head home $200 richer.

The Editor says...
And all that income is tax-free, because they are paid anonymously in cash.

Prosecutor: GoFundMe story about helpful homeless man was a hoax.  A New Jersey prosecutor says the story that launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for a homeless veteran was all a hoax.  In a news conference on Thursday, Burlington County Prosecutor Scott Coffina said the tale was "fictitious" and "formed the basis of a scam."  Coffina said it was, "concocted to compel kind-hearted individuals to contribute to the cause."  "The entire campaign was predicated on a lie," said Coffina.  The couple and the homeless man are all under arrest.

Headlines claim "one in eight" Americans live in poverty.  But is that true?  An officially poor family of four has income of about $25,000 or less.  That's not much.  But that measure fails to take into account taxes.  The poor mostly don't pay taxes.  In fact, many get money back through the Earned Income Tax Credit and other income-support programs.  Food stamps, housing support and other aid likewise enable officially poor households to boost their incomes, in most cases significantly.  The fact is, when the very same households that the federal government considers to be poor are questioned, they report roughly $2.40 in spending for every $1 of income that Census says they have.  So that family of four earning $25,000 is likely consuming as much as $60,000 a year in goods and services.

California city council candidate is caught dropping off his wheelchair-bound mom, 86, so she can panhandle.  A nonpartisan candidate for city council in Southern California has been accused of dropping off his elderly, wheelchair-bound mother to panhandle for the last decade, even though they're not homeless.  David Chey has been caught on camera leaving Soon Chey, 86, in her wheelchair in the downtown district of Laguna Beach with a sign that reads, 'please, help me.'  'They have a brand new car, live in a condo in Irvine, yet beg for our help,' local business owner Heidi Miller told DailyMail.com.

James Madison doesn't want your dead cat to vote, and maybe not you either.  Today's poor live a more luxurious life than yesterday's royalty.  They enjoy comforts that had not even been imagined just a 100 years ago, including air conditioning, inoculations, the internet, airplane travel and over 130 non-working days a year.  And food.  Oh, food.  Rich and poor alike have so much inexpensive food that consuming too much of it is our biggest health problem.

This NYC panhandler only accepts high-quality food.  Meet New York City's pickiest panhandler.  Ron Clarke, 51, regularly positions himself in front of Union Market, the snooty Park Slope grocery spot that a local realtor nicknamed "Millionaire Market."  The discerning Clarke, often seen holding a cup full of coins at the chain's Seventh Avenue outpost, would not disagree.  Last Tuesday morning, shortly after blowing part of a previous day's proceeds on a pair of lottery tickets ("I buy them once in a blue moon," Clarke insisted), he told The Post, "By standing in front of Union Market, I get nice groceries."

How Support For Socialism Arises From Ingratitude.  The free market took off at about the time the American experiment in liberty got going.  Before that time, life for virtually everyone was like a bad dream they could not wake up from.  People lived tired, dirty, hungry, downtrodden, and at the mercy of their circumstances.  You don't have to trace very far back in your family line to reach a time when your own people would have found the ease, affluence, and expansiveness of the life you lead totally astonishing.  Would they also be astonished by your lack of gratitude for what the free market has given you?  Or would they find you celebrating the free market and the gifts it provides?

Before and After Welfare Handouts.  There is virtually no material poverty in the U.S.  Eighty percent of households the Census Bureau labels as poor have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more.  Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV.  Half have at least one computer.  Forty-two percent own their homes.  What we have in our nation is not material poverty but dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives, aided and abetted by the welfare state.

How to stop the West from committing cultural suicide.  The key factoid animating "Suicide of the West" is this:  For 2,000 years, everywhere on earth, the large mass of humanity lived on the equivalent of $1.90 a day.  "Near subsistence living," Goldberg writes, "defined human habitats for almost all of human history."  Then something happened.  In the 18th century.  In Great Britain.  It was a complex phenomenon Goldberg calls the Miracle — a new way of thinking about humanity and human achievement and personal liberty that unlocked a hidden door in the possibilities of the species.  The results of the Miracle are astounding.  Where once 94 percent of the people on earth survived on less than $2 a day, today only 9.6 percent does.

