| Submit your comments on this article |
| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| NYC pols have let the mentally ill take over our streets |
| 2022-04-15 |
| [NYPOST] The threat-laced ramblings of alleged subway shooter Frank James, now in jug, have a disturbingly familiar ring, don’t they? Sure, they’re on YouTube — but bitter mumblings of the same sort are heard all day, every day in New York’s increasingly untenable subway system. So the question of the moment is this: How long will the city accommodate — indeed, encourage — aggressive mental illness in its public spaces? Will it ever push back? How many shootings, how many slashings, how many fatal shovings and — disgustingly — how many demented excrement smearings will it take before the penny drops? How many subway cars, train and bus terminals and public parks must fill to the brim with pitiful, helpless and obviously self-destructive people before New York’s leaders have had enough? This is not a new problem, of course — not by any means. Once upon a time, decades ago, there was a police captain who got it. He had very little patience with a then-novel notion that therapy must always trump coercion when the "If you knew so much about mental cases," he’d bark at social workers, "the police wouldn’t need to be called. The reason we’re here is because you failed." Certainly the new policy was failing, badly. It assumed the insane were fit masters of their own destiny, regardless of circumstances and consequences — which was, well, nuts. But it had become the law. Presently New York’s mental hospitals emptied, its public spaces grew forbidding — and decades of often lethal chaos ensued. Kendra’s Law, a ’90s response to a fatal subway shoving, allowed judges limited authority to order involuntary confinement for the mentally ill — until then, cops and the courts were virtually powerless before the That was the theory, anyway. In practice, as that old-timey police captain well knew, coercion — jail — was applied because "therapy" was non-existent and, anyway, a prescription for continued mayhem. Then came the progressive "reforms" of 2019. Now hardly anyone goes to jail for anything — and the thoroughly predictable result has been a sharp rise in seemingly motiveless Except they’re usually not motiveless at all — but rather driven by demons that defy reason, let alone compassionate understanding. They’re just invisible. None of this makes any difference to the city’s growing league of random victims — babies in strollers, wide-eyed tourists, elderly straphangers and, Tuesday morning, Brooklyn commuters. Who speaks for them? Who acts for them? Nobody with the power to help them, that’s for sure. Kendra’s Law is a well-intentioned half-measure that takes fully into account the interests of the state’s This presumption needs to be flipped on its head. Where interests collide, those of the innocent must prevail — and this, ironically enough, would include those too addled to protect themselves. Why is this so complicated? That old cop recognized failure when he saw it. After five decades, you’d think New York would, too. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #5 ^ sorry, can't seem to find the federal government's responsibility in that area anywhere in the Constitution. However, I do see the 10th as saying if you can't find it here, it belongs to the states. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-04-15 21:25 |
| #4 To be fair fricking Reagan. Under President Ronald Reagan, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act repeals Carter's community health legislation and establishes block grants for the states, ending the federal government's role in providing services to the mentally ill. Federal mental-health spending decreases by 30 percent. Ass hole. |
| Posted by: Woodrow 2022-04-15 18:59 |
| #3 They either fix it or New York City goes the way of Detroit, Seattle and San Francisco. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2022-04-15 11:45 |
| #2 Cause they're the same. One just wears better suits than the other. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-04-15 09:00 |
| #1 NY Gov. Hochul rails against 'insanity' of NYC crime surge and ignores obvious solutions |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2022-04-15 06:29 |