Highlights
San Diego: experiencing homelessness have been involved with crime “at dramatically higher rates than the rest of the population,” whether as victims or offenders.
NIH: The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population.
New York ending homeless encampments within two weeks.
Is it time to return to state-run hospitals?
Author
Perspective
There is a vast difference between homelessness among the mentally ill and addicted population creating crime problems and those without housing due to medical bills and economic difficulties. I grew up working-class; I understand that there are people living on the edges of financial stability. Solutions require different strategies.
New York
New York mayor Eric Adams has ordered that every homeless encampment in the city should be taken down within two weeks, arguing that the situation is not only dangerous to those living there but to the city itself.
“We’re going to rid the encampments off our street and we’re going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services,” Adams said Friday, though he provided few details on exactly how that extra provision would be provided for them.
“I’m looking to do it within a two-week period,” he added in an interview with the New York Times.
Article
I once left the National Crime Prevention Council at 10:00 p.m. I was the director of information services trying to catch the last train to my Baltimore home. We were just a couple of blocks from the White House.
As I walked to the subway, there were hundreds of homeless people (more?) milling about, with several aggressively demanding money. It was so bad that I walked in the middle of the street (and traffic) to avoid a confrontation. Some didn’t like my unwillingness to give them money (“I’ll f___ you up if you don’t give me five dollars”). The interaction met the common law definition of an attempted robbery.
Hundreds of homeless milling about scare the hell out of people because of aggressive demands for money and erratic behavior. Concentrated numbers of homeless people will destroy commercial areas and drive businesses, economic development and employment out. There are endless media accounts of homeless people openly doing drugs, shoplifting, exposing themselves to those who pass by, and again, people demanding money.
Ignoring the distress of residents and businesses leaving the area out of fear cannot be ignored if we want cities to remain viable.
But we chose to ignore the distress of mentally ill and addicted people by closing state mental health hospitals decades ago. What was done in the name of progressive thought devastated the lives of thousands of people. It’s also destroying cities.
The National Institute Of Health
The overall rate of criminal offenses was 35 times higher in the homeless mentally ill population than in the domiciled mentally ill population. The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population. Homeless defendants were significantly more likely to have been charged with victimizing strangers.
Homeless mentally ill persons appear to be grossly overrepresented among mentally disordered defendants entering the criminal justice and forensic mental health systems and to have a higher base rate of arrest for both violent and nonviolent crimes than domiciled mentally ill persons.
San Diego
From The Crime Report: New numbers released by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office show homeless people in San Diego are far more likely to commit crimes and be the victims of ones compared to the rest of the local population, reports CBS8.
According to the DAs office, based on two years of county data compiled from November of 2019 until October of 2021, those experiencing homelessness have been involved with crime “at dramatically higher rates than the rest of the population,” whether as victims or offenders.
Recidivism rates among the homeless population were also high, with 83 percent of defendants having two to four new cases filed against them by local prosecutors and 15 percent having five to nine new cases filed.
Recent high-profile incidents of seemingly random violent crime allegedly committed by homeless people have been making headlines and putting city dwellers on high alert — a harbinger for some of a return to more troubled times.
In Los Angeles, for instance, a 70-year-old nurse was killed during an alleged random assault by a homeless man at a bus stop on Jan. 13, and just two days later, a homeless man allegedly fatally pushed a woman onto New York City subway tracks.
About 30% of chronically homeless people have some sort of mental health condition and about 50% experience substance use problems, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
The consequences of so many people living outside are severe and fatal. In 2015, the LA county coroner’s office recorded 613 deaths of unhoused people. That number has steadily climbed each year, rising to 1,609 fatalities in 2021, a spokesperson said. Those figures are an undercount, because the coroner only tracks fatalities considered sudden, unusual or violent. A report by the University of California, Los Angeles last year estimated that overdoses were a leading cause of death of unhoused people during the pandemic.
The Disappearance Of Long-term Facilities
From National Public Radio: The disappearance of long-term-care facilities and psychiatric beds has escalated over the past decade, sparked by a trend toward deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients in the 1950s and ’60s, says Dominic Sisti, director of the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care at the University of Pennsylvania.
State hospitals began to realize that individuals who were there probably could do well in the community,” he tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson. It was well-intended, but what I believe happened over the past 50 years is that there’s been such an evaporation of psychiatric therapeutic spaces that now we lack a sufficient number of psychiatric beds.
A concerted effort to grow community-based care options that were less restrictive grew out of the civil rights movement and a series of scandals due to the lack of oversight in psychiatric care, Sisti says. While those efforts have been successful for many, a significant group of people who require structured inpatient care can’t get it, often because of funding issues.
A Return To Hospitals?
The bottom line is that when states shut down their psychiatric hospitals, they never invested sufficient funds in community-based health care. What began as a progressive effort to “treat” people in the community became an abandonment of the problem.
The problem continues today. New York state cut nearly a third of state-run psychiatric hospital beds for children, pledging to reinvest the funds in outpatient measures. There’s no evidence it worked.
Conclusions
Cities don’t have the funds to comprehensively treat mental illness or substance abuse or to provide housing. There are cities reporting that they have allocated millions of dollars to fight homelessness with little to show for it. ‘We have failed’: how California’s homelessness catastrophe is worsening.
It may be time for states to return to providing hospitals beds for the homeless/addicted/mentally ill/criminal population before commercial areas are avoided entirely thus eliminating businesses, jobs, a tax base, and economic development. Google is moving its employees out of downtown Seattle because of crime and disorder, partially related to homelessness. Residents are leaving.
Many police shootings involve people in mental health distress.
None of this applies to those homeless not engaging in addiction or criminality or are mentally ill. Many people are living on the edge economically. States and cities should fund housing vouchers for those homeless for economic reasons.
It’s up to all of society to provide a solution that comprehensively addresses the issue, which means a return to state-run hospitals to comprehensively address mental health and addiction issues and to keep them from victimizing or being victimized.
The justice and correctional systems cannot cope with the influx of mentally ill-addicted and homeless people. Jails and prisons have become the de facto state mental health institutions. More than half of all prison and jail inmates had mental health problems. These estimates represented 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of jail inmates. These figures are likely undercounted. States suggest that 80 percent of inmates have histories of addictions or extensive use.
It’s time for cities and states to step up and provide the necessary treatment and housing through state-run hospitals.
See more articles on crime and justice at Crime in America.
Most Dangerous Cities/States/Countries at Most Dangerous Cities.
US Crime Rates at Nationwide Crime Rates.
National Offender Recidivism Rates at Offender Recidivism.
An Overview Of Data On Mental Health at Mental Health And Crime.
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