Could mandating mental health care help the most vulnerable?

CHAKRABARTI: Are we relying on government though? Because as we said, Jordan Neely had, definitely was in need of care, but he wasn’t in care that day.

Do you see what I’m saying?

DEL POZO: No. When we say we’re hoping, the government has a responsibility to do something about this and it can’t be, it won’t be perfect, but it needs to be effective. I think the worry is that it’s not effective, as you probably know. Jordan Neely had, in the prior episode, punched a woman in the face, broken her orbital in her nose.

And instead of criminal charges, appropriately, he was offered inpatient intensive treatment, free housing. And within about 13 days, unfortunately, he absconded from that. And when he was on the street and Subway, when he encountered Daniel Penny, it was having absconded from a program that was designed to give him the psychiatric treatment that he needed.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: We’re talking about how to strike a balance, the right balance between personal liberty and public safety.

And how right now, with that out of balance, society is failing both the public and the severely mentally ill. Now, this isn’t just an issue in New York City, of course. It’s an issue all over the country. For example, Brett Richland. He owns the East West Cafe in Burlington, Vermont. And in August of 2017, he saw a familiar face come into the store.

Michael Reynolds. He was intoxicated, high as usual, Richland told Vermont’s NBC5.

BRETT RICHLAND: And I said, no, it’s not your property, it’s my property. And he punched me in the chest.

NEWS BRIEF: Richland says the punch from the homeless man knocked him over. His daughter called 911. Police found Reynolds a block away, and he did not go quietly.

POLICE OFFICER: Resisted efforts, their efforts to arrest him, threatened to kill the officer, threatened to kill the correctional officers that dealt with him at jail and was clearly intoxicated.

CHAKRABARTI: Michael Reynolds was apprehended by the police, but eventually released. That same year, 2017, the Burlington City Council began considering whether city ordinances needed to be changed in order to better deal with habitual offenders.

Something cafe owner Brett Richland said couldn’t happen soon enough.

RICHLAND: It’s unfortunate that he continues to be in that same cycle. Really, he needs to be taken off of the street.

CHAKRABARTI: The City Council’s deliberation, though, did not change the trajectory of Michael Reynolds life. He is known to struggle with substance abuse and suffer from severe mental illness.

He’s had run in after run in with Burlington Police, sometimes violent. Fast forward to May 20th, 2024.

NEWS BRIEF: A Burlington man is behind bars tonight after using his bodily fluids to assault a firefighter captain and police sergeant today, according to BPD officers and firefighters were trying to get control of Michael Reynolds, who they say was intoxicated and combative.

After physically assaulting firefighters, Reynolds got away, then tried going into random houses on Henry Street.

CHAKRABARTI: That report from NBC5 again. The station also spoke with Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad, who wasn’t able to fully contain his frustration.

JON MURAD: Mr. Reynolds is somebody who has been afforded every single handout that this community has to offer. Every opportunity to avail himself of assistance for those conditions I mentioned before. Conditions like mental health, conditions like substance use disorder. And this is someone who has simply not taken advantage of any of those in a meaningful way and continues to be an incorrigible recidivist in our community.

CHAKRABARTI: For Michael Reynolds, the cycle is always the same. Drunken, disorderly, or violent conduct. Then, someone calls the police. They come to the scene. Reynolds resists or gets violent. They arrest him, he gets a court appearance and is then released.

NEWS BRIEF: Murad says Reynolds has around 1,700 run ins with the police over a little more than a decade.

CHAKRABARTI: That was in May. The number now of run ins he’s had with the police is almost 2,000 in a decade. Just last month, in December, Michael Reynolds was cited for trespassing twice, on December 9th. He was cited again the next day for trespassing at the University of Vermont Medical Center.

He did it almost a dozen times between December 9th to the 20th. On December 23rd, he was arrested for aggressive behavior in public, including punching a mailbox and running into traffic. On December 27th, police say Reynolds was trespassing again at the medical center. He allegedly tried to assault security guards and patients at the hospital. It was later learned that he was involved in a burglary earlier that day, where he allegedly broke into someone’s home while the resident was showering.

He was arrested for trespassing and burglary and lodged at Northwest State Correctional Facility on $1,000 bail. Reynolds appeared in court on December 30th. He pleaded not guilty, after which a judge released him on the following conditions.

