Mental Illness Plagues the Streets of San Francisco
Posted on 03/07/2003 10:43:34 AM PST by SeenTheLight
The Chronicle covered a story on Wednesday that should be a wake-up call for San Francisco. A woman who was nine-months pregnant, was viciously attacked by a deranged, homeless man who hit her over the head with a can of paint and severed her ear. All this happened while she was painting her house, in the normally placid Bernal Heights neighborhood.
But it no longer matters if you live in a nice neighborhood or not, because the specter of homelessness now reaches into all corners of San Francisco. Among the ranks of the homeless are those who suffer serious mental illness. Much has been written about the disgusting conditions of the city’s streets, due to homeless people using them as toilets, but not enough has been said about the toll that mental illness is taking. A lack of leadership at the top and apathy among the citizenship are the main culprits.
The blight of insanity on our streets has gotten so bad that the people of San Francisco are largely tuning out, as a means of coping. The statements made by the victim’s neighbors in the Chron article are typical of this attitude. Although one woman claimed to have seen "a suspicious young man walking up and down the street, looking into the windows of houses," the day before, her response was simply to tell her husband not to open their door. Another neighbor summed it up by saying "I just thought he was some loony, walking around with a pole....you hear crazy people talking all the time."
Apparently, none of these people called the police, who did eventually arrive and arrest the attacker. No one bothered to check on the victim either, despite the fact that the man had been seen across from her house covered in the purple paint she was using. It wasn’t until her husband arrived home and found her unconscious on the floor, that she was taken to the hospital, where her baby was delivered safely and she remains in intensive care.
The problem has gotten so bad that experiences like the following have become all too common. I was riding a MUNI train, when a man who looked like Robinson Crusoe boarded, lay down on the floor, and babbled loudly to himself. Passengers averted their eyes, including the train operator, hoping that the nuisance would just go away. Not only is this head-in-the-sand approach destined to fail, it leads to a level of callousness and cynicism that does little for the health of the populace.
Unfortunately, the leadership of San Francisco seems to be mostly taking the same approach. Although the voters overwhelmingly supported supervisor Gavin Newsom’s Care Not Cash initiative, it isn’t scheduled to take effect until July 2003. Meanwhile, the Coalition on Homelessness continues to lobby for the "privacy" and "freedom" of these people, ignoring the fact that neither condition will help the mentally ill, most of whom clearly can’t take care of themselves. Every attempt to create a system that at least keeps track of the homeless and tries to offer actual assistance, instead of just handing out cash, is resisted by these so-called homeless advocates. The political circus just goes on and on, while the homeless and regular citizens of San Francisco are left to their own devices.
As a result, conditions in this city are more dangerous than ever. In a time of heightened awareness about terrorism, the insanity that we allow to flourish unchecked is incomprehensible. What’s the point of putting up concrete impediments in front of the Federal Building, when there are several people sleeping out front and a guy on the corner screaming to himself? How would we know who was a terrorist and who was one of our garden-variety crazies? True security means more than superficial changes.
The dangers of not responding to this epidemic are becoming more and more glaring. Today’s incident is just one example. Let’s not forget another attack on a mother that occurred about a year ago at the Powell Street train station. A man ran up and grabbed an infant out of the arms of its frantic mother and attempted to toss the baby over the railing. If not for the intervention of a couple of brave onlookers, this woman’s baby would have died. The recent incident in the subway of South Korea, where a man with a history of mental illness started a fire that eventually engulfed 2 trains and killed 198 people, should be a warning sign of what could easily happen here.
As citizens, we cannot continue to turn away from the dangers of the mentally ill on our streets. In addition, our leaders need to stop ignoring this problem, and take a good hard look at their priorities. We owe it both to the mentally ill and to the regular folks of this city, to address this issue, before something even worse happens.
Back to topic, what is a 9 month pregnant woman doing painting her house? Thats what husband and father-in-laws are supposed to do. A pregnant woman is supposed to be in the house, barefooted, eating pickles and ice cream.
And the voting booth as well.
Everybody's crazy out there.
You never have seen nesting in action eh?
It's San Francisco. There is no husband or father-in-law or any other representative of The Patriarchy in this Womyn's life.
How long ago was it that the compassionate liberals in our wonderful government decided that insane asylums public mental hospitals were "inhumane" and "incarceration of the innocent" and expelled all these poor creatures from their padded cells to fend for themselves.
Agreed! Yum-yum.
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