With the daylight hours shortening and the leaves beginning to fall, the large group of young so-called “travelers” will begin their annual migration to cities with warmer weather, leaving the 16th Street Mall to Denver’s more “traditional” homeless who are older and, generally speaking, a great deal less violent with marijuana and alcohol being the drugs of choice rather than the heroin and meth preferred by some of the young travelers.
It has been an in-teresting summer down at the Mall which was originally envisioned as a mecca for tourists coming to Colorado, and in particular Denver. Walking down the Mall this summer one could enjoy the fresh, pungent odor of urine while being accosted by highly aggressive young panhandlers and even physically assaulted by individuals carrying pipes. If you were eating on one of the patios or restaurants adjoining the Mall you stood a chance of your food literally being taken off your plate by a traveler. It got so bad that even the older Denver homeless were demanding that Denver do “something” about the chaotic situation.
The situation got worse and worse until some of the violence was captured by a KDVR camera crew and a reporter and broadcast on the nightly local news. Other news outlets soon began covering the story and a call went out to the mayor of Denver (who was on a mission in Rio De Janeiro to find out about what was involved in holding the Olympics) to tell him trouble was brewing back in River City.
To his credit when Mayor Hancock returned he held a press conference at which he made it clear that he found the situation untenable and he intended to take action. No wonder. The problem has been festering for a long time on the 16th Street Mall.
In 2015 the Denver City Council was presented with a report from Visit Denver, the official marketing arm of The Convention & Visitors Bureau, which noted how visitors complained about the “homeless, youth, panhandling, safety, cleanliness, and drugs, including marijuana consumption.” In one communication to the bureau a visitor noted: “I’m sorry but I would never consider putting attendees in danger by holding a convention in your city. We were staying at Embassy Suites downtown on 16th and last night witnessed a group of about 30 teenagers attack a man walking along 16th Street.”
Part of the problem are the somewhat spineless downtown business groups such as the Downtown Partnership whose spokeswoman asserted amazingly to a television reporter that the violence and assaults on the Mall are part of the wonderful “urban experience” that Denver provides to visitors.
The mayor did significantly increase the police presence on the 16th Street Mall which caused many of the travelers to move to the Cherry Creek bike path resulting in a massive increase of used heroin needles on the bike path. Denver Parks and Recreation issued a temporary directive allowing police to give 90-day suspensions from park use for persons caught dealing or using drugs in the parks, but suspensions could be appealed.
Even that tepid response was, of course, too much for the highly sensitive Editorial Board of The Denver Post whose main job is to make as Denver thoroughly miserable as possible for the residents, while generally being in the back pocket of the Administration and the high density real estate developers that control the city. (See The Denver Post September 7, 2016 lead editorial.)
The dispute highlights a decayed society that no longer can protect itself or its children. Parasites like John Parvensky, President of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless since 1986, have exploited the massively government funded Coalition for his own enrichment, with the goal appearing to be to attract as many homeless to Denver as physically possible in order to increase the funding for the Coalition and Parvensky’s scandalous salary.
Visitors to Denver are often shocked by the number of panhandlers and beggars throughout the city. You often hear city officials assert that begging is a constitutional right for which they can do nothing. In actual fact the United States Supreme Court has never asserted that public panhandling is somehow protected by the 1st Amendment but simply that governments cannot prevent organized charities from soliciting funds as stated in Riley v. National Federation of the Blind of Carolina.
Of course the ACLU will sue Denver if it even attempts to prevent even aggressive panhandling, but Denver gets sued all the time anyway. The ACLU is infamous for cowering when government actually attempts to quash citizens’ real 1st Amendment and other rights as when Roosevelt issued an executive order interning Japanese-American citizens during World War II or when the U.S. government in the 1950s went after individuals for simply being a member of or having been a member of the Communist Party of America. The ACLU is a gutless organization when the rubber really meets the road, but in in the meantime it’s great for suing small municipalities with limited budgets for having inoffensive Christmas displays.
In between the endless ACLU lawsuits, the young heroin chic travelers would stop coming to Denver as they look for cities with great weather that are easy marks. Stop being an easy mark and they go away. But, of course, Denver would risk, as the spokeswoman for the Downtown Partnership indicated, visitors being deprived of the wonderful “urban experience” of being physically assaulted on the 16th Street Mall and the opportunity of starting their own collection of used heroin needles from the Cherry Creek bike path. But as the old saying goes “you can’t have it all.” Will Denver muster the courage to fight the good fight? Don’t count on it. The Administration is too busy destroying neighborhoods with excessive density and no parking.
— Editorial Board