We have a lot of crazy people wandering the streets in Oakland. If you never come down from the Hills you might not see them, but those of us who live in the Flatlands have to contend with them every day.
In my neighborhood, there’s the guy who always has his pants dropped below his knees, sitting on the sidewalk with his privates bared. There’s the screaming lady who rants at ghosts unseen by anyone but her. There’s the elderly gentleman wrapped head to toe in shredded old garbage bags, wandering around Kaiser Center. There’s the angry mutterer, whose way you get out of when you see him coming. It’s a strange circus of scary, pitiful people.
What to do? There are two schools of thought. One is that these people are clearly suffering from mental illness, compounded by drug and/or alcohol addiction. They need social services of every kind, interventions like psychotherapy and addiction control and, of course, housing, healthcare and food. Advocates for these interventions claim that the money is there, perhaps to be redirected from the police, or through parcel taxes imposed on a struggling middle class.
Another school of thought is that these crazy people should not be allowed to wander our streets. Advocates of this school believe that we shouldn’t have to navigate our way through the city while being accosted, annoyed, bothered, threatened or confronted with the mentally ill. A city that cannot or will not control its streets, these advocates argue, is failing in its basic job: public order and safety.
The dividing line or fissure between these two alternatives lies in the area of what is known as a “conservatorship.” The California Judiciary defines a conservatorship
https://www.courts.ca.gov/selfhelp-conservatorship.htm?rdeLocaleAttr=en
as “a court case where a judge appoints a responsible person or organization (called the ‘conservator’) to care for another adult (called the ‘conservatee’) who cannot care for himself or herself or manage his or her own finances.” The public heard a lot about conservatorships during the recent case involving Brittany Spears, but that isn’t what I’m talking about in dealing with crazy people. Conservatorships are based upon Section 5150 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=WIC§ionNum=5150
It states, in the logorrhea typical of legalese, that “When a person, as a result of a mental health disorder, is a danger to others, or to himself or herself, or gravely disabled, a peace officer, professional person in charge of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, member of the attending staff, as defined by regulation, of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, designated members of a mobile crisis team, or professional person designated by the county may, upon probable cause, take, or cause to be taken, the person into custody for a period of up to 72 hours for assessment, evaluation, and crisis intervention, or placement for evaluation and treatment in a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment and approved by the State Department of Health Care Services.” In short, this means that a responsible designee of the state (cop, physician, firefighter, etc.) may forcibly place a crazy person “into custody,” against his or her will.
Cops don’t like enforcing 5150s, for understandable reasons, but right now, who else can do it? With all the talk of MACRO
https://www.oaklandca.gov/projects/macro-mobile-assistance-community-responders-of-oakland
as “an alternative community response” to calling the cops about crazy people, there is as yet no proof or tangible evidence that MACRO is working in Oakland; the average citizen, walking around downtown and seeing a crazy person or two every block, is justified in wondering why the City appears to be doing nothing about the problem. That same citizen might well conclude that he’s just going to have to get used to it, that crazies wandering the streets is the new normal and is the price he has to pay for choosing to live or work in Oakland. He may not like it, but there it is: he, himself, is powerless to do anything about it.
Well, apparently the crazies are the new normal, and there will be a lot more of them in the future. The current City Council has shown, by its deliberate indifference, that it really doesn’t care how many crazy people are out there, or what they do, or how blatantly unfair it is to the crazies themselves to allow them to exist in such a state of decrepitude and despair. In fact, the implication the City Council gives us is that, if you’re bothered by the crazies, it’s your problem, because you’re probably a greedy, racist, gentrifying, white Karen or BBQ Becky.
I don’t buy it. We’re being asked, in the name of social justice or equity or whatever it’s called these days, to let extraordinarily sick and potentially dangerous people literally come unglued in our streets, to defecate and urinate in public, scare little kids, block store ways, stray into traffic, approach us for money, intimidate senior citizens, offend our common sensibilities, litter our neighborhoods, and so on; and we’re told that if we dare to try to detain them and give them proper medical care and shelter, we’re some kind of evil Nazis who are building concentration camps. This is a lie and a slur.
I’m calling for 5150s to be more thoroughly applied, so that we can reclaim our streets and put the crazies where they need to be: into supervised confinement, with doctors, nurses and mental health experts who can figure out what to do with them. I’m not ready for this to be the new normal. Are you?
Steve Heimoff