This is starting to remind me of Willie Sutton's famous line that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is:"
The Times this morning puts the cart before a couple of horses with a story explaining that cops dump mentally ill, addicted and intoxicated homeless people in downtown Los Angeles because that's where the shelters are.
First of all - cops from Beverly Hills, Venice, and other areas far beyond spitting distance from downtown have been ignoring shelters and mental-health facilities in their own neighborhood to dump hard-luck cases on the streets because it's easier than paperwork, so I guess I don't buy that explanation ...
Second of all, I'm going to hypothesize - and hope that a historian with far more knowledge can confirm or refute - that some of the downtown missions opened up shop many decades ago to reach out to Skid Row's "community", rather than the other way around. The reality is probably a good deal more complicated and - like Santa Monica's long-time relationship with homeless people - inextricably symbiotic.
It's a sort of open-jail situation - people unable to function with the majority of society due largely to brain problems and partly to bad fortune are thrown together in a single place where police, charities and public donations conspire to keep them until they somehow struggle their way out. Society throws enough money at the problem to feel like it's done its part, the charities fight the losing battle with ever-thinning resources and the police keep sloughing off cases they're unwilling to handle properly.
And so grows Skid Row.
Bottom line - many of the mentally ill and addicted homeless are unwilling or unable to pull themselves out, and only the intervention of court-ordered commitment or treatment upon arrest and adjudication of their cases will give them a fighting chance.
The infusion of cash from Prop. 63 is starting to trickle into L.A. county's mental health system, but it will take a cultural shift on the part of the police (and by extension, the rest of us) to allow that system to start assuming the burden it should have had all along.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Wednesday, October 05, 2005 - 11:47 AM