JUDGE: And if you don’t show up at court at your next hearing then an arrest warrant will issue. And a judge could not strike the bail when you’re picked up on that arrest warrant. Do you understand?

REYNOLDS: That seems fair. Yeah, I do understand, actually.

CHAKRABARTI: Why is this happening? Back in 2017, the then Burlington Police Chief offered this explanation to the Vermont Free Press.

DEL POZO: The only penalty that we have right now is to hurt your credit score.

VERMONT FREE PRESS: Literally your credit rating?

DEL POZO: Your credit rating. That’s it. I can drink, I can smoke, I can urinate, I can get drunk, I can catcall people, I can do all of that. And the only thing that’s going to happen is my credit score is going to go from zero to zero. Then that’s a tool we don’t have to tell these folks you can’t behave like this.

And what we’re saying is this behavior has antecedents, and we can never erase all crime. But we do want to address the antecedents in a way that have consequences. And that works. That works most of the time. It’s not working with some individuals.

CHAKRABARTI: Brandon del Pozo, that’s you.

DEL POZO: Yeah, no, that was a blast from the past, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So you know Michael Reynolds?

DEL POZO: Not personally. Haven’t seen him in a while. But yeah, no, I’m quite familiar with Michael Reynolds. I convened a special task force just to deal with him and his disruptions to the community back when I was the chief of police in Burlington. I realized I said, listen, sometimes we fail because the systems just aren’t up to it.

And sometimes we fail because we just haven’t put enough elbow grease into it. I’d like, as a lifetime public servant, to just see if it’s a matter of elbow grease. Can we do more work and leverage systems better? And so I said, maybe that’s it. So we had a meeting, a committee, which had folks from city mental health, meaning that the local providers, state officials, it was interdisciplinary.

We had people from the police, people from the hospital, people from, again, health and mental hygiene, so to speak. And we met to go through everything we knew about Mike Reynolds case file. We went to go through everything we knew about what he’d been up to, also to leverage the best types of interventions.

And the result was we could do nothing. That he would just be continued. He would continue to have these violent and disruptive outbursts in the city and just get released to continue doing it. I stopped having the meetings. We had no options.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, hang on for a second. Because in your Vital City article, which by the way, we have links to it at onpointradio.org. You write, I once had to stop my car in the middle of the street while Mike finished urinating on the double yellow line, explaining to my son, because your son was in the car at the time, that as a state, Vermont had decided to allow him to do this indefinitely. What do you mean you could do nothing?

DEL POZO: That sounds like an indictment. And it is. I was in the car on North Street with my son. He was in front of a place called The Shopping Bag. And he was just peeing in the street. And you can’t detain somebody. You do not have the power to physically remove someone to a station house for public urination.

And if you do cite them, it’s never criminal. It’s always a civil summons. And if you don’t pay the civil summons, there are explicitly no consequences, except they could aggregate into something that a collector comes for and the collector could hurt your credit score. That’s it. And then one day I remember —

CHAKRABARTI: I’m sorry, Brandon, but just to be clear okay.

Public urination, distasteful. It’s not necessarily hurting anyone, but in the case of Reynolds, though, what we’re talking about is 2,000, 2,000 run ins with the police over 10 years, some of which as we’ve gone over, are violent and you even organized this state task force to figure out how to help one man, right?

And what I don’t get is why exactly was the conclusion that there was nothing that anyone could do to help him that’s defies reason.

DEL POZO: No, it does. And to be clear, we’re having a broader discussion about mental illness and vulnerability. And this is the exception. But I think it’s the exception that really gets to the heart of where the gaps are not only in this case but in cases like Jordan Neely, there are.

So when it comes to mental health in Vermont, after the hurricane, that really literally quite literally flooded the state forget, whether it was Sandy or Irene, forgive me.

CHAKRABARTI: It was Irene.

DEL POZO: Mental health. Thank you. The inpatient beds. They literally lost several inpatient beds to the flood.

Quite literally lost the beds, never rebuilt them, that plus having laws that really emphasize liberty over anything else. And not liberty for people who want to go live full expansive lives free from, you know, disruption from people like Mike, but liberty for people with mental illness.

That’s an important thing that we did a very bad job of with institutionalization in the last century, and the pendulum went in the other direction. I’m trying to say it plainly. The idea that nothing could be done, because literally nothing could be done. The bar was way too high. And in the article in Vital City, if you recall, I wrote, there was a time where I was in the shower, I was in the shower at home.

