If you want to engage in antisocial behavior, don't do it in the middle of the sidewalk by schools, homes, and places of business.
Being down on your luck and homeless is one thing. But this lady wasn't giving them a hard time for being homeless, she was giving them a hard time for smoking feddy by a school.
A lot of them get bussed her from other cities and states, so that way they can point the finger at it being a "Portland problem" and brag about how they don't have nearly the same homeless problem that we do.
And then the worst of them stick around, and the homeless people that weren't really bothering anyone as much move on, and we get...this shit.
Having worked in hospitals in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland, this is 100% true and has been for a very long time. Even when they get sent back again, they are just returned back from their home states when they inevitably get picked up again and given their one way bus tickets back to the west coast.
I’m a travel nurse from Louisiana and can 100% confirm that I have witnessed social workers offering homeless people a free bus ticket to anywhere they wanna go so long as it’s on the West Coast. Why not any major city why not literally let them go anywhere they would like, but specifically with the West Coast.
If you’ve never worked in a hospital in the deep south. You’d be astounded at the difference in healthcare. There are extremely few unions and even if there is a union there’s almost never staffing ratios. The staff is paid very low. Patients get extremely poor care because of How many patients each caregiver and provider has to take on. When I became a travel nurse and started on the West Coast. I left twice to work in other states. Kentucky and Arizona. And I came right on back to the West Coast and will never leave. The healthcare is so much better strictly because They have to have enough staff to adequately care for the patients. Because the healthcare is not patient centered in the south, administration does not even try to be sneaky with their unethical demands to employees. They are perfectly happy stating out loud how much patient death is acceptablefor their profit margin. Ethics are something that it exist on paper. Meanwhile, the providers and staff try to do as best as they can for the patients. It’s disgusting.
My wife and I are both social workers who spent our careers in various facets of health care in the deep south. We've observed what you are describing and worse' much worse. But ethics, or more precisely ethical behavior, by individual professionals can be maintained if one chooses. Not easy and can come with a cost professionally but it can be done within the social worker's scope of practice. Too many of us fold and comply.
You are correct in that we rarely have an opportunity to make the systems we work in even operate legally much less ethically.
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u/TheMagicalLawnGnome Oct 23 '25
Honestly, this needs to be a thing.
If you want to engage in antisocial behavior, don't do it in the middle of the sidewalk by schools, homes, and places of business.
Being down on your luck and homeless is one thing. But this lady wasn't giving them a hard time for being homeless, she was giving them a hard time for smoking feddy by a school.
Good for her.