Do 5 Million Americans Really Live in Third World Poverty?  Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton recently published an op-ed in the New York Times titled "The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem."  Deaton asserted that 5.3 million Americans (or 1.7 percent of the population) live on less than $4 per day and "are as destitute as the world's poorest people. ... [Their] suffering, through material poverty and poor health, is as bad [as] or worse than that of the people in Africa or in Asia."  But measurements of poverty and deep poverty based on income are seriously flawed, because U.S. government income surveys:
  •   omit or severely undercount most of the $1.1 trillion that the government spends on means-tested welfare assistance each year;
  •   omit or undercount off-the-books earnings, which are prevalent in low-income communities;
  •   omit the incomes of cohabiting partners and parents; and
  •   ignore assets acquired in prior periods.
The omission and undercounting of welfare aid is particularly troubling.  For example, in 2016, federal, state, and local governments spent $223 billion on cash, food, and housing benefits for low-income families with children, an amount three times that needed to eliminate all official poverty and ten times that needed to wipe out deep poverty among them.  But the Census Bureau's income surveys counted only $7.6 billion of this spending for purposes of assessing poverty or deep poverty.

Homeless Man Arrested by Police With $750K on Him.  A Swedish beggar has made headlines for all the wrong reasons.  The unnamed 55-year-old man was arrested outside a train station after he was harassing bypassers to give him money.  Some of the witnesses claimed he was very aggressive with them, and many of them cited they felt they had to give him money so he wouldn't hurt them.  When law enforcement arrested him, a struggle ensued and a large sum of money fell out of his pockets.

$84,000 a year now qualifies as low income in high-cost Orange County.  A family of four with an annual income of $84,450 or less now qualifies as low income in Orange County.  A single person living alone qualifies as low income if he or she earns $58,450 or less a year.  Orange County has the fifth-highest income threshold in the nation, according to new income limits released last month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Panhandlers Caught Driving Rental Car, Traveling Around Town To Solicit Cash.  From the San Fernando Valley to the Santa Clarita Valley, CBS2's David Goldstein's undercover cameras captured similar looking groups of panhandlers with children.  Some were holding kids small enough to even be breastfeeding, and all were holding signs claiming to be down and out.  But are they as needy as they seem?  Goldstein watched them outside shopping areas all over town, with similar signs reading "Please help,", "Lost my job," "I have 3 kids" and the like.  Residents believe they're all working together, and they're fed up.

Who is poor in the United States? 
  •   More than a third of those who live in poverty are children.  More than 15.5 million children lived in poverty in 2014.
  •   About 13 percent of those living in poverty are senior citizens or retired.
  •   A quarter of those who live in poverty are in the labor force — that is, working or seeking employment.
  •   A tenth of those in poverty are disabled.
  •   Eight percent of those living in poverty are caregivers, meaning that they report caring for children or family.
  •   Students, either full- or part-time, make up another seven percent of those living in poverty.
  •   Just three percent of those living in poverty are working-age adults who do not fall into one of these categories — that is, they are not in the labor force, not disabled, and not a student, caregiver, or retired.

Wealth and Income Inequality Is Not as Bad as You Think.  [Scroll down]  Politicians do not mention the inequality of income very much because it is so much less than the inequality of wealth, especially after tax.  Household consumption equals income after tax minus savings.  Since those with high incomes save more than those with low incomes, who often spend more than their incomes a fact called dissaving, consumption is distributed more equally than income and vastly more equal than the distribution of wealth.  Since those at the lowest income levels receive welfare, food stamps, and some public housing, politicians want to avoid talking about the distribution of consumption.  As we pointed out, the estimates of household wealth do not include the value of social security benefits.  The Social Security administration reported that in 2015, over 59 million Americans received about $870 billion in Social Security benefits.

Obama administration considering evictions of thousands from low-income housing.  The Department of Housing and Urban development announced Tuesday that it would consider evicting tens of thousands of public housing residents who earn too much money to qualify for public housing.  The announcement comes in response to a July audit from the department's Office of Inspector General that revealed over 25,000 families had an income that exceeded the maximum level to qualify for government-assisted housing.  At least one tenant had roughly nearly $1 million in assets.

Now Accepting Credit Cards: Abe Hagenston, Detroit Homeless Man, Goes High-Tech.  Can you spare a swipe?  A Detroit homeless man has taken panhandling high-tech:  He accepts credit cards on the 8 Mile highway overpass where he lives and created a website where he can be hired to work odd jobs.  Abe Hagenston, 42, who goes by "Honest Abe" on his website, told NBC affiliate WDIV he has been homeless for about a decade.

