Early last month police in Fullerton, California, received a
report that someone was breaking into cars at the
city’s transportation center. For years, the station
has been a popular hub for the homeless. Unlike private business
owners who have to worry about their bottom line, the public
employees who run the transit center are more tolerant of street
persons. The station is also a convenient place for burglars to ply
their trade, since car owners often leave their vehicles unattended
for hours at a time. Security guards are supposed to keep an eye on
things, but this is unfeasible when on
any given workday an average of 3,000 commuters travel through
the hub.
Fullerton police discovered several homeless persons
hanging round the bus station. Among them was 37-year-old Kelly
Thomas. Thomas, who suffered from severe schizophrenia, had a
string of arrests going back 17 years, during which time he’d been
charged with everything from vandalism to assault with a deadly
weapon. In 1995, he had pleaded guilty to hitting his grandfather
in the head with a fireplace poker.
The pattern never varied. Thomas would be arrested
and serve a brief jail sentence, after which he would be
transferred to a treatment center. He would respond well to
medication, at which point he would be released onto the streets.
Or he would simply escape, since, as he told his father, he “hated”
the treatment centers.
Inevitably Thomas, who was often heard saying he
preferred the life of a drifter, would go off his medication. (He
did not appear to have a similar aversion to illegal drugs, a
probation report stated.)
This time when officers tried to search Thomas’
backpack for weapons, drugs or stolen items, he made a run for it.
Police easily caught up with him and,
when he resisted, they allegedly zapped him with a stun gun.
Perhaps as many as six times. It was reported that officers
savagely beat and kicked Thomas until, at length, he slipped into a
coma.
Five days later Kelly Thomas was
dead.
MUCH OF THE nation was outraged by the news reports of his
death. And rightly so. Editorials, blogs, and talk shows focused on
the brutal actions of the six cops. There was virtually no
criticism of Thomas’s divorced parents for allowing their
schizophrenic son to roam the
streets. One newspaper reported that Thomas’s father said he “just
didn’t have time” to be his son’s full-time guardian. While his
mother reportedly took out a five-year restraining order against
him last December after he refused to leave her porch where he had
been sleeping.
But if Kelly Thomas was too dangerous to live at home with
his mother or father, why was it okay for him to roam the streets
where he might harm innocent passersby? Another newspaper account
noted that, “in the nearly two decades since his son descended into
madness, Ron Thomas has worried every day that the schizophrenic
37-year-old would die of exposure or illness on the streets.” Was
there nothing Mr. Thomas could have done for his son except to
“worry”? (Rather than opprobrium, Thomas
père received an offer for nearly $1 million
in compensation from city officials, which he turned down. No
doubt, he intends to sue for much more.)
One woman, interviewed by a television crew at a
candlelight vigil, choked back tears as she recalled how she used
to wave to Thomas and bring him breakfast. That doubtless made her
feel better, and may even have made Thomas feel better for a bit,
but it hardly addressed the problem of the mentally ill languishing
on our streets. Indeed, no one seemed to be addressing the problem,
or even giving it much thought. Perhaps because for society to
actually do something helpful like involuntarily commit a violent
schizophrenic in order that he can be treated — would be
considered cruel and a violation of his civil rights.
In a statement, Fullerton police noted that officers
receive training on how to deal with the mentally ill and the
homeless. But police are
not psychiatric nurses or
orderlies. And unless a police officer has a
specialized medical degree, how is he to know whether this or that
transient is mentally ill? It is unlikely a veteran psychiatrist
could make that kind of diagnosis under such circumstances. It
seems to me the job of police should not be to “deal with the
mentally ill,” but to arrest criminals. To expect otherwise is like
asking social workers to arrest
carjackers.
There are some 200,000 homeless in America with
untreated mental illness, according to the Treatment Advocacy
Center. In the name of civil rights and
compassion, society allows such persons to languish and die on the
streets of our greatest cities. I fail to see the compassion and
justice in that.
