London Breed Quotes

Homelessness, open air drug use and mental illness - which we all see in this city - are things we've been relying on the DA's office and the jails to deal with. That's really expensive, inhumane and ineffective.

The questions that consume me, that keep me up at night, are the people that are sleeping on the streets.

We know that all too often, homelessness and behavioral health challenges go hand in hand.

By incarcerating someone who is homeless or addicted or who suffers from mental health challenges, we only further destabilize that person and create situations where they are more likely to commit crimes in the future.

Every day on our streets there are people who are facing a combination of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. Each of these conditions is challenging alone, but when experienced at the same time it creates a downward spiral that makes it even more difficult for the person to get treated and housed.

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

There are five issues that make a fist of a hand that can knock America out cold. They're lack of jobs, obesity, diabetes, homelessness, and lack of good education.

In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.

Many times, I left the prison thinking, 'I'm smart. I can make it. I won't get caught up again.' But you get off downtown Skid Row, and you're a target for all of the environmental harms in that area. The pain and trauma in that area is so thick, you can almost reach your hand out and touch it.

To me poverty, mental health, and addictions don't sound like criminal justice problems. They sound to me like a social justice problem.

Homelessness and behavioral health challenges affect every neighborhood in San Francisco.

Not everyone who's homeless is a drug-addict or in need of mental health care. Some are normal people who've been knocked down, and it can happen to you, too. Not all of us made bad life choices.

Clearly, there are a thousand and one scenarios for how someone can slip through the cracks. I'll walk down the street and see a homeless person, and I'll want to stop them and say, How did this happen? Where's your mother? Are you physically ill? Mentally ill?

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.

I spend a fair bit of time in Los Angeles, and there is much I love about the place - the weather, the food, the beaches and the golf. And a few things I don't. Like the way an enormous number of mentally ill people seem to be forced to live on the streets with little or nothing in the way of government assistance.

There are more than 200,000 people in Maputo who are nothing more than parasites.

Cincinnati’s Problem: The Feeble Minded: The Hub to our Wheel of Vice, Crime and Pauperism.

The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America's poor; America's minorities; and often, unfortunately, America's vulnerable, in terms of people with disease and addiction and mental health.

I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.

I don't think people who are already burdened with social, economic, psychological situations, dysfunctional families, need to be burdened with other people with the same problems.

It can be refugees, it can be a pregnant mother, it can be a 15-year-old... homelessness can happen to everybody.

Certain people are more likely to use drugs because of whatever it is: They've suffered some trauma in their life. They have risk factors like mental illness, people with learning disabilities, with attention problems.

Of course homelessness has many causes and the solutions are often frustratingly complex.

The holidays are a rough time for the homeless, but it's a year-round problem we have to solve.