I do not think that removing dangerously mentally ill people from the streets is more dangerous than waiting until they act out on their violent tendencies.
Once upon a time, mentally ill people could be confined to hospitals indefinitely if their illness warranted. Which pretty much means they stayed for life, since true mental illnesses cannot be cured. "Civil rights" groups have successfully stopped the practice of institutionalization, and the results are not good.
It isn't just the dangerously mentally ill people who were thrown out on the streets to prey on others, but non-dangerous ones, those we now call the "homeless." The homeless cannot take care of themselves; throwing them out on the street is just plain cruel. But society does not really suffer when the homeless are thrown out to fend for themselves, not the way it does when the psychotic mentally ill are thrown out.
Whenever there is a highly publicized case of a mass murder, it seems that the murderer was giving clues all over the place that he was about to do something. And no one acted to stop the murders. In today's reality, it is nearly impossible to do anything--the mentally ill, dangerous or otherwise--cannot be institutionalized. And once the psychotic ones commit a crime, then they end up in the prison system, which really is not set up to handle the mentally ill.
Well said.
I agree on most points, actually.
It’s just that assessing mental illness, and locking people up for it, is inherently dangerous as a political reality.
Your homeless example is a case in point. Many homeless people are indeed mentally ill. However, it’s all to easy to use that to throw all homeless people into insane asylums, which would be an atrocity and a crime against humanity. Nevertheless, history has shown the reality and ease of such things.
Life is inherently messy. Making things too neat means discarding humanity for totalitarianism, every time.
Precrime prevention is very dangerous. It doesn’t mean letting the insane run wild, but it must be severely limited in application, otherwise we turn out own society into a prison camp, similar to the USSR.