I’m not sure which is worse: cruelty by decision or cruelty by ignorance.
This story falls into the category of cruelty by ignorance.
The City of Akron is currently on a rampage against their homeless citizens. They are hunting homeless people.
Since the beginning of the year I have personally seen them shut down at least a half dozen homeless camps.
They don’t tell them where to go. No homeless service providers show up to offer help.
And if the city can find them they will immediately throw them out of any place these people try to hide.
The madness of this is infuriating and frustrating. But it’s not actually the urgent story I want to tell you about today.
Today I want to tell you about the complete incompetence the city is exhibiting in the way they go about closing these camps.
Last night I was watching a video about a man trying to build tiny homes for the homeless people of Los Angeles. In the video they talk about how the city cleans camps. You can watch that here if you’d like:
But what is important is the systematic way they go about it.
They educate the workers on what they are going to experience. Things such as powerful opiates, needles, feces, urine, rats and other bio hazards.
On top of that they give them safety equipment like bio hazard suites:
They duct tape the arms of the suites and wear thick rubber gloves:
And when they are done they then thoroughly power wash the sidewalk:
These are professionals doing their job professionally. (Notice his boots. Those are quite likely protective quality as well.)
This is the scene at an Akron camp cleanup:
These are people required to do community service work. They aren’t paid. They aren’t volunteers. These are people REQUIRED to do this work.
They are in their own street clothes. They were given fabric garden gloves to do the work. They were given no training or even warning about what they had gotten themselves into.
It is no exaggeration to say that this community service work could have been a death sentence for these people.
As of today Summit County now has 81 reported cases of Hepatitis A.
On May 30 I wrote that The Ohio Department of Health reported that Summit County (Akron) had 64 reported cases of Hep A… Compared to Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) which had 54 cases.
Two weeks later the numbers are:
Summit county: 81 Cases
Cuyahoga County: 62 Cases
We have increased Hepatitis A in Summit County by 27% in 2 weeks! Cuyahoga County increased by 12%.
The population of Cleveland is 385,525. The population of Akron is 197,846.
So not only do we have more Hepatitis than Cleveland. We are outpacing them every day.
This all becomes more critical in the face of what Dr. Drew recently said about LA:
Dr. Drew Pinsky warns Los Angeles could be at risk of a deadly epidemic this summer | Fox News
He said: “I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.”
“Pinsky described to Kilmeade what he believes to be the almost medieval conditions in the City of Angels and compared local politicians to Nero, the infamous Roman Emperor who allegedly fiddled while his nation burned.”
Our mayor is fiddling while Akron burns.
On top of that he is putting unsuspecting community service workers in harms way.
We are living in a town of insanity.
I don’t know how to yell louder than what I’m currently doing. But this is serious. We are on the edge of a very serious infectious disease outbreak in Akron Ohio.
Someone PLEASE listen to me.
What is happening in LA is going to happen here.
They don’t clean these camps properly. They don’t try to help the homeless stay clean. They just scatter them to the wind. They are making everything worse.
We are looking at rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus.
It’s all very possible because the administration isn’t taking their homeless problem seriously.
These people need to be living in a place with running water, toilets and trash service.
Whether you care about the homeless is irrelevant. This is an infectious disease emergency.
SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!