Criminal Song Requests Rampant

Last week, the P-I ran a story titled "Solutions sought at crime-plagued Steinbrueck Park". The story had a picture of a shirtless man bending forward talking to a woman holding a map. It looks like he's giving her directions, but the caption says he was a homeless man and was persistently yelling at the woman, who was a German tourist. It said he was demanding that she sing a song for him on his guitar.

The article also had a nice chart, which showed how the number of park notices handed out in the park have increased 1997. It said that according to the police there has been an increase in the total amount of crime, which has been mostly non-violent and similar to that of other cities!


[Above: Other charts that the P-I did NOT use tell a radically different story, however.]

The title says solutions are sought. Let's solve these problems in this column!

The problems: The yelling man. An increase in park notices, and in arrests for mostly nonviolent crime, similar to that of other cities! (Aren't Sodom and Gomorrah other cities?) Plus, homeless people coming back to the park, even after they've been told to leave and not come back! Plus, how does a homeless man get a guitar, when he should be saving every dime to move into a room? I'd like to be able to lie around all day shirtless, making Germans sing for me. Wouldn't we all?


[New Orleans: Yet another "other city" we don't want to be!]

We need to know a cause, and one look at the chart and I knew what the cause was. Me!

That's right. I stopped being homeless at the end of 1997, and thereby deprived the streets of my good example! None of this trouble ever happened when I was on the streets. People even wrote it on their backpacks. WWWD: What Would Wes Do? Would Wes take his shirt off and tell a lost German to sing for him on his guitar? Duhhh... No! No, he would not! So we won't either!

OK, that was today's irony quota. Ha, ha, no, that was just stupid.

Let's try to find some other "real" or "intelligent" explanations. I mean, this is serious business. "I want to hear 99 Luftballons! Now!"

My first clue as to what has been going on was to look back at when the Parks Exclusion law was passed. Hmm. It was passed in 1997. Aha! So the number of park notices has dramatically increased ever since there was a law to give them out! Damn those homeless people, getting laws written against them!

Then I remembered that Real Change, the people who print this crap, are putting on a book sale and that hundreds of books will be sold at Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard at the end of the month. As a result the office is packed with donated books. I cracked one open. It was a psych book by some Dr. Phil or Dr. Jesus. I opened it to a random page and it said if something someone does annoys you, you might think how their actions mirror yours.

So the idea is, we look at the yelling shirtless man, and ask if we ever did anything to him or people like him that was similar. That might be the key to his behavior.

And I had it! Throughout the 90s, we took almost away all the public benches downtown, and made it so he couldn't lie on the ones that were left. In 1994 we passed a law that prohibited people him from sitting or lying on downtown sidewalks, and by 1997 that law was out of litigation and began to be enforced, by armed men.

[Right: "Cease lying down, or I shall be compelled to take all appropriate measures!"]

So we want to create laws that use the police to yell at the homeless for us and drive them from "our" sidewalks and benches into parks. Then we want to moan that there's a homeless man at Steinbrueck Park who drives tourists from "his" end of the park to the other.

The solution: Arrest the mirror?