Issue 300 Motives

Issue 300 in Denver, called the right to survive, would end the use of many tactics currently used by Denver law enforcement to address the "nuisance" created by homeless camps and other conduct driven by homelessness in the City, especially by repealing the controversial Camping Ordinance. The official summary of the measure states:

I wrote most of the material below in response to a Facebook post severely criticizing the opponents of Issue 300, condemning them, among other things as Trumpists (I have made editorial changes not indicated and added new paragraph breaks which you can't easily make in Facebook comments):

I wouldn't be as quick to to demonize [the opponents of Issue 300].  

I definitely agree that many people who are opposed to 300 are afraid of the homeless (and more particularly afraid of the subset of the homeless who used to be known as "vagrants" as opposed to other populations that are technically homeless like couch surfing single moms), and especially the homeless who are struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism.  

This doesn't come from nowhere. Usually it comes from frightening personal encounters in which they find needles or human feces strewn on their property or in a park, or are on the receiving end of rude comments or gestures, or are faced with an aggressive panhandling request. And, nobody thinks that leaving dirty needles around, pooping in public, or being rude and aggressive are appropriate behaviors.  

The anti-300 folks don't want to undermine anything that tries to reduce this unpleasantness.  

The pro-300 people don't like the status quo either but think that an incarceration and criminal justice based solution does more harm than good, and pushes for alternative solutions (some of which are really harm reduction strategies rather than true solutions) like supervised injection sites, more public toilets, housing first, wider access to drug and alcohol treatment, etc.  

The kind of lack of knowledge of what policy responses (to what is universally acknowledged to be a problem) work is different and much less blameworthy than the kind of lack of knowledge of what is obvious or can be learned with brief inspection that we usually call ignorance.  

The selfish focus on eliminating a problem in so far as it affects the person making the decision personally, in lieu of the more empathetic approach that really thinks hard about how a "solution" to the bad conditions that the homeless are in will affect the homeless themselves, is driven a lot by fear and by insecurity. You fear what you have a harder time avoiding and escaping or addressing personally more than you do situations you can easily leave or that you can easily fix. Empathy is, to some extent, a form of privilege.

While I completely agree with you that drug addiction and alcoholism are more similar to non-problematic substance use than most people realize, and is less voluntary than most people realize, these are not at all obvious realities, and almost everyone involved (including the people who have drug addictions or are alcoholic) agrees that drug addiction and alcoholism (which definitely are an important contributor to the situation of many people who are vagrant), are problems even though they aren't (as many people who don't understand this well believe them to be), problems that are easily solved by just deciding to do so.  

In general, the idea behind 300, which is that the best shouldn't be the enemy of the good (or that there are gray areas between a totally free ability to choose one's own actions and a complete lack of ability to control one's own actions), is a very challenging idea for lots of people who are generally people of good will to get their arms around.