Downtown

where all the lights are bright, downtown

 

feral youth and homeless bums plaguing streets of Santa Barbara

"The Year of the Locusts"

 

A band of modern-day Gypsies descends on Santa Barbara, its aging matriarch (Wendy) unaware that the younger generation has moved on from the traditional flim-flam to million-dollar heists and.....

Detective Lt. Mike Stone: Somebody call for a cop?
Inspector Steve Keller: Well, I called for one about an hour ago, but you know they're never around when you need 'em.
Detective Lt. Mike Stone: Well, here I am.

so once upon a time there were some homeless people hanging out at the Cabrillo Ballfield so the city closed the bathrooms...then citizens and nearby businesses complained about the homeless then citizens and nearby businesses complained again about the homeless gathering at the ballfield again and again and again.....

nearby Casa Esperanza is a homeless shelter by the beach.... the Milpas Community, led by a fat chick, formed to complain about the Casa and the icky homeless people hanging around Milpas...then they finally got the city to erect a fence around the Cabrillo ballfield and that kept the homeless people out...then the Milpas Community people won an award from someone in Minnesota for cleaning up their neighborhood....ahem...

ok so the homeless had to go somewhere else so they migrated downtown to City Hall and the Central Library and State Street....Scott Steepleton had a News-Press story about the homeless who are scaring folks in the De La Guerra Plaza triangle, esp Team Wendy folks...Scott says the homeless cacophony would keep any sane person away from De La Guerra Plaza...the transients cuss, brawl, and aggressively panhandle...maybe he's talking about the bar crowd at 2:00 am after last call...

epilogue: the transients are definitely here for good... and they are starting to bother the News-Press...starting to bother Scott Steepleton...I like that....the News-Press potheads will now have to snuggle up to the cops/unions to help keep the transients at bay...the same cops that Randy Rowse and Frank Hotchkiss support...all working together to outsmart the homeless...Dale Francisco said it best: got a problem, call a cop!!

meanwhile, the cops were busy arresting some non-transients for DUI, marijuana and other drugs, felony theft, assault and battery, trespassing, being drunk and disorderly to name a few....the Superior Court Calendars have thousands of local cases, civil and criminal, on the docket....thousands of cases involving all types of people...business owners, landlords, students, investigative journalists, newspaper publishers, restaurant owners, bars, hotels....all headed to court for one reason or another...

everyday is irony in the asphalt jungle