And I said, my God, I got to make a phone call. And I called up, we hired a public health professional to really sync up our police work with our public health work at the police department. I became a public health professor with this way of thinking. And I said, find out what happened to Mike.

Cause he’s either in jail or he’s dead. I haven’t heard about him in a few weeks. Thankfully he was in jail, not dead, but the only time we didn’t hear about him is when the criminal law stepped in and stuck him in jail. And that’s not a way to treat mental illness. It’s just a stopgap.

CHAKRABARTI: Brandon, hang on here for a second because we wanted to get the point of view of someone from the mental health community in Vermont.

We reached out to a bunch of people, many of whom are radically opposed to any change in the priority on personal liberty. And we’ll talk about that more in a minute. But we did connect with Mark Redmond, who’s the executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services in Burlington, Vermont.

It’s a job he’s had for 22 years. Now while Michael Reynolds doesn’t qualify for the youth services that Spectrum provides, Redmond says he does see him repeatedly on the streets, and once as Reynolds was leaving another social service facility.

MARK REDMOND: And I got there at 6 a.m. It was minus 20 out and he was walking out of there with no gloves and I gave him my gloves.

CHAKRABARTI: The fact that Reynolds was able to walk out of a care facility and into the deadly cold without a home, without even adequate clothing, and has done so hundreds of times, Mark Redmond tells us that he sees that as an example of how Vermont’s reliance on community-based care for the severely mentally ill is failing.

REDMOND: But if someone’s been through, like he has, every single setting that we have, and he’s caused havoc and mayhem and crimes and destruction and over and over again. At one point you say, hey, guess what? A community-based setting is not what this person needs.

CHAKRABARTI: Now to be clear, Mark Redmond tells us he does not want to see Vermont, or the country go back to a time where the severely mentally ill were warehoused in decrepit institutions and forgotten forever.

At Spectrum, in fact, they specialize in caring for teens and young adults who are either homeless, in and out of the juvenile justice system, or suffering from substance abuse and mental health disorders. And the whole goal is to help those young people become thriving members of the community. But Redmond says the exact opposite sometimes happens.

People may not be thrown into institutions anymore. He just says they’re thrown back onto the street. Redmond remembers one young man who was actively self-harming and needed emergency care.

REDMOND: He was cutting himself, there was blood all over the place. We sent him up to the hospital. He’s in the ED, they sent him right back to us.

And at that point, that was the final straw for me. So I did what I’ve never done in my 22. I call the hospital. I said, who’s the psychiatrist on duty? And I talked to the man, and I said, how can you look at me with a straight face and say that this person is not a danger to himself or others? How can you honestly say that?

And he said to me, How long have you worked in Vermont? I said, 19 years, at that point. He said I’ve been here 14 years, and they didn’t involuntarily commit anyone before I got here. They don’t do it now, and they probably never will. And I asked him, do we have the same laws on the books as Massachusetts and New Hampshire?

And he said, yes, we have the same laws on the books, it’s just that we interpret them differently.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s where Redmond doesn’t mince his words. He says in Vermont, and he throws in other states as well, mental health professionals and advocates, he says, are stuck in a trap of their own making.

REDMOND: It’s like we’re trapped by our own ideology in this field, of course we want to see the least restrictive environment. We would all want that. And for many people, that works, right? They can live in a setting and get community-based care. But there’s a percentage of people who really do need to be in what’s called a secure setting. It’s locked. I’m not saying it.

I remember the days in New York when you had Geraldo Rivera, right? Going out to these Creedmoor, these horrible places where there were hundreds of people living in squalor. Nobody wants to go back to those days. But now the clock is swung in the other direction so far. Where we presume that everybody can live in the community, with community.

And that’s just not true. And we need to get out of our own ideological blinders and recognize that there are people who suffer from this. Who need to be in a secure setting where they can get the proper care and treatment. Everybody wins! Right now, everybody’s losing!

CHAKRABARTI: Mark Redmond readily acknowledges that many advocates vehemently disagree with him, and he understands their concern.

That any diminishment of personal liberty for the mentally ill is the start of the slippery slope to the horrors of the past. Nevertheless, he believes Vermont has to make the tough decision to involuntarily commit more people. But, and he stresses this, not incarcerating them.

