Despite Democrat-controlled cities’ indulgent policy on vagrants and homelessness, their encampments just keep growing.
Not only are the rat-infested encampments a threat to public health, now they’re a threat to public safety as well.
Take Los Angeles for example.
The Los Angeles Times reports on May 12, 2021, that as the number of tents, makeshift shelters and campers on Los Angeles streets has surged, so has the scourge of fire. “In the three years since the Los Angeles Fire Department began classifying them, fires related to homelessness have nearly tripled. In the first quarter of 2021, they occurred at a rate of 24 a day, making up 54% of all fires the department responded to.”
A Times analysis of records shows that fires related to homelessness have doubled in all of the department’s 14 districts since 2018, the first year of complete records. The fires were most prevalent in downtown and South Los Angeles. But the numbers were also elevated in a swath across the north side of the city from Northeast Los Angeles to the east San Fernando Valley.
A fire in 2017 was traced to a cooking fire in a ravine near Sepulveda Boulevard. The blaze spread through Bel-Air, destroying six homes and damaging a dozen others.
Although the epidemic of fires is largely attributable to the built-in conditions for combustion in street camps — cooking stoves and campfires in close proximity to tent fabric and piles of other flammable material — as much as a third of the 15,610 fires related to homelessness in the past 3 ¼ years were classified as arson, i.e., intentionally set fires.
From the LA Times:
Many fires related to homelessness are intentional. Over the three years, such fires classified as arson have steadily comprised about one-third of the total. As fires related to homelessness have increased, though, the raw number of arson fires has more than doubled, to 2,258 last year — about one of every six fires in the city. Arrests are rare — 129 and 174 over the past two years, a clearance rate of about 6%. Though few arsons are solved, limited evidence suggests that the perpetrators are most often other homeless people. Three-fourths of those arrested identified themselves as homeless….
Impossible to quantify is the dread, hostility and loss of faith in government brought on by the surge in fires. Business owners are left wondering if a random blaze will scar or destroy their property.
Preliminary results from a study released by the Fire Department show that such fires have caused $185 million in damage since 2017, 22% of all fire damage in the city. That includes $80 million in damage last year and $12 million in the first quarter of 2021.
Read the rest of the news article here.
~E
