When the renovated Denver Union Station was unveiled in 2014, there were bands, food trucks, and plenty of activities for families with children. The $500 million project was designed to be the “crown jewel” of lower downtown. And for a number of years, it was.
Unfortunately, Union Station has become a “lawless hellhole,” according to the president of the city’s bus drivers union. Homeless people use drugs, urinate, and pass out all throughout the once-beautiful indoor corridor. The public restrooms have been closed. Benches have been removed. The police have arrested over 1,000 people at Union Station in just the first five months of 2022 alone.
What happened?
Californians happened. For decades, hundreds of thousands of California residents have fled the Golden State for Colorado, which was once a purple state, but all of those Californians have turned it reliably blue.
Then, in 2019, the state decriminalized the possession of most drugs. Now when police arrest drug users, as almost all of the homeless in Union Station are, they are back on the street within hours.
In other words, thanks to public policies imported from California, Denver’s police officers were powerless to stop the homeless from overtaking Union Station. Since Colorado legalized drug possession, homelessness in Denver is up 50%, violent crime is up 17%, and murder is up 47%.
When they are not buying drugs at Union Station, much of Denver’s homeless population rides the city’s buses from one end of the line to another, taking the effects of their addictions and mental illnesses with them.
On one occasion, the Washington Post recently recounted, an intoxicated 57-year-old woman jumped in front of a moving bus, and when the driver came to a screeching halt, the woman then boarded the bus without paying. She then walked up and down the aisle, while the bus was moving, cursing at the passengers.
Finally, a different mentally disturbed passenger punched her in the face, knocking her out cold. “Who ain’t never been knocked out before?” the man shouted, before he grabbed the woman and threw her out of the bus before she died on the sidewalk due to blunt-force trauma. “We can keep riding, though,” a different passenger said to the driver. “We got to go to work, man.”
San Francisco voters recently recalled their district attorney, who had refused to clamp down on open-air drug markets that were fueling that city’s homelessness crisis. Maybe Colorado voters can move in that direction as well, recriminalize drug possession, and reclaim what can be their beautiful downtown spaces.
* Article from: The Washington Examiner