This bum boasts he makes $200 an hour panhandling.  A panhandler outside Grand Central Terminal says he rakes in up to $200 an hour from kind-hearted New Yorkers.  And the 43-year-old former theater stagehand is only one of a legion of beggars in the city hauling in big bucks and a smorgasbord of food doing nothing but sitting on the sidewalk with hands out.

US suffering from massive equality of rich and poor.  Propaganda is about telling a good story.  So when the media wants to tell a story of how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, they ignore inconvenient facts, such as the value of the various federal, state, and local transfer payments as well as the value of charitable contributions from private groups such as soup kitchens.  That would interfere with the story that is needed to justify higher taxes and higher spending.  But if you look not at income but material wealth, the story gets worse, but in an opposite way.  By examining material possessions we find that the gap between the rich and poor is actually alarmingly small.

By Global Standards There Are No American Poor; All In The US Are Middle Class Or Better.  [Scroll down]  The idea that the US has more people living in real poverty (as opposed to inequality) than Albania or China, much poorer countries, does indeed shock.  However, it's necessary to walk through the definitions that are being used here to see what is happening.  For it's not actually quite as that finding seems to show.  The first is that the US numbers are looking at peoples' incomes.  And as we all know "income" among the American poor is grossly under-reported.  No, not because everyones' lying (although some obviously do and statisticians try to correct for that) but because the major poverty alleviation programs in the US are not counted as income.  So that US number doesn't include many of the things that we do to try to reduce poverty (things like SNAP, Section 8 vouchers and so on).

Dependency, Not Poverty.  There is no material poverty in the U.S. [...] Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the U.K.  What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.

The Minimum Wage Issue — Again.  Minimum wage-earners actually pay a "negative" tax.  A person making the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25/hour will make $15,080/year (assuming he/she works 2,080 hours — 40 hours/week times 52 weeks).  He/She is in the first income quintile according to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report.  According to the same report, he/she pays an income tax rate of -9.2% (Table 2), or $1,387.  He/she pays no income tax on the $15,080, and receives $1,387.  So the effective minimum wage is $7.91/hour ([$15,080 + $1,387]/2,080).  But wait!  There's more!

Don't Forget the Other Entitlement Monsters.  According to an American Heritage report based on an analysis of Census Bureau data, 43% of statistically poor households own their own homes, and on average these houses have 3 bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths. [...] As the Heritage report summarizes, "In 2005, the typical poor household, as defined by the government, had air conditioning and a car.  For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR.  In the kitchen, it had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave.  Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.  The family was able to obtain medical care when needed. [...]"

Carter Is Wrong:  [the] Middle Class Not Like [the] Poor 30 Years Ago.  Today's poor children — 96% of whom don't go hungry — have it better than their parents and grandparents, who played checkers and cards, and even made up games to play outside.  According to Rector, "more than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation."  Simply put, poor Americans in 2010 or 2012 or 2013 not only live better than the middle class of just a few years ago, they also live better than royal families lived not that many decades back.

Americans in 'Poverty' Have TVs, VCRs, Cell Phones, Air Conditioning.  A new report from the Census Bureau found that 80.9% of households considered poverty stricken have cell phones along with their landline phones, and 58.2% have computers.  96.1% of those in "poverty" have televisions, and 83% have some sort of DVR.

The new face of SNAP? Food stamps buy lobster for surfer and his buddies.  [John] Roberts reports that [Jason] Greenslate has no fixed address, instead choosing the life of a beach bum staying with family, friends and girlfriends, living off them and $200 a month in benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he uses to buy gourmet items at the grocery store.  "I don't got a paycheck coming in so I qualify," Greenslate told Roberts.

Next scandal: Platinum EBT cards.  The next welfare scandal is going to be the huge balances on some of these EBT cards. [...] Last January a radio listener from Pittsfield sent me a receipt from a local convenience store.  Some loafer had run up a tab of $3.28, so he whipped out an EBT card to pay for it.  After paying his three bucks, he had $7,066.58 left on the card.  I kid you not.  Over seven grand on an EBT card.

