People in this town are becoming increasingly disgusted with the behavior they have to deal with on the streets.

When there is no law enforcement, even law-abiding people are going to stop being tolerant and humane. They may even take matters into their own hands.

Whether it’s someone half out of his mind on meth or a mentally ill person throwing things around in a store or going off in a Starbucks, it’s just a matter of time before someone gets seriously hurt — and it could be the one who’s acting out.

The recent North Beach incident in which a truffle store owner’s son came to his defense with a baseball bat after the father scuffled with a man he said was causing a disturbance could easily have ended in tragedy.

I don’t recommend using a bat, but there are times on the street when I would have felt safer if I’d had one.

Superior Court Judge Ross Moody did the right thing the other day when he ordered Austin James Vincent to remain in custody while awaiting trial on false imprisonment, battery and attempted robbery charges. Vincent is the man who was arrested in the attack on a woman trying to enter her Embarcadero condo building after a night out with friends. She says her assailant told her he was trying to protect her from robots.

It was all caught on the condo building’s security video and made public by a neighborhood group opposed to the city opening a Navigation Center next door to the complex.

That case, of course, went viral because it was on video and because another judge, Christine Van Aken, initially put Vincent on supervised release. But the real story is that incidents like this happen all the time — they just aren’t taped and fed to the evening news.

I’ve had conversations in several neighborhoods, and it’s clear there’s a growing desire to do something about the problems on our streets.

It has to be specialized: A poverty-stricken family needs to be handled differently than people with mental issues. People with mental issues need to be handled differently than drug addicts.

For some people, help may mean a locked mental health facility. For the more volatile cases, we may need to keep people in jail while providing mental health services.

There are no perfect solutions. If there were, we would have tried them. We need to start working with what we have.

Either that, or get ready for a real tragedy to happen.

Dede Wilsey explained: To some, Dede Wilsey is a diamond-wearing Republican socialite. To others, she’s the town’s leading patron of the arts, charities and civic causes.

She’s both.

She is also one of the biggest donors to local Democrats, having given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gov. Gavin Newsom, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein, on down to Mayor London Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener.

With Wilsey, donations have never been about politics. If she likes you and likes what you’re doing, she helps — whether you’re with a museum or an AIDS charity, or you’re restoring the organ at the Castro Theatre.

And you don’t have to kiss her backside or call her a second time for the money.

That’s an important bit of bio on Wilsey, who found herself at the center of the flap over Shanti Project giving her its Nancy Pelosi Lifetime Achievement Award.

I’m a bit surprised that her longtime friend Pelosi asked to have her name taken off the award this year because of the controversy over Wilsey’s support for Republicans.

She and Wilsey were all smiles the other day at Pelosi’s annual summer lunch at her Napa Valley retreat. You would never have guessed a storm cloud was on the horizon.

That’s politics for you.

Movie time: “Angel Has Fallen.” This latest installment of the “Fallen” series has Gerard Butler playing the Secret Service superagent who serves as the protective angel of the president, played by Morgan Freeman. After a drone assassination attempt, Butler is arrested for supposedly being in on the plot.

The story is about as far-fetched as you can get, but it’s a fun film, especially the fight scenes with the drones. For me the real star is Nick Nolte playing Butler’s long-lost father.

Millennium milestone: The news that a $100 million fix has been worked out to stabilize the tilting Millennium Tower was big for those of us who live there.

Walking through the lobby, I overheard one resident talking to another.

“A $100 million fix. Is that for the building? Or is that for the lawyers?”

Want to sound off? Email wbrown@sfchronicle.com