When the National Park Service cleared 70 homeless people from a public square just blocks from the White House on Feb. 15, it was better late than never. It should not, however, have been so late.

Broader policy lessons, too, along with humanitarian concerns, were implicated here.

For months, the vagrants had been not just sleeping in McPherson Square but pitching tents and virtually taking over what historically had been a lovely downtown enclave. By the time the park service finally acted, it was responding to what it called “very serious concerns about growing threats to life, health, and safety.”

Well … of course. Public encampments without proper “facilities” are notoriously and almost unavoidably unsanitary. Add the fact that many (but certainly not all) homeless people suffer from mental impairment or illness and other pathologies, and it is obvious that mass collections of them are safe neither for themselves nor others. McPherson Square is in the middle of one of the busiest business districts in the nation’s capital. There’s no excuse for having allowed the situation to fester for so long.

None of which is to say that people encamped there deserve no sympathy. Of course they do. Many of them are prime examples of human suffering. That’s why governments and social service agencies should make priorities of mental health services, job placement, and other means of assistance, all with as little bureaucratic rigmarole as possible. The District of Columbia is not exactly hurting for cash, especially after receiving oodles of federal pandemic funds. Yet news reports say city government has been extremely slow in implementing a planned system of housing vouchers that could provide shelter for almost every homeless person in the city.

Then again, part of the equation needs to include not just carrots but sticks. What passes as leniency for troubled souls, in the name of compassion, can actually allow problems to metastasize for both the homeless and for all citizens who work or live nearby. After decades of improvements in urban life throughout the nation, the past seven or eight years have seen cities across the country experience reversions to urban ills reminiscent of the 1970s, even though unemployment (except during the height of the pandemic) has remained at historic lows for the past dozen years. San Francisco , for example, has become notorious for heroin needles and human excrement on its streets, and New York streets have become dirty and perilous once again.

Much of this results from awful public policy, including a bizarre abandonment of the “broken windows policing” tactics that worked so well to cut crime and street poverty drastically in New York and elsewhere. The theory, for those who have forgotten, is that if authorities sweat the “small stuff” such as broken windows, graffiti, vandalism, and, yes, vagrancy, then everybody feels safer, takes more pride in their environment, and engages more with neighbors in ways that deter crime and other pathologies.

Authorities can and should arrest and prosecute violators without necessarily overburdening prisons. Creative alternative sentencing and well-supported probation systems can help set small offenders on the right path. On the other hand, failing to prosecute “small” crimes means that contempt for authority grows. Without the “early intervention” of enforcement for lesser offenses, people who began as minor scofflaws, or as hapless but harmless vagrants, get bolder in their bad behavior or sink further into their own mire.

It is inhumane, not compassionate, to “look the other way” on little things. The McPherson Square situation was just a microcosm of the broader reality: Sometimes, the best way to show love is with a little toughness.