Those with mental health issues and drug addiction cannot be taken off the streets.
Okay, so you're definitely saying they "cannot be taken off the streets." Got it.You misunderstand, apologies if I wasn't clear. In many cases, it is illegal to take them off the streets "against their will". Which means that they remain on the streets untreated and a danger to themselves and to others. That is the obvious solution - to take those that are mentally ill off the streets, but the left won't allow it and there are laws against it.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2019/09/11/gravely-disabled-homeless-forced-into-mental-health-care-in-more-statesSNIP:
Often, when she got high on meth, “Melanie,” who suffers from schizophrenia, would strip naked and run screaming straight into San Francisco traffic. Invariably, police would bring her to the hospital, where she’d undergo treatment. There, her psychotic symptoms would quickly subside.
But by law, Melanie, who is homeless,
couldn’t be held for longer than 72 hours without her consent, so back on the street she would go. Until she relapsed, and her drug use triggered yet another psychotic episode, and she ended up in the emergency room all over again. And each time, she got a little worse.
“
Legally, she couldn’t be helped,” said Angelica Almeida, director of the forensic and justice involved behavioral health services at the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
......cities and states are taking a fresh look at involuntary commitment, said Lisa Dailey, legislative and policy counsel for the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit based in Arlington, Virginia, that advocates for those with severe mental illness.
But advocates for the homeless and for civil rights are pushing back against those laws, arguing that confining people against their will violates their civil rights. They also worry that facilities won’t have enough room for the additional patients, and that the laws will disproportionately affect minorities.
Roughly a third of the U.S. homeless population has an untreated, serious mental illness — such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder or major depression — according to a 2016 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center. Among homeless people with severe mental illness, who are often victims of predators, the mortality rate is as much as nine times higher than the general population, the report found.
