Quote:
Originally Posted by DiracSpike
So I can definitely appreciate your point that the SIS could be just concentrating the nascent crime that would otherwise be occurring in the city. I guess you'd have to dig in to the crime statistics to see if crime as whole was static over a larger area, say all of downtown, over the past 10 years and if so that would be a strong data point that it's just a concentration effect. It could be true, you'd have to have a large draw down in crime from other areas of downtown to achieve that though. If it's just a concentration issue then that removes one of the larger drawbacks on this site of increased crime in the city as a whole. I wonder if diffused crime is better than concentrated crime for the city though, concentrating it runs the large risk of ghetto-ization which thankfully our city has managed to avoid, I don't think anyone wants to have our own version of East Hastings here. I don't know what a good go-forward is though, this is one of the toughest societal problems we have and I think anyone who thinks they know exactly what to do is full of it. Substance addiction and mental health are incredibly complex issues that are hard to solve, and unfortunately for Calgary I could see this issue getting much worse as our economy slides with no pipelines. The needle deposit idea I think is a good one, along with increased Police presence so we're agreed there. I know they had the infrastructure ready with the Chumir center already there but I think there were much better places to put the SIS all things being equal. There's a lot of open space north of the saddledome by the river that is just grass and parking lots with no homes or businesses that would have been much better.
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You have to put it pretty close to where the community already exists or you won't see people using it. These are low-barrier and embedded services for communities who need them.
Let's just dispense with the weird concentration camp fetishes espoused by some posters in this thread.