Seattle Faces Backlash After Easing on Crimes Involving Mental Illness
This is a really simple problem that for some reason Americans just can&#x27;t get their heads around.<p>We have eliminated virtually every government intervention besides police power. We have also seen our social institutions significantly divest their social contributions.<p>Therefore the criminal justice system has become the catch all. It is expected to handle the mentally ill, the homeless, the drug addicted, problematic families, neighborhood disputes and more.<p>Every now and then, we see the consequences of that divestiture and it shocks us. We see people who only really need mentorship, medical care or friendship being treated like hardened criminals and we see how that treatment corrupts these people with otherwise fairly socially benign failings.<p>So we pull back on the leash of the criminal justice system. These people begin to rejoin our society but with no assets, no standing, little to no mental healthcare. And unsurprisingly this influx of invested citizens gets people&#x27;s attention. And regardless of whether crime genuinely increases these people are newly visible and easy to associate with any anecdote of crime and violence.<p>So people predictably turn against them and against the pull back. But to fix this problem you have to do two things Americans are loath to do. You must tax and spend money to build institutions that are not police. And you must give those institutions some power to intervene sometimes against the will of those they are intervening with. And I have no illusions. Involuntary commitment to mental health care and drug treatment and community involvement are often ugly but Americans make it clear over and over that even though vagrants and homeless are generally not a problem that much affects those other than the vagrants and homeless themselves we will never collectively tolerate their presence.<p>The options seem to be building institutions to specialize in the assistance and care of these people or continue to use one monolithic system and continue this cycle.