Sitting in front of a tent pitched on a sidewalk, Daniel Shawn, a 48-year-old homeless man, is silhouetted against the street lights Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, in downtown Los Angeles.

“Seattle is dying.”

That’s the provocative title of a one-hour documentary written and narrated by Eric Johnson for KOMO TV (ABC-4) in Washington. The program originally aired March 16 and has subsequently gone viral with millions more watching on YouTube and other web platforms.

Ostensibly an investigation into Seattle’s homeless epidemic, Johnson took a bat to a beehive by placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Seattle’s mayor and City Council; in other words, on liberals and their false-compassion policies that have enabled the drug-addled and mentally incompetent to live on the streets with impunity. And when I say “live on the streets” of course I mean die on the streets.

KOMO is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest television company with 192 stations in over 100 markets. Sinclair is openly conservative and makes no secret of the ideological slant it puts into its news coverage. Five minutes of “Is Seattle Dying” will be enough to convince you no Los Angeles news director would ever put anything like it on the airwaves here.

Now before you turn the page or click on that amazingly cute cat video, ask yourself this: “What if Eric Johnson happens to be right?” Conservative or not, the documentary should be required viewing for anyone who really cares about solving this national disgrace. It needs to be part of the conversation.

“This program is not about demonizing those who are struggling with addiction and homelessness and mental illness,” says Johnson. “It asks the question, ‘Why aren’t we doing more? Why don’t we have the courage to intervene in lives that are, in the face of a grave sickness, reeling out of control?’”

And what if “doing more” means exactly the opposite of what we’ve been doing? Los Angeles, like all of California, is reaping the bitter fruit of AB109 and propositions 47 and 57, which have effectively handcuffed law enforcement from intervening in this humanitarian crisis. By legalizing or decriminalizing many drug/drug-related crimes, addicts have been allowed to spiral downward until they land on the streets subject to rape and robbery and illness, while perpetrating crimes both petty and horrific to sustain their addictions or because they’ve lost contact with reality and humanity.

What if Seattle is dying via a tsunami of lost souls soiling the streets with used needles, vomit, urine, feces and every resulting bio-hazard that follows like a lethal caboose? Homelessness and drug addiction are not left/right issues. If we can’t work up compassion for addicts or the mentally disturbed, pure self-interest should demand a change in course. We have thrown billions at the homeless and that money has failed to stem the tide.

“It’s about citizens who don’t feel safe taking their families into downtown Seattle. It’s about parents who won’t take their children into the public parks they pay for,” says Eric Johnson. “It’s about filth and degradation all around us. And theft and crime. It’s about people who don’t feel protected anymore, who don’t feel like their voices are being heard.”

And those people are you and me. Those people are homeowners and renters, business owners and library patrons and law enforcement officers who are tasked with policing streets that have become toxic zones without the authority to actually do anything. Pooping on the sidewalks where kids walk to school? Shooting up in public parks? Shoplifting? All these crimes and more are now essentially consequence-free. Compassion without consequences is not kindness. Allowing these tragic cases to suffer in public and impose intolerable blight on neighborhoods is not an act of love.

We’ve been finger-pointing on homelessness for nearly 50 years. The problem has gotten exponentially worse. Drug abuse and mental illness is becoming a pandemic. It’s not just a city problem. Last year I saw a tent encampment under an overpass spanning the Trask River in Tillamook County, Oregon. While we don’t hesitate to condemn anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers for being fact-phobic, we somehow allow state legislators and city councilors and mayors to talk past reality with clichés like “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem” or “sustainable housing” jibber-jabber. What housing will sustain a meth-head?

In California, as in Seattle, officials blame everyone and everything except the drug-addled or the ACLU and other enablers for this crisis. As we all know, people investing in our communities, who take pride in their homes or businesses, are the bad guys.

What we’re unwilling to factor in when discussing housing costs are the sanctuary policies that have welcomed with open arms millions of illegal immigrants. News flash, they aren’t moving to Bel Air or Newport Beach. What do you think happens to low-income housing when millions of low-income migrants arrive? But even if there weren’t a housing shortage, junkies will ultimately end up in the gutter because the nature of drugs like crystal meth, bath salts, opioids and crack cocaine dissolve human connections and self-pride and ultimately unmoor addicts from civil society.

Whether you agree with everything or nothing in “Seattle is Dying” or this column, we can no longer ignore this issue. On top of the human tragedy homelessness represents, it’s a colossal embarrassment. Forty million people visited Southern California last year. Is this what we want them to see?

So, let’s ask one more uncomfortable question: What if we cross out “Seattle” and pencil in L.A, Anaheim, Santa Ana or pretty much Everytown, U.S.A.? What if we ask, “Is Los Angeles Dying?” Or “Is Fill-In-The-Blank Dying?”

The markets are booming. Unemployment is minuscule. Tax revenues are reaching record highs. Yet we’re stepping over human splat and driving past squalor and degradation on a massive scale. Scooping out turkey and yams once a year ain’t getting it done. We need new laws that will pass court challenges that empower the police to remove the sick and the dangerous from the streets. We need courts that will offer the choice of rehab or jail and we need recovery centers where the addicted can withdraw and recover while the mentally ill receive the compassionate care they require.

It won’t be cheap. Neither is what we’re currently doing.

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. He can be reached at:

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