Deaths spur Anchorage to involuntarily commit homeless alcoholics
From The New York Times:
A man was down, immobile at the edge of one of this city’s busiest intersections. No sirens sounded, no ambulance rushed to the scene. Dealing with the scourge that has consumed Alaska’s biggest city is often delegated to two men in a white van, the Community Service Patrol.
“We have about 50 to 100 regulars that we pick up on a daily basis,” said Josh Wilson, one of the patrol workers.
image credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The man down was homeless and had passed out, drunk, like he often does. Mr. Wilson knew him by name. The Community Service Patrol would soon take him to the city sleep-off center, where by the next morning, if he was sober enough, he would be free to go.
Mr. Wilson said odds were good that he would once again drink and pass out, putting himself and possibly others at risk and demanding intervention from this city’s frayed social safety net.
“Worse,” Mr. Wilson said when asked how things had changed in his two years with the patrol. “Absolutely tenfold worse.”
The police and social service providers say Anchorage has as many as 400 people they call “chronic public inebriates,” with up to 25 percent of them regarded as the most difficult cases. This year, after the deaths of at least 13 homeless people since the spring, there has been a widespread sense that the city’s response has been inadequate and must change.
The new mayor, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, has created a staff position and a task force devoted to addressing homelessness. The police recently gained the authority to dismantle homeless encampments with just 12 hours’ notice. Citizen groups are patrolling parks where homeless camps have been the site of rapes and other violence. But in perhaps the biggest and most controversial break from how the city has handled the problem in the past, a Salvation Army detoxification and alcohol abuse treatment center has begun accepting chronic inebriates who have been taken there essentially by force.
» continue reading “Deaths of Homeless on the Rise as Anchorage Tries to Cope” at NYTimes.com
There’s more and I encourage you to read it. Anchorage is dealing with the real-life issues of civil rights vs. human rights. I think about this all the time. If we leave homeless, alcoholic and/or addicted and/or mentally ill people on the streets, are we protecting their civil rights while ignoring their needs as human beings? It’s not a theoretical debate. And like Anchorage, we’ve had people die on the street here. I’m interested to see how these changes work for Anchorage — and for the homeless people who need help and care.
