Yes. Happy to help you understand. Many homeless in SF are actually very mentally ill. They sometimes jump in front of traffic. This has happened to me a few times driving in SF. So the implication is that the bus driver may not at all have been at fault.
I'm not saying anyone deserved to die; the homeless in SF are basically not autonomous agents anymore. Right or wrong, it shifts it in my mind from "bus driver is at fault" to "nobody is at fault" (except the city that encourages themn to them stay drugged and on the streets).
So being homeless means that we shouldn't investigate fatal crashes? Personally, I don't think they should have to give up the right to not be murdered.
(Which is a bit sarcastic, perhaps, but people generally value the homeless less on various axis, whether they want to admit it or not, because when you hear "bad thing happened to man" you immediately want to know if that man could have been you, once you learn he was homeless the panic reaction subsides.)
The subtext is that the individual was not of right mind, either due to sleep deprivation from being unhoused, or the stress itself of being unhoused, or, to be blunt, being on drugs. Not that it, in any way, makes it okay to have run over them, but the implication is that it's possible they got hit because they stepped out/jumped in front of the bus, and that it wasn't the fault of the bus driver. Not saying that's what happened here, but that's the framing that saying they're homeless gives for me.
For additional context, Harrison and 7th isn't located in the best neighborhood, which is to say there are numerous tent cities in that vicinity.
> Not that it, in any way, makes it okay to have run over them, but the implication is that it's possible they got hit because they stepped out/jumped in front of the bus, and that it wasn't the fault of the bus driver
This sounds like this makes it, "in some way", okay to people here. No need for investigation, it must be the dirty homeless.
No, they could have just described the persons' behavior -- but instead they wanted to include the false nuance that is echoed in the comments here that because someone is homeless it implies and symbolizes their mental state as being broken and their judgement as being faulty.
It's about as true as looking at the ballot returns of any single state and then declaring all people within that state as party affiliates for the elected party -- it's not true but it's useful for painting the people involved into hateful and simplified stereotypes that do nothing but provide bigots with an easy to understand mental model, however false or imprecise it might be.
One thing that can be said for sure : If any of us were homeless traffic victims I doubt that we'd want "they're homeless" as the de-facto explanation as to why a vehicle ran us down -- it's not that easy to explain away.
Maybe because it does take a broken mental state to give up on society and go live out on the streets. I understand that is a progression and it is no ones choice, but it doesn’t change the fact that no one of a sound mental state lives like that.
