Every time I leave my house, I see people who ought not to be allowed to wander the streets in their sick condition.
There are the mutterers who make speeches to unseen presences. There are the ones who pick at invisible things in the air. There are the guys who provocatively wander through traffic in the middle of Grand Avenue, flashing their middle finger. There are the sorry souls, dressed in rags, sometimes partly naked, who are slumped on curbsides or bus shelter benches, scratching at their toes. There are the screamers, whom the rest of us cross the street to avoid. There are angry-looking men and women menacingly brandishing canes, metal rods and sticks as weapons.
And every time I see these people, I think, “Why do we allow them to be out here? Why don’t the authorities scoop them up and take them someplace where they’re examined mentally and physically?” My common sense tells me that any city in the world that purports to be run by rational, civilized government would stop such activities immediately.
Well, most other cities would do precisely that. But not Oakland. Here, the “civil rights” of these psychotic people takes precedence over their own health and safety, as well as over the well-being of the rest of us. I think most people would agree that these suffering souls need to be restrained; to allow them to continue on the streets is inhumane and obnoxious. But every time someone comes up with a proposal to deal with the problem, along come the “civil rights” activists, including their woke allies on the City Council, who mount their usual pressure campaign to coerce governments into inaction. (By the way, Carroll Fife’s BFF, Cat Brooks, is violently against CARE Court. Of course: getting psychotics off the streets would interfere with her ability to find a “victim group “ she can raise money off!)
Tell me, what “civil right” is the person enjoying who is taking a dump on the sidewalk? What “civil right” does the woman have who sits on Broadway exposing her privates? What “civil right” is the gentleman using who is unconscious in the gutter? For that matter, the progressive lunatics on the City Council use the same erratic reasoning when they imply that homeless people have a “civil right” to set up tents anywhere they want to.
The latest example of the lunacy of the “civil rights” crowd is their active resistance to CARE Court. The Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Court is Gov. Newsom’s idea to “connect a person struggling with untreated mental illness – and often also substance use challenges – with a court-ordered Care Plan for up to 24 months.” The operative term here is “court-ordered.” The mentally-ill people could be compelled to go into hospitals or into “conservatorships,” by which they would have a court-appointed person manage their financial, legal and personal affairs. Newsom’s act provides legal counsel for the persons affected; it seems to me to be a sane, compassionate, balanced and realistic approach to the problem.
But here’s the ACLU, the Western Center on Law and Poverty and similar “civil rights” organizations doing their best to kill CARE Court. The Act has not yet been formally approved by the Legislature; crucial votes remain ahead. During those hearings, the “civil rights” organizations will be testifying in force, to compel legislators to vote CARE Court down. They’ll bring in witnesses who themselves are or have been psychotic, to argue that their “civil rights” would be violated by CARE Court. Never mind that the mental condition of these folks makes them unable to make rational decisions regarding their own wellbeing, let alone anyone else’s.
These “civil rights” extremists may very well succeed, given the heavily Democratic majorities in our State Legislature and the sensitivity of those office-holders to being accused of doing anything to stymie anyone’s “civil rights.” My question becomes (as London Breed put it), “When did someone’s ‘civil rights’ include the ‘right’ to rip your clothes off and run into traffic?”
I understand what the “civil rights” activists worry about: They don’t want a return to the “snake pit” mental hospitals of the past, when psychotic people were jammed together, often receiving below-standard care. I worked in such a place in the 1970s (Munson State Hospital, in Massachusetts) as an Adult Education Specialist, so I’m familiar with the situation. Granted, those hospitals had plenty of problems, but they did afford a certain minimum quality of life (including a full range of caring specialists) to people who clearly could not live on their own, and whose families—if they could be found—did not want them. It’s often said that Ronald Reagan, when he was Governor of California, spitefully closed these hospitals and threw the residents out into the streets, but that’s not entirely true. At the time, there was a concerted national effort to “mainstream” psychotic people, i.e. to release them from the hospitals and get them into halfway houses and the like, where they could transition to life in regular society. This effort was prompted by the purest of motives: compassion, justice and empathy. Unfortunately, like so many other idealistic schemes that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s, it backfired. The law of unintended consequences.
CARE Court is a modest attempt to go back to a model that, for all its deficiencies, worked. But we now live in an era where spineless politicians, desperate to get re-elected, back off from doing the right thing, either because they can’t see it (which makes them unqualified to represent us), or because they’re terrified by the pressure that “civil rights” organizations can bring on them, along with the resulting negative publicity from a hopelessly-biased media. The result is exactly what we see: seriously disturbed people flooding the streets.
I hope you’ll contact your elected State representative and tell them that you’re in favor of CARE Court, that you demand they vote accordingly, and that psychotic people have no “civil right” to be out there in the streets, alone and untreated, no matter what the ACLU says.
Steve Heimoff