Jay Evensen
  • Front Page
  • Opinions
  • Second Thoughts
  • Portfolio
  • Awards
  • About

Violence inevitable on Salt Lake's troubled Rio Grande St.

3/1/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
As Salt Lake City struggles to gain a foothold after the tragic police shooting of a 17-year-old boy officers say was assaulting someone on Rio Grande Street last weekend, one thing seems to be escaping attention.

The street itself is a cesspool of lawlessness, a 24-hour “hell” of crime, as people who know described it to me more than a year ago, and as I have witnessed myself and discussed several times in this column.

Surely, amid the anguish of what happened last Saturday, there must be a sense of inevitability about it all, as well as questions as to why such a place is allowed to exist in a city known as orderly and peaceful. And surely, there must be a resolve to do something about it.

Back in December of 2014, I met with several businesses owners in the area who wanted desperately to reform how the Road Home homeless shelter on that street does business. They described public urination, fights, drug deals, prostitution and many other daily occurrences making it hard for them to attract customers or to even come and go from work safely.

Pamela Atkinson, an advocate well known for her work with Utah’s less fortunate, described the problem well when she told a legislative committee that the homeless aren’t the problem. It’s the criminals who prey on the homeless.

The young man police shot, Kenyan refugee Abdullahi Mohamed, was not, as Atkinson reminded the committee, homeless. What he was doing in that neighborhood, and what led him to beat a man with a stick or a rod remains unclear.

But Rio Grande Street has become a mall, of sorts, for the underworld. The group I met with included Bryson Garbett, president of Garbett Homes. He took the unusual step of posing as a homeless person and living on the street for four nights. He described sordid scenes rivaling anything you would expect to find in a bigger city. He also described meeting intelligent, interesting out-of-luck homeless people trying to get help amid the danger, vying for a limited number of beds inside the shelter each night.

One person who gets all this is Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller. As the Deseret News reported, she pled with lawmakers Monday to fully fund the city’s and Salt Lake County’s request for $27 million to help redesign the Road Home shelter, which Salt Lake Mayor Jackie Biskupski said was designed to hold 300 people but regularly crams more than 1,000 people together each night.

Miller and other members of the Homeless Services Site Evaluation Commission may have gotten through to lawmakers, who ought to make this a priority.

With $27 million, the commission hopes to find ways to divide the homeless into separate shelters in separate locations, depending on their needs. No longer would families with children or single homeless women have to navigate the gauntlet of Rio Grande.

If the shelters dealt with smaller, more easily controlled populations, and if they had better ways to help people obtain public services and track their progress, it might be easier to keep the peace.

When I’ve written about this before, critics have accused wealthy business owners of little more than wanting to move the homeless away because they are bad for business. It ought to be clear now that the neighborhood is a community crisis.

I refer to what happened to Mohamed as a tragedy because there is no other way to describe the shooting of a 17-year-old boy, no matter the circumstances. Like many troubled young people, he had a long list of felonies and misdemeanors on his rap sheet, including 122 days in a detention facility, according to the Deseret News. That, in itself, is a separate tragedy.
​
But the shooting, the tragic tale of a young man who now is in critical condition and the facts of what happened Saturday are one thing. The conditions that contributed to the situation on Rio Grande Street are another, and they can, and ought to, be solved through the right political will.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Search this site


    Like what you read here?

      Please subscribe below, and we'll let you know when there is a new opinion.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Picture

    The author

    Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has nearly 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities.

    Archives

    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012

    Categories

    All
    Campaign 2012
    Congress
    Crime
    Culture
    Iran
    Oil And Gas
    Poverty
    Steroids
    Taxes
    Utah
    Washington
    World Events
    World Events

    Links

    Deseret News
    Newslink
    Marianne Evensen's blog

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.