Yes, but the alternative is not problem-free either. There are no easy answers here, but I don’t think the current situation is ideal.

I believe it isn’t really the people; it’s the mental illness or addiction that keeps them from accepting help. Every chronically homeless person I’ve met is one, the other, or both. While I understand it’s tempting to think that we should let them decide whether to accept help or not, I don’t think that worldview takes into account that you’re talking about people that are actually incapable of making decisions in their own best interests. I personally think it’s inhumane that they are not taken into protective custody and allowed to live in dignity.

Not exactly, but chronically homeless people would rather be homeless than stop doing the things that caused their homelessness in the first place. The ones who really did just have bad luck tend to bounce back with the assistance available to them fairly quickly, never to be seen again by me.

Source: firsthand knowledge serving the homeless and trying to get them to help themselves.

Thanks for the added context. If they did intentionally delay prosecution (plausible considering how much time they had to do it but didn’t) then that’s pretty hard to excuse regardless of the reason.

Do we have proof or is this conjecture that fits what we can observe?

True, that is surprising and makes everything worse. It’s probably controlled by a setting that none of those engineers knows how to change, based on the lack of knowledge described here.

Seriously, it doesn’t sound great, but it sounds about what you might expect wiring up a new UI widget in WPF or whatever the latest thing for native Windows is. Sounds like what would happen if you started developing a Windows app using the Microsoft scaffolding and never applied any kind of software architecture beyond that and it just grew and grew into a big ball of mud. Exactly what I would expect given the quality of so many of their frameworks, and I say that as a professional dotnet software engineer.

Yeah that seems suspicious. F# is pretty succinct.