shannon_a

Last night, a bit before midnight, I start hearing strange sounds outside. Hooting and huffing, like an owl and a wolf, maybe some moaning. Then the first outright yell cuts loose. That one catches Kimberly's attention; she never likes intrusive sounds, but particularly not a crazed shriek in the night. Amidst this I also hear banging about of trash cans, quite possibly the ones right next to our door.

Twice, I go to upstair windows to try and spot who it is making these sounds. I look out toward the ever-under-construction apartments next door and out across our swath of sidewalk, and can't spot anyone.

Callisto is disturbed by the sounds too, moreso the hooting and huffing than the yelling as far as I can tell. She's running all about the house, also trying to figure out where it is.

I should note, though these types of sounds haven't intruded on house before to this extent, they aren't unknown in Berkeley. Through its policy of permissiveness and refusal to stop homeless vagrants from illegally camping on our streets, illegally taking over our parks, and illegally shooting up drugs in all of these places, the Berkeley City Council has made our city a "Holy Land" for the homeless. No, that's not hyperbole. There's been at least one newspaper article that puts it in those terms, quoting homeless who travel from all over to get to Berkeley and partake of the city council's laissez faire attitude. And, one city obviously can't resolve all the homeless problems of the entire Bay Area, so we have a constantly overflowing petri dish of people with severe mental health problems and severe drug use problems, and that often leads to people nonsensically (and threateningly) shouting, screaming, huffing, howling, and hooting in the street while stumbling around smashing trash cans and whatever else is nearby.

And, I've been threatened both in the street and in restaurants by some of the same, but as I said, it hadn't intruded upon our supposedly safe domicile before.

Going downstairs after my second fruitless window search last night, I see that this time it has. A disheveled gray-haired man in a ripped jacket begins sporadically banging on the glass panes of our front door, huffing and hooting as he does.

That is the point at which I call the police. Non-emergency line, but I let them know he's right at our front door and that I feel threatened. No, he doesn't have a weapon that I can see, but at that point he's sat down on our front steps, so I can only see his back.

They say they'll send someone out.

A minute later the vagrant starts banging really hard on our glass panes, and I'm afraid he's going to smash them. I pick up the landline in my hand, ready to dial 9-1-1 and get an immediate response. I also quickly consider where the best weapons are in the house. The thick, wooden closet rod in the art-room closet can be popped out of its sockets. That's probably the best choice. The banging stops. A minute later the police show up. It's a long wait.

I hear bits and pieces of the conversation. He says, "I'm very cold", the first articulate words that he's said since beginning to haunt our house. They also get a name out of him, though it takes a few minutes. They get the first name first, then the last name a minute or two later.

With the police having successfully cleared the area, they bring in an ambulance a few minutes later, then they're all off.

I open up the door several minutes later to survey the damage, and I see two drops of blood on our bottom two steps. So, apparently he was both physically and mentally wounded, and that's probably why he was banging on the door. This freaks me out even more. I fill a pitcher with water and pour it out over the bottom steps, standing as far away as I can. Then I do it a second time.

I feel bad for not letting in someone who was hurt and seeking help. I mean, I feel like that goes against the basic morals of the human species. But everyone who has lived in Berkeley for more than a few years is haunted by the murder of Peter Cukor. Basically: paranoid schizophrenic vagrant shows up at Cukor's house and starts messing around in his yard, exactly as happened to us last night; Cukor goes out to confront him, and is bludgeoned to death. And that's not even to speak of the regular knifings that occur at the various homeless encampments, the continuous arson, the sexual assaults, the 1500 police calls that occur just at People's Park every year.

Some wag came up with the phrase "the homeless aren't harmless" and that's unfortunately true.

I don't want to ignore the very real challenges that the homeless face. I do want to get them help and support, but we can't do that at a city level; all we do is endanger the other 99% of our residents in exchange for trying to help the 1%.

Seriously, fuck Berkeley for creating not a Mecca for the Homeless, but a Black Hole of Homelessness.

Seriously, fuck Berkeley for making me constantly choose between compassion and my personal safety.

I feel like their permissiveness, their horribly misguided and doomed-to-fail attempt to be good, is contributing to making me a worse person.

And that's the second time that I had a very uncomfortable vagrant encounter in the last week. On Tuesday, I went to have lunch at McDonalds. They always have a problem there with not policing their lobby, and it filling up with vagrants. So I sat down next to a table where there were two. Whatever.

And as I'm eating a third vagrant sits down in the chair across from me so he can talk to them. He ignores me, so again, whatever.

And then he starts asking what stuff they got and how much it is, and it's obvious that there's a drug deal going down, literally at my table at McDonalds.

The price is more than he's got, so he stomps off. And he comes back a few minutes later, thankfully looming over their table instead of sitting at mine, and he's somewhat angrily trying to negotiate down their price. And I'm starting to be worried there's violence going to erupt. But, the two drug-selling vagrants are cool as cucumbers. They finally give him his drugs for what he can afford.

And I don't see a reason to go back to that McDonalds unless I'm getting something to go.

And seriously, fuck Berkeley for allowing a homeless encampment to exist at Shattuck & University for months and months, in the literal middle of our downtown, and thus forcing this business to decide whether it's going to put someone in danger trying to police the vagrancy or whether it's going to allow drug deals go on in its premises, the ultimate result of the city's permisiveness.

Last night, Kimberly said she felt we did the right thing. We got our hooting intruder help quickly, through the police. And we did it without endangering ourselves.

She's right. I'm sure she's right.

But, I worry, I catastrophize. Is he going to show up at our house again, banging on our door? Is someone going to come after us for not providing aid and support quickly enough? Is he going to claim he hurt himself banging around our property in the night and that's it our fault? is there more blood out there that might be a literal biohazard?

Most likely we'll never hear of it all again.

Most likely I'm just fretting because I'm feeling vulnerable because my personal sanctuary was assailed last night.

This morning I could see the outside better, and I noticed that our nighttime visitor had thrown our trash can a full ten feet.