PERRY: ‘Tough love’ treatment of Aurora’s homeless signals ‘tough luck’ for all

It’s safe to say that regardless of your political and philosophical views about homelessness, everyone agrees that having homeless people not be homeless is the best possible outcome in this growing and persistent crisis.

Much of Aurora and the metroplex find it heartbreaking that so many people, thousands of them, risk their lives almost daily without a home or even the backseat of a car to sleep in.

Much of Aurora is also fed up with often dangerous road-side encampments, burrowing into neighborhoods, becoming cauldrons of drug abuse, crime and misery.

And, despite what some say, almost all of the homeless people themselves would much prefer life with a bathroom, food, safety and retreat from the elements that having a home offers.

With everyone sharing the same ultimate goal, it’s especially disappointing that Aurora and the metroplex continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without even beginning to attain our mutual goal.

Aurora lawmakers have a new old idea: “tough love.”

This 1960s philosophy that “father knows best” has been applied to just about every social and personal ill available. The general idea is that it’s more compassionate to hurt someone for their own good, than to just sympathize or accommodate their dysfunction.

It was a big deal when I was in school and kids got “grounded” or even arrested by truancy police for ditching school all the time.

The notion that you have to be “cruel to be kind” appeals mostly to people who see the world as black-and-white. It’s all choices and consequences.

It’s an extension of “spare the rod, spoil the child.”

The problem is, these are not children.

These are real people who don’t have a place to live. Many of them have debilitating mental illness, physical health problems or addictions. They don’t live on the streets and beg for a few dollars to buy whatever meth, bourbon or fentanyl they can get because they’re spoiled. It’s because they’re sick, sometimes to the point of being nearly broken.

The idea that these people just don’t know better, and that they just need the fear of jail to get their attention, is quaint and wholly unrealistic.

That’s not just my opinion, nor is it only the opinion of an army of homeless activists and workers who see for themselves every single day what does and doesn’t work.

Multiple vetted studies consistently show that cajoled or mandated drug and alcohol addiction treatment doesn’t work.

“Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms,” seven expert authors concluded in a 2016 review of nine qualified studies of a tough-love approach to trying to compel addicts to end their addictions.

I understand how attractive this philosophy is to some people. It’s based on the idea that, faced with dire consequences, like having to stay in your room with no TV, or even losing everything, humans will pull up.

When facing the worst, some people will quit drinking to save a marriage. They’ll quit meth to save their job. They’ll quit gambling to keep the house.

But more often than not, people keep drinking, gambling and doing meth, and they lose it all.

What’s more, so many of these homeless people have nothing left to lose. They have nothing. Nothing.

For some, a couple of weeks in jail isn’t a bad thing. It’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It’s safer than waking up under a bridge to someone stealing what few items you have. It’s a respite from the harsh existence so many people suffer through without a home.

Addictions are gargantuan obstacles for anyone, and especially for those who’ve already hit rock bottom.

It doesn’t mean that there won’t be at least a handful of homeless people in Aurora shuffled into the right place at the right time to pull away from their issues, get a job, a home and rejoin everyone playing by the rules.

But what’s really going to happen is that the vast majority of people who are homeless, and camping along roads, at the back of parks and under viaducts will be shooed away to another road, another park, another viaduct. Probably, they’ll be shuffled to Denver or beyond. And the homeless people in those communities will be shuffled over here.

Many will go to jail, on fail-to-appear-in-court warrants most likely, hang out there for a few weeks, at extraordinary taxpayer expense, and then find a new place to camp.

It’s sad that Aurora finds itself right where it was a couple of years ago when Tough Love Version 1.0 was introduced by much of the same city council.

We all want the same thing. It seems that with such a solid common goal, it would be easy to work together to reach it. Maybe next time.

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