Repeal & Replace the Welfare State.  Welfare once was the province of the states, but increasingly has been treated as a federal responsibility.  Since the 1960s, when the concept of public welfare radically expanded, federal micromanagement and redistribution of income has grown out of control.  The federal government has spawned a vast array of redundant, overlapping and poorly targeted assistance programs.  This bureaucratic monstrosity spends $724 billion a year to provide medical care, food, shelter and other basic services to a growing number of people who increasingly are not "needy" by any rational definition.

Bogus beggar is so good at his scam he makes $100,000 a year trolling Kentucky city.  Gary Thompson, a wheelchair-bound man in Lexington, Ky., makes up to $100,000 a year begging off of unwitting good Samaritans.  He has difficulty walking but is otherwise in fine physical and mental shape.  But the scammer fakes a mental and speech disability as he panhandles around the city, he told Lexington TV station WLEX.

What is Poverty in the United States Today?  For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in "poverty," but the bureau's definition of poverty differs widely from that held by most Americans.  In fact, other government surveys show that most of the persons whom the government defines as "in poverty" are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term.  The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities.  They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs, including medical care.

The Tales of Three Bankrupt Cities.  Why did so many people move out of Detroit?  The quick answer:  crime abetted by welfare.  During the decade from 1965 to 1975, crime and welfare dependency roughly tripled in the United States and rose even more in Detroit.  There was a connection between the two trends.  Welfare encouraged single parenthood; fatherless boys often grew up to commit violent crimes.  Most violent crimes were and are committed by (and against) blacks, whose numbers in Detroit during the great northward migration rose from 149,000 in 1940 to 660,000 in 1970.

The Close Connections between the Economy and the Family.  [Scroll down]  Worse, we are discovering that ObamaCare really will "destroy marriage for the middle class the same way that the Great Society welfare state destroyed the black family — with financial incentives for staying single."  ObamaCare's marriage penalty could possibly cost couples over $10,000 a year.  This intentional disparity means that U.S. government policy will encourage singleness and create increased disincentives for marriage.

Toxic Words.  During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes.  One of these words is "entitlement."  To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from "affordable housing" to "a living wage."  But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive.  If we don't produce food, we are just going to starve.  If we don't build housing, then we are not going to have housing, "affordable" or otherwise.

Derelicts Now Demanding To Live on the Streets As Matter of Right.  America's homeless are lawyering up to fight for a "right" to live on the street — your neighborhood and personal safety [notwithstanding].  From Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles, cities are struggling with a surge in people living in cardboard boxes and doorways.  Local lawmakers are trying to ban "camping out" in public and ordering police to clear the fetid encampments.  Now lawyers for the homeless are pushing back.  They're demanding that "sleeping rough" be legally protected.  In Denver, where living on the street is outlawed, lawyers for the homeless want to guarantee vagrants "the right to use and move freely in public spaces without discrimination."

Prenup for welfare recipient's wedding?  I saw this desperate plea for help on Facebook.  Is there anyone who can help out this poor prog who is axing for advice?  You see, Comrades, she doesn't want to lose the welfare benefits for which she worked so hard.

Mom says she can't see son's grades without paying fees.  A parent of an Oak Grove High School student is upset over a fee the school is charging her, and the punishment for families who can't pay those fees. [...] "Oak Grove High School is charging the parents for art class and shop expenses," said Angela Mullin, who has a 15-year-old son, a sophomore at the school.  "If I wanted to pay for my son's classes, I would definitely send him to private school," said Mullin. [...] "My son's on free lunches and I can't afford this fee," Mullin added.  She says without paying this fee, her son's report cards are on hold, along with 317 other children according to her.

The Editor says...
If your son is getting free lunches, you are already putting your hand in my pocket.  One should expect to pay nominal fees for the supplies used in extracurricular programs.

Maine Changes Rule for Food Stamps that Every State Should Follow.  Another state is making people work for food stamps, and it has some people up in arms without knowing all the details.  Typical liberals, who are filled with lots of emotion but low on the facts, are worried that children and disabled people will now go without.  If they did a little research, they would know this expired waiver will only affect able-bodied people with no children.  The federal waiver that has been in place since 2010 because of the recession has been allowed to expire in the state of Maine.  This allows Maine to reinstate a mandate requiring able-bodied adults who are 18 to 50 years old and have no children to work or volunteer 20 hours per week or they will be limited to three months of food stamp benefits over a three-year period.