Prison isn’t the answer, he says. Redmond wants more secure facilities, where people can receive humane, compassionate, and effective mental health care for a fixed period of time.

But he also knows that building more beds like that doesn’t come cheap.

REDMOND: Can we fiscally afford it? My argument is this, if you look at Michael Reynolds alone, and the amount of money that we have spent on police, on emergency room visits, on what it costs to lock somebody up per day, we’re spending the money already, it’s just that we’re not spending it wisely or humanely, but we need to have a better evaluation system, and then we just need to overcome our hesitancy.

You’re always balancing people’s civil rights, right? Versus the rights of society to be safe.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s Mark Redmond. He’s the executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services in Burlington, Vermont. Brandon Del Pozo, legally, has anything actually changed in Vermont? Has anything changed in Burlington to provide some other option for officials to help people like Michael Reynolds?

DEL POZO: I haven’t been there in a few years, but to my knowledge, no. And I think that the sentiment that liberty is the only ingredient to dignity probably is still the one that drives a lot of those decisions. But liberty is not the only ingredient of treating people with dignity.

So you see that there’s workarounds, that the courtroom tape that you played earlier was a threat to rearrest Mike Reynolds, if he didn’t comply with his court conditions for burglary. So you have Mark Redmond saying, we don’t want incarceration and criminal responses. You have me saying, we don’t want incarceration and criminal responses.

And then the only thing Vermont can offer is, you’re under arrest for burglary. And if you act out again with your mental illness, we’re going to rearrest you, which is a criminal response.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Brandon, I want to ask you, you said something very compelling just before the break, you said liberty is not the only ingredient to a person’s dignity, and that echoes a line you wrote in this article in Vital City. In that same paragraph, you said, another is respect for their welfare.

For people with serious mental illness, that means understanding how precarious their situation is, how vulnerable they are, and how compromised their judgment can be in the midst of crisis. Leaving them to their own devices, in the name of liberty, amounts to letting the most troubling parts of them determine their life and set their fate.

But it does seem we’re trapped, though, in this, it’s either personal liberty and choice and freedom. We’re talking about freedom, really, or some kind of incarceration, or commitment against a person’s will. Now that strikes at something that’s fundamentally American, right?

The idea of individual liberty. And I do want to hear you explain a little bit more why you think that that core value of this country should be diminished somewhat for the severely mentally ill.

DEL POZO: This is compelling. And by way of explanation, my doctorate is actually in, it’s not in medicine or public health, it’s in political philosophy.

And I went into medicine and public health to try to fill these tremendous gaps and how we do this after seeing it unfold in policing. And also because they really invoke the questions I was studying literally as a philosopher, and thankfully some researchers were able to give me the runway to start a shift in my career.

So I say this to say, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, for a long time. And it’s not just raw exercised freedom is like some form of the Id. I don’t think what we mean when we talk about freedom in America or anywhere, right? It’s freedom to thrive, freedom to build social connections, to be a part of a community.

And it’s also a freedom that comes with the duty of respecting other people’s freedoms and other people’s need to thrive and when unchecked mental illness doesn’t result in maybe some circumscribing like liberty in the moment. It really, it disrupts that system.

It disrupts everybody’s freedom. And I guess what I mean by that is, take Mike Reynolds or Jordan Neely. They were nominally free, right? They could roam the city. They could get on the subway, nobody was physically restraining them. They weren’t in a building they couldn’t leave, but they were definitely social outcasts.

They were ostracized from society. They were incapable of caring for themselves in a way that would allow them to thrive in any way. And they’re also incapable of electing and adhering to the treatments and the interventions that would get them there. So what kind of freedom is this for them?

And then what are the consequences for the freedom of others? It’s just, it’s broken. And I think the idea that the freedom always comes first as a value falls apart when you look under the hood this way.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I know. The philosophical analysis is quite compelling. And so let’s remarry that back with reality.

Because I should say, that last April, we actually did a show exclusively on the ethical dilemmas of involuntary mental health treatment or involuntary commitment. And by the way, folks, you should listen to that. You can find it at onpointradio.org or in our podcast feed. And in that episode, we spoke with Dominic Sisti, he’s an associate professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

And in that sort of what happens when philosophy meets reality space, Professor Sisti said his biggest concern with involuntary treatment is essentially the police.

