Another Tragedy of Deinstitutionalization

From the January 3, 2008 Santa Rosa Press-Democrat:

A Santa Rosa police officer shot a 24-year-old man who was wielding a knife Wednesday inside a home where he and several other tenants receive care for mental illness, police said.

Police said officers responded after a social worker called to report that his mental health client was ``off his meds,'' violent and had a knife.

One of three officers at the A Street home fired on the man after a Taser stun gun proved ineffective and the man advanced toward them with the knife, police said.

Police declined to identify the man, say how many times he was shot or describe his injuries.

A source familiar with the situation, however, said the man was upgraded from critical condition Wednesday night and is expected to live.

From this account, the officers did what they were supposed to do, and escalated to deadly force only as a last resort. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time that this has happened in Sonoma County--even the first time recently:

The shooting was the third in the past year involving Sonoma County law enforcement officers and a person reported to have mental health problems.

...

The other two shootings in the past year involving Sonoma County law enforcement officers and people reported to have mental health issues were in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa.

Two sheriff's deputies fatally shot Jeremiah Chass, 16, at his home near Sebastopol on March 12. He had resisted his parents' efforts to take him for help, and fought with the deputies.

On April 9, Santa Rosa police shot and killed Richard DeSantis, a 30-year-old bipolar man who fired a gun inside his house and later charged officers outside.

Those cases sparked a series of meetings involving Santa Rosa Mayor Bob Blanchard and other elected officials, law enforcement, mental health advocates, and representatives of civil rights and minority groups.

This particular incident involved a man in a program called "assertive community treatment"--which is an alternative to hospitalization, and apparently intended for those who are considered no longer so dangerous that they need to be locked up. Unfortunately, it appears that someone may have made a serious mistake in deciding that this guy didn't need to be hospitalized.

One of the many downsides to deinstitutionalization is that people with serious problems who would not have access to deadly weapons in a mental hospital are released into the larger society. Now, in spite of the best efforts of California government to make the entire state like a low-grade mental hospital with increasingly restrictive gun control laws--there's no hope of preventing deinstitutionalized Californians from getting knives. And that makes tragedies like these unavoidable.

Much of the rationalization for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was that it was bad for their human dignity to be locked up in mental hospitals. But it's also bad for your human dignity to get shot (and killed) by a police officer. Freezing to death on the streets of San Francisco, or dying of pneumonia, or developing tuberculosis because of malnutrition caused by panhandling for alcohol, is also not very dignified.

I keep asking myself, "Am I the only person who sees the insanity of pretending that reducing human beings to a condition that we would not allow pets to suffer from is somehow good?" I talk to a lot of different people every week about what has gone wrong on this, and I seldom meet anyone who wants to argue that this great social experiment of the 1960s worked out for the benefit of the mentally ill. Yet inertia seems to be winning this public policy debate.