The program consistently dehumanizes people who are homeless, gratuitously and needlessly showing faces of those experiencing traumatic mental-health or medical crises in public, calling them “wretched souls,” “living like animals” in “filth and degradation.” It’s unconscionable. Language like this causes a physiological reaction that inhibits our humane response to people who are homeless. Johnson says he doesn’t seek to demonize people, yet he actually refers to one person as “consumed by demons.”

It suffers from the “everywhere else does it better than we do” syndrome. Johnson ignores our local progress, such as reducing family, youth and veteran homelessness. He and his team travel to Rhode Island to devote a long chunk of the show to the successful prison-based Medication Assisted Treatment program. Had he sent his drones over South Lake Union instead, he would have found permanent supportive housing programs like 1811 Eastlake, a national model for alcohol treatment. Had he looked toward Belltown, he might have found the respected Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which diverts people involved in low-level drug offenses to services.

Johnson ignores the root causes of homelessness, both systemic and situational : the high cost of housing and wages that don’t keep pace; lack of health, mental health and addiction services; our regressive tax system; generations of racial discrimination; and long-term cuts in public housing, to name a few.

Johnson criminalizes homelessness. His solution to the problem is “enforcement and treatment,” which on the surface may sound logical. But make no mistake, he’s saying that the thousands of people who are homeless should be locked away, because he then suggests spending our region’s entire annual homelessness budget into turning McNeil Island — a remote confinement center for sex offenders — into a giant prison with drug treatment.

I live in the same beautiful city as Eric Johnson, but because I work on homelessness every day, I experience it differently. I have hope that though there’s still a lot of work to do, we can solve homelessness when business, academia, nonprofits, the faith community, funders, government and more come together. It’s discouraging that KOMO didn’t look hard enough to see that there’s more to the story than what’s visible on the streets of Seattle.

Catherine Hinrichsen will serve as moderator for Boomtowns: Affordability and Access for Communities on the Margins at Crosscut Festival on May 4 at Seattle University.