www.street-people.com is celebrating the one year mark of documenting the panhandlers, scammers, and street people in our city.  It is not something we are happy to celebrate.  We had hoped by highlighting the issue something would change

Our effort has raised the interest of other bloggers, started a forum, and generated interest in local media.

The street people are part of the problem in several ways:

1. They create an image that our city is unsafe because people are panhandled.  Street-people.com has tracked the panhandlers from downtown, mid-town and all the way out east in Germantown.  It is a county wide problem

It impacts tourism dollars, conference meeting that might get scheduled here, and business development just as the hookers by Smith& Nephew impacts their business.

2. Police are called to deal with panhandlers and are taken away for more serious crimes. Often the police need to address the drunk and disorderly panhandlers (not that all are) but they arrest the panhandlers who go to jail for a day or two, get free meals on our tax dollars and medical care, and then are back out on the street.  Maybe if we had a better system for dealing with these people it would be a better us of our police department, and tax dollars.

So I think addressing this issue needs to be part of the crime discussion as it we solve it we would free up officers to deal with larger crime