This is a very well argued opinion piece.
I spent most of my younger years living in a city that always had mentally ill people on the streets and always grappled with homelessness, but over the last decade the numbers of people on the streets, and the intensity of their mental health issues, are of a far greater scope than I can recall ever happening before.
The train ride safety issues he talks about were happening in Chicago as well - riders who would deliberately rattle or confront other riders just for the thrill of it. Train conductors won't do anything on CTA and cops don't, either. (On Metra the conductors are all too busy talking about some female passenger's tits to even notice.)
I was in Palm Springs about a month ago - like most cities in warm weather California, PS has always had visible homelessness, but something during COVID really kicked it into high gear. I was walking down the street and went to an ATM, and as I was conducting my transaction, a mentally ill woman who was engaged in an argument with another person screamed and yelled. She used the "f*gg*t" slur probably fifty times to yell at "Jimmy" and she threw a bag of groceries or food bank food she'd been carrying. The bag slid across the pavement and came close to hitting me.
I wrapped up my transaction, stepped away from the ATM and was about to pull out my phone to call police....and looked up, at the building across the street, to see 3 police cars and 3 cops standing across the street, doing absolutely nothing. And like McWhorter, I can't figure out why they didn't take any action whatsoever.
I think we just have a perfect storm in this country of several things: both the 2008 crash and COVID means more people are homeless, more mental health providers have closed their doors, etc. We have city/county/state budgets cut to the bone so no support or care is being given to these people. We have a country where local taxpaying businesses are almost extinct and have been replaced by megatrillion dollar corporations who won't pay even a dime in taxes, so local governments are starved to sustain even basic services. We have cops who, if they were good cops, were overworked dealing with residents with mental health issues they weren't trained to handle, and cops that, since the pushback over excessive force and the murder of unarmed citizens, won't lift a finger any more. And we are now seeing the results of a decade or so of changes in laws and regulations about both mentally ill people and people who had been incarcerated - before, even a small infraction or drug charge landed someone in prison or in a psych hold. Now the pendulum has swung very far on the other side, where little to no oversight and/or charges/jail time/repercussions are happening at all, which is also not a good way to handle the issues that are happening.
I don't know what the answer is. Asylums are not Nirvana, but it seems like they may have been safer places for some people.