DOMINIC SISTI: The problem is in the involvement of the criminal justice system. When you involve the criminal justice system with people with mental illness, you’re taking them down a road of, we think about we worry about involuntary treatment as problematic and traumatizing. And ER’s as being a very bad scenario.

Imagine being in a holding cell with psychosis, that’s even worse. When we think about rounding folks up, they often end up involved in the criminal justice system. That is not where people with serious mental illness should be. It’s the exact opposite of a therapeutic setting. And that’s what worries me.

CHAKRABARTI: Brandon Del Pozo, I think he’s got a really good point here. What are the alternatives? Because one of the quickest fixes is changing the law, right?

That’s where we started the conversation. But that would mean that further involvement of the criminal justice system. So is there another way?

DEL POZO: A few things. Number one, I completely agree with Professor Sisti. My colleagues and I had a chapter in an edited book that Amy Watson and her colleagues just published, about how people with mental illness get harmfully entangled in like the misdemeanor court system.

What the professor described is exactly right. Changing the law, however, doesn’t just mean the law doesn’t simply, and maybe this is one of the misunderstandings changing the law. It doesn’t simply mean, all right, we’ve changed the law, and it now shunts people into the criminal justice system, into the prosecutorial criminalized system.

Changing the law could empower the police to bring people more readily and directly into a system of care, right? Now there are other alternatives. Hopefully we’ll get to touch on, but when people are out there in the street pushing someone onto the subway tracks, lighting someone on fire, or just throwing garbage, saying, I don’t care if I die today, I’m going to hurt someone, like you’re going to get a —

You’re not just going to get a co response or a clinician response. You’re going to get a police response. What we then do, whether the next door that they go through is the prosecution door, or the next door they go to is the door to a care setting, that is where the critical difference lies. And that’s what we haven’t fully built out.

CHAKRABARTI: To your point of other alternatives, Professor Sisti also told us that he thinks that enforcing involuntary treatment on people is, like you said, it’s solving the problem after the problem happens. And he sees it as an issue of helping people before something terrible goes on, and that cities and states need to invest in that, this kind of treatment before they resort to enforced care.

And to that point, he also talked about that many cities and states around the country are simultaneously trying to increase the use of hospitalization. He mentioned California and New York City. But in his mind, the results are truly mixed.

SISTI: There are folks who do well and get better. And after a certain amount of time, it might be weeks, months, or even years, are able to reintegrate into society and build and recover and have happy lives with support.

There’s other folks who don’t do as well. And it is the case, I think, that medication and medical interventions are just one thing that these folks need. They need wraparound services. They need support. They need transitional care, moving from a hospital back into the community. If these pieces are not in place, inpatient hospitalization won’t be as effective.

So the outcomes really will depend on the quality of all the other services that may wrap around the patient. So it is absolutely true that hospitals themselves are not a cure all. They’re a necessary component, I’d say, to a comprehensive mental health care system, but they’re not sufficient.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor del Pozo, are these some of the alternatives that you were thinking about?

DEL POZO: Yeah, and it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t right now, because when you get sent into the criminal justice system, it’s terrible for your health. It disrupts the continuum of care for you. And then when you get out, you have the stigma of mental illness and of a criminal record.

If you go into an institutionalized setting and word gets out, you have the stigma, mental illness is one of the most heavily stigmatized conditions in our society, even when you make a good recovery from it, even when you’re in recovery from it. So there’s always going to be that problem. But right.

What Professor Sisti describes is like a very resource intensive continuum of care. He talks about things we’re familiar with, like wraparound services, ways to transition people. Like all of that is quite helpful and offers the best hope. Also very complex and expensive, and we’ve under invested in it.

CHAKRABARTI: So then what to do though, because the cycle of under investment, short of true political will, is going to continue. You know the stories even better than I do, that basically across the country there’s this endless burden on mental health professionals, caseloads that are too great, underfunding, not enough beds.

But, at the same time, you’ve also suggested, in your article, that there are underleveraged touch points in the system? I find that hard to believe, so convince me.

DEL POZO: For example, the when, so there’s this trifecta, this hat trick of comorbidities.

It’s mental illness, homelessness, and substance use disorder. And you could start with one and get the other two. One can lead to the other two. You can enter this triple threat from any direction. But that’s where we see the most acute cases. And so there are things that we were developing.

