I saw my first dead body today.

It was a homeless man in an abandoned lot near the metro station. I was walking past and saw a couple of cops confirming his deadness or something while an ambulance waited to take him to wherever Philadelphia takes its dead homeless people. I presume he died overnight of complications from homelessness - hunger, exposure, illness, drugs, something like that. I wish I could write about him as more than an nameless, homeless guy, which is almost certainly how he was treated at the end of his life.

That part of Philadelphia has a pretty bad drug and homelessness problem. The city's most recent policy intervention was to require permits for the mobile medical service providers in the area and restrict their operation to a single lot in front of a police station. (There's a separate six-block stretch they can use overnight.) The law implementing this was drafted by that district's councilmember, and it passed the city council overwhelmingly, 13-3. The people in the district really don't like the homeless and the drugs they use, and blame the mobile services providers for "littering, nuisance behavior, and safety concerns," if Councilmember Quetcy Lozada's press release is to be believed. I can't speak to the experience of living there, but I also don't follow the logic. Making it harder for homeless people to get services only reduces homelessness by killing the homeless.

Maybe that dead guy is the policy working as intended.

Sandbagging service providers does make it easier to avoid seeing the homeless, which I suspect was the real motivation for the law. Like I said, I'm not in that district, but I know that in my own district, the most politically vocal demographic seems primarily focused on minimizing their personal dissatisfaction. For example: It's hard to park, so we must oppose all new housing, because new housing means more people, which means more cars. (Also, rent is too high, but that's unrelated.) The neighborhood zoning committee recently voted to oppose a new late-night slider joint in an area without many late-night food options primarily because the woman who owns the boutique next door was worried her clothes would smell like hamburgers.

At a recent neighborhood safety meeting, the hottest topic was how excited everyone was to get city funding to install Internet-connected door cameras and transmit the footage directly to the police department. This prevents? deters? punishes? package and car theft, I guess. Whether giving the police a live video feed of the entire neighborhood might have any downsides did not seem like an important question. When the division inspector beseeched us to immediately call 911 anytime we saw anything we found suspicious, all the attendees sagely nodded, except for me, who has read too many stories about Black men detained because they "matched the description of a suspect in the area," where the "description" was "a Black man wearing a coat" and the "suspect" was someone walking in a place that a white person didn't expect them.

The idea that problems (in general) can be solved (generically) by the police seems pretty prevalent here. One of the safety meeting attendees was hopping mad about increased traffic congestion on a local thoroughfare. The actual issue is that the street is not large enough to support the densifying neighborhood, but she was baffled that we weren't solving the problem in the obvious way: More police, more aggressively ticketing double-parkers. I admit unfamiliarity with this school of transit planning.

The division inspector also proudly announced that closer collaboration between the police department and the parking enforcement group should result in us seeing more boots on the cars of moving violators with unpaid tickets. Once again, the logic escapes me. Why does booting cars reduce speeding? I think it's supposed to be a deterrent, but punitive measures are a crude tool for effecting social change - when they work at all. I can't bring myself to categorically endorse them, let alone celebrate them.

The Onion was right 30 years ago. Somebody should do something about all the problems. But people presume that "someone" means "someone else," and that "something" should be easy. Just have The Authorities fix things. That's what they're there for, right? And if they claim their hands are tied because of a lack of resources or information or unaccountability, well, best give them what they ask for. We need the problems to be solved, after all.