Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
A recent open letter to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (Strib Voices, Sept. 15) described a couple’s experience with their child being stuck with a needle left on the sidewalk in front of their home. Indeed, that is a scary, terrifying experience. So many Minneapolis residents have been affected by what is going on. This is my story.
My husband and I are in our 70s. For more than 10 years we have volunteered to clean along the Hiawatha Bike Trail and portions of the Midtown Greenway in south Minneapolis. Several times each week we take our grabber tool and plenty of bags, our little dog tagging along, and clean up sections of the trail. We started doing this after biking through the area years ago and seeing how bad it looked. At first it wasn’t much of a problem. The biggest issue was men passed out from drinking. Empty vodka bottles were common. We never, ever found needles, but then it all changed. When the large homeless camps emerged along Hiawatha Avenue, we started to find needles and drug paraphernalia everywhere. It’s misleading to call this a homeless crisis; it’s a drug epidemic.
One summer a few years ago after picking up more than 1,000 needles we had to stop. I myself was accidentally pricked by a needle. We would encounter aggressive people high on drugs, screaming at us, swinging boards and shooting up on the trail. Our car was broken into, and it was just too dangerous. The amount of trash was horrendous. Only after the city cleared the homeless camps were we able to return to the trail. We still found plenty of syringes, straps for shooting up, cotton balls, bloody bandages, lighters, thousands of pieces of aluminum foil used for doing drugs, etc., but it felt less dangerous.
But as of this week we’ve decided once again to stop picking up along the trails. Monday was our last day, it’s just too risky. As is typical each day, on Monday we filled two 33-gallon trash bags from a two-block stretch of the trail that we had just cleaned the week before, along with some larger items we hauled out. We had to avoid areas where drug users were present and shooting up. It’s not just the huge volume of drug paraphernalia, it’s used condoms, clothing used as toilet paper, rotting food and trash scattered everywhere a drug user had stopped to shoot up. We find multiple needles every day.
As we’re walking along the trail, we often talk to the property owners and maintenance people trying to clean up their properties. They tell horror stories. There have been fires set next to buildings, including a school, feces on their front doors in the morning, broken windows and doors, holes cut in fences, shoplifting, stolen property and the list goes on. One worker said he’s encountered drug users who came to Minneapolis from as far away as California because they heard medical care was so good here. Another, a recovered addict himself, said he’s recently seen drug dealers and users coming from other areas, especially Chicago, because drugs in Minneapolis are plentiful, potent and cheap.
So, what do we do? I have no great answers, I just pick up trash, but I do know this. When people do bad things, sometimes very, very bad things, there needs to be consequences or the behavior will continue. I fully support providing housing, food, medical care and treatment options for people. These people need our help. But when people refuse help and continually break the law, we as a society need to say it’s not acceptable and hold them accountable. We have a majority on the City Council who live in a fantasy land. They attack the police instead of the problem. They have this naïve belief that if we just provide the homeless and drug users with more services then everything will be fine. The Democratic Socialists even want to “demilitarize police,” taking weapons away from police and ultimately eliminate police altogether. It’s delusional.
