By: Rita Cook
President Trump signed Executive Order 14321 on July 24 “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets.”
I am probably looking at this from a sideview, but first the EO name does not seem to coincide with what I am reading as its purpose.
Supposedly this will make it easier for cities and states to take homeless people off the streets.
I must be missing the plot because while I am sure there are dangerous homeless people on the streets, when I think of crime and disorder the homeless folks are not the first group that comes to mind.
And since I cover crime extensively both locally and sometimes otherwise, maybe a percentage of the crime and disorder does come from people living on the streets, but in a number of cases too the homeless are there because of economics.
And with that thought I will add, a news lead to draw in the reader regarding fearmongering is not always a news lead telling the truth.
Let us break it down since the headlines like “Trump wants to remove homeless people from the streets” is not the entire story.
Not every homeless person is dangerous or violent so the headlines are purposely misleading just like the name of the EO.
As well, it does not seem to the be homeless taking out the CEOS and committing random acts, which are likely not random acts at all when looked at from a broader lens.
At one time during a red administration – Ronald Reagan was the president – he played a “significant role in the reintegration of the mentally ill homeless back onto the streets” according to a newspaper in southern California.
It went on to read “After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, many state mental health hospitals closed, forcing many folks who needed a lot of care onto the streets. Without those facilities, many mentally ill people ended up in jails and prisons which are not set up to provide safe, compassionate care for brain illnesses. But in 1981, when President d Reagan deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and emptied the psychiatric hospitals into so-called “community” clinics, the problem got worse.
Most of those who were deinstitutionalized from the nation’s public psychiatric hospitals were severely mentally ill. Between 50 percent and 60 percent were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The fact that many of these people struggled with various forms of brain dysfunction was not recognized back then. With so many advances in brain science, experts now know that we need to be able to coordinate care in residential facilities, especially if we are housing people at $4,000 per day in a local medical hospital.”
You get the point at one time the mentally ill were not homeless because they were getting the help they needed.
Trump’s EO mentions there were 274,224 individuals living on the streets of the US in 2024.
If they suffer from mental illness, why would we, as a society, not give them help?
The order reads “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.”
While I think the “public order” wording is a little heavy handed, the idea of the federal government providing “assistance to State and local governments, through technical guidance, grants, or other legally available means, for the identification, adoption, and implementation of maximally flexible civil commitment, institutional treatment, and “step-down” treatment standards that allow for the appropriate commitment and treatment of individuals with mental illness who pose a danger to others or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves” does not seem like an overstep.
And, yes as a byproduct it will lead to increased public safety for many reasons.
The only idea I thought could be tricky was the ability to take those who have mental illness who are not homeless and carry them off to a facility without proper guardian/parental consent. That is when I believe we should worry. I did not see that mentioned, even though there were rumors this EO could allow that to happen.
I would suggest the facilities not be privately owned (as in the case of Texas prisons). When privately owned you have problem it is a business and the business needs money. The only way to get money; prisoners. I am not sure about the lobbyist groups who lobby for private prisons, I would be careful about anyone making money on the mentally ill homeless facilities.
Will the facilities to house this homeless group deemed violent or mentally ill be a part of a hospital system (again private ownership)? What can the lobbyists do on that?
The EO reads “The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall, as appropriate, take steps to require recipients of Federal housing and homelessness assistance to increase requirements that persons participating in the recipients’ programs who suffer from substance use disorder or serious mental illness use substance abuse treatment or mental health services as a condition of participation.”
What happens if they do not want to participate?
What about those who are violent (like the guy who set the city council member on fire or the man who opened fired in NYC and killed four people) both last week.
Not homeless, but certainly mental illness was involved.
