People are conflating street homelessness with crime. Seeing homeless people in their neighborhood makes people feel guilty and uncomfortable, so they demand that the police remove them from public view.

Because there is no coherent strategy to deal with housing in North America, this will continue to get worse. For whatever reason, reactionary public opinion is fine spending inordinate sums of money on policing, but freaks out when it is directed toward public housing, which in the long term is a much cheaper solution.