Indiana reinstates time limits for some food stamp recipients.  Indiana will begin cutting off food stamp benefits next year to tens of thousands of people who fail to get a job or train for work.  Beginning in the spring, the state will limit benefits to no more than three months during a three-year period for able-bodied adults without children who don't work or participate in job training for at least 20 hours a week.  The time limit is a requirement for the federally funded program, but states can ask for a waiver if jobs are scarce in all or part of the state.  Although Indiana is among the majority of states that qualify for a waiver, the state plans to reinstate the requirement.

Is There a Way Out?  The fact that Congress has no resources of its very own forces us to recognize that the only way Congress can give one American one dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American through the tax code.  If any American did privately what Congress does publicly, he'd be condemned as an ordinary thief.  Taking what belongs to one American to give to another is theft, and the receiver is a recipient of stolen property.  Most Americans would suffer considerable anguish and cognitive dissonance seeing themselves as recipients of stolen property, so congressional theft has to be euphemized and given a respectable name.  That respectable name is "entitlement."

Local housing authorities in Charleston and North Charleston get federal dollars for self-sufficiency programs.  The public housing authorities in Charleston and North Charleston will be getting a small piece of nearly $57 million in federal grants awarded this week to help some clients make the transition to self-sufficiency.  The clients are people who have agreed to leave the Housing Choice Voucher program, commonly known as Section 8, within five years.  In exchange, the clients get a financial incentive to succeed, and a coordinator to help them achieve their goals.

EBT benefit card glitch sparks Walmart shopping sprees in Louisiana.  The Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) system allows recipients of government food stamps to purchase goods using a digital card with a set spending limit, but for a few hours over the weekend, that limit disappeared for many users visiting Walmart stores in Louisiana.  Walmart and local police in Springhill and Mansfield confirmed to CBS affiliate KSLA that officers were called into the stores to help maintain order Saturday as shoppers swept through the aisles at two stores and bought as much as they could carry.

The Louisiana Heist.  On Saturday [10/12/2013], Louisiana's "EBT" system malfunctioned, causing spending limits on users' food-stamp cards temporarily to be lifted.  In two counties at least, recipients noticed the error, spread the word, and set about trying to check out as much as they could fit into shopping carts. At Walmarts in the towns of Springhill and Mansfield, employees called corporate headquarters to ask what they should do.  They were instructed to "keep the registers ringing."  This they did — and with a vengeance.  By the time that proper limits on the cards had been restored a couple of hours later, the shelves had been all but stripped bare.

The Editor says...
The government has the names and addresses of everyone who committed this fraud.  Why haven't the perpetrators been arrested?

Walmart food stamp bonanza proof of abused system.  A week ago, the technology that assessed spending limits on debit cards for food-stamp recipients malfunctioned.  As a result, there was no way for stores to tell how much value was left on individual cards.  Many merchants refused to accept the cards until the problem was fixed.  Not wanting to risk having anyone go hungry, Walmart allowed people to use the cards.  Unfortunately, the food-stamp recipients treated the stores' generosity as a bonanza, and filled carts with much more than they were entitled to.  As word got out, the two Walmarts quickly found themselves overwhelmed by other food-stamp recipients doing the same.

Update:
Vitter Wants Those Who Cleared Shelves During Glitch Banned from Food Benefits.  Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) wants to make sure that both benefit recipients and stores are held to account for the recent run on groceries during an outage of the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) system in his home state.  Shoppers cleared out shelves Oct. 14 when the system went down, with deluged Walmarts deciding to let transactions proceed despite the outage showing no spending limits for the cards.  Vitter said those who went on food grabs should be disqualified from receiving benefits.

Jindal administration will pursue people who misused food stamps.  Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration will pursue Louisiana residents who took advantage of technical problems with the food stamp system on Oct. 12 and purchased amounts of food that were above and beyond what was allowed.  The decision comes a week after U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., publicly criticized the Jindal administration for not pursuing food stamp recipients who went on a shopping spree while the system was down.

Louisiana suspends EBT cards for food stamp cheats.  The Advocate reports that the Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's office will cancel food stamp benefits for anyone who participated in a fraud and shopping spree catalyzed by an EBT malfunction.  More than 12,000 people were sent an insufficient funds notice when the problem with the EBT cards was fixed on Oct. 12; those who transgressed may lose their EBT cards for a year.

"Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work."

— Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)