You may think I'm rude,

But I don't care.

Yup, still an AI image. Deal with it.

When I was giving tours of the jail, I always made it a point to tell the folks taking the tour (usually citizens, but sometimes media) that the County jail system was the largest provider of mental health services in the United States — despite being comprised of buildings not designed for such purpose, staffed by (primarily) young detention officers never trained for such purpose.

If you know someone who staffs a local-level pre-trial detention facility for longer than about five years, they will have a story involving a use of force¹ with an EDP². Or can tell you about transporting someone with an obvious untreated mental illness to a treatment facility, only to have that same person released before the officer has finished filling out his report³.

Believe it or not, we’re tossing Cackle Factory Candidates into jails to be watched by jailers, because we’re compassionate. Well, actually more because the dacoits we vote into office would rather “fix” a problem (and let other people pick up the pieces of the “fix”) than actually solve the problem, and maybe hurt someone’s lilac-scented fee-fees in the process⁴.

The “fix” in this particular example would be called “Deinstitutionalization”, and it’s where the United States formally ended the insane asylum system in favour of “Community Mental Health Services” — a rant for another time⁵.

All of that is to say that I am somewhat familiar with mentally-ill, and have a great deal of sympathy for them.

I also don’t want someone with obvious untreated mental illness within lunging distance of me, and I damned sure don’t want someone displaying any signs of untreated mental illness behind me … At. All. Period.

If I’m out with Rita, and an obvious failure of the MHMR system shows up, I will have a hand on a weapon until either the person unasses our AO⁶, or Rita and I leave the area.

I have been told that my “aggressive body posture” upon sight of someone at the height of their public bi-polar dissociation is “rude”. I am informed that standing up and escorting Rita to a different table in a restaurant when a trustee of modern pharmacology wanders in is “not very compassionate”.

Huh.

In August, a young woman named Iryna Zarutska was riding a public train in the metropolis of Charlotte, North Carolina, United States; and sat down in a seat in front of a mentally-ill felon.

Three different surveillance cameras caught what happened four minutes later. On the cameras, the felon can be seen talking to himself, is filthy, and is displaying jerky hand movements — not someone I’m ever going to turn my back to — and after four minutes he opens a pocket knife, hammers it into her neck and throat multiple times, and then walks away.

This attack was unprovoked, unwarranted, and the two had never met, never spoke, never interacted before he butchered her.

The fun part comes you learn that the felon had been arrested (well, multiple times and extensively) but in July of this year his public defender successfully argued that he wasn’t mentally-competent to stand trial⁷, and had been released from custody to wander, free as a bird, by the judge until said felon could undergo mental evaluation as to his competency⁸. And if you think this is a one-off or a rare situation, I’ve got some beachfront property in South Dakota to sell you, cheap⁹.

I have a great deal of compassion for folks with untreated mental illness. I also don’t want them anywhere within stabbing distance of me or mine. Period. The two concepts are not mutually incompatible.

And I don’t care if it hurts your fee-fees.

Nothing but love,

Ian

1. And if he’s had a beer before you ask, some variant of the phrase “smeared with fæcal matter” will probably be mentioned.

2. “Emotionally Disturbed Person”, which was the compassionate term for “Flat Barking Bugnuts” before I retired. I have no doubt that People Who Are Better Than Me have come up with a new term because Lord knows that the most fiscally important thing about mentally ill folks in jails is that we don’t hurt the public’s feelings with inappropriate phraseology.

3. “Compassion.“

4. Not to mention having to spend tax-payer money and getting the tax-paying voters all angry about the taxes they’re getting screwed out of.

5. And, boy howdy, can I rant on this subject. I once gave an no-notice, off-the-cuff presentation about “deinstitutionalization” that lasted half an hour before the Chief Deputy started tapping his watch meaningfully.

6. Area of Operations.

7. “Non compos alpo” as they say.

8. Or stab a girl to death a month later.

9. Thus the extended rant on “compassion” and “deinstitutionalization”.