We, the royal we, the public health community, long acting injectables. For example, one of the problems with effective medications is getting somebody who’s out there on the street, not institutionalized, to take their meds every day, right? There’s an effective monthly injectable for opioid use disorder.

There are long-acting weekly or monthly injectables now that they’re developing for the psychotropic medications. Just getting folks, instead of having them come to the hospital or the doctor setting, go and meet them where they’re at, whether it’s a homeless encampment or a low threshold housing, and give them their meds once a month, right?

Things, investing in things like that. So part of it is just hacking away at the margins where the decisions are more clear. I think the decision was pretty clear in the case of Mike Reynolds. I think in the case of Jordan Neely, absconding from housing after committing like a terrible assault against someone.

Remanding him would be clear. And then on the other hand, going to folks where their morbidities are getting worse, they’re emerging and treating them and nipping them in the bud with outreach and long acting injectables. For example, these are ways to make gains today that probably don’t require much legal change.

It probably required elbow grease.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m glad you brought back Jordan Neely into the conversation, and perhaps even more specifically, Daniel Penny’s not guilty verdict. Because underlying all this is the question of, and you wrote about this, it’s the social contract that we have with each other.

Not that we have with the severely mentally ill, and I think our duty of care as a society, but also the social contract when it comes to the preservation of sort of safety and security in public spaces. Do you think that the Penny verdict, the Penny not guilty verdict, perhaps heralds the beginning of a swing back of that pendulum, that there may be future cases.

Hopefully not, but there likely will be future cases in which the public’s safety is an overriding factor in a similar not guilty verdict.

DEL POZO: I think it’s even a lesser thing than that. The fair and cooperative use of public space in big cities is one of the most important determinants of people’s quality of life, of how they feel about living in a city and whether they feel safe or not.

And when you cram everybody onto a subway platform or a subway car, the fair and cooperative use of public space becomes even much, much, much more critical. And we rely on the government to broker and enforce the fair terms of that cooperation. So sometimes it’s people committing crimes.

Sometimes it’s people just, they’re treating a subway car like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, which is not a crime. It’s just very uncooperative. And then sometimes it’s mental illness, right? It’s people that can’t even control their behavior, doing very uncooperative things. And so we hope the government can broker and enforce that and put the guardrails on and when the government doesn’t.

Communities start doing it themselves, right? And I think the reason why people had such a visceral reaction to Penny, at least the ones who supported him, was instead of the subways being this profoundly uncooperative and disruptive place that the government has failed to like broker and enforce, like somebody did it themselves.

And yes, they used the chokehold that was inherently unpredictable and dangerous, but at least somebody is doing the brokering, that makes our public spaces tenable. I think that was the emotional reaction that a lot of people had. Does that help answer your question or did I stray?

CHAKRABARTI: No, it does.

Because it gets right to this sort of, how do we balance the, like again, our social contract to the mentally ill and to the society in which they live? But you’re also presenting a sobering immediate future then, right? Because the sense that finally someone is doing something doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to think, in the future, someone may be far less threatening, and an individual might take action.

DEL POZO: I think that might overestimate the willingness of everyday people to get into fights. I don’t think that this cleared the deck for people to start using chokeholds against the mentally ill. I don’t think, as a person who was a police officer for two decades and who has been in a lot of physical confrontations, I don’t like them.

They fill me with apprehension. I don’t relish them. And I try to avoid them. But I think what we saw was people, it was almost as if that incident, the Penny Neely incident, embodied like a very loud scream for something to change. And people felt gratified and vindicated that scream was issued, that maybe it will be heard.

I don’t think they’re going to, I don’t think the average person is not going to go out and become a subway enforcer.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Do you think that if somehow both the, let’s say, the philosophy of the mental health system and the laws work together to, for example, perhaps keep Jordan Neely in care for a while longer?

That it’s possible he might be alive today.

DEL POZO: That’s one particular person, right? And yeah, things could have gone differently in a way that he’d still be alive, right? And it would have involved probably being a little more involuntary with him. But he, like you suggest, he’d probably still be alive.

And I think most, no one wants perfection. I don’t think people want these things never to happen. They just don’t want to feel like they’re helpless, because there’s a dereliction. And I think people right now, the biggest frustration is not that people feel the system’s imperfect. It’s always going to be imperfect.

There’ll always be crime. There’s always going to be disruptive incidents from people with mental illness. People just don’t want to feel as if this is all because of dereliction of the government’s duty.