Those afflicted with mental illness cannot substantively contribute to political campaigns, therefore until our society takes a definitive humanitarian stand and recognizes that the benefits would far outweigh the financial costs to provide adequate coverage, nothing will change.
Police have been forced into the position of what was once done primarily by psychiatric facilities. They are not given the resources and training to handle these situations in a successful way.
The unintended consequences of deinstitutionalization, brought by fiscal conservatives teaming up with full inclusion ideologues, leads us to tragedies such as these.
In the future, we will also see an increasing amount of intellectually and developmentally disabled, become victim to these circumstances. We are in the midst of dismantling the safety net using the same propaganda that was used in the '80s. Those people who are at the most severe end of disabilities have increasingly fewer options. They will meet the same fate as those released from the psych facilities decades ago, either jail, the street, or the morgue.
In my state, they used to have a residential wait list for the DD/ID population. They tossed it in the garbage. In Connecticut they have a residential request wait list but it's meaningless. People have been on the list for 20 to 30 years and never moved any closer to finding a spot. Where are these people supposed to go when their families die off and can no longer take care of them?
According to one organization, there are 4.9 million adults with ID/DD in the U.S.
http://www.madisonhouseautism.org/video-will-4-903-million-individuals-live/
Yet states are closing down institutions by twisting a supreme court decision (Olmstead v. LC) into what is fiscally convenient for them. They are pushing home and community based service waivers but when people attempt to use those waivers, the restrictions are such that the waivers are becoming meaningless. They have tied people's hands behind their backs.
Sorry to go off on a tangent here but this is my family's life. We support my older mentally ill disabled brother and a severely disabled child. Though we have been blessed in many ways, the reality is the most vulnerable people in our midst are the most often overlooked. Or worse, exploited for the revenues they can bring in. The state of NY was charging $5100 a DAY to residents of institutions. Those federal funds that came in as a result were then diverted to cover other state expenses that had nothing to do with the institutions. When the feds finally figured out that they had been played by NYS, who do you think gets punished at the end of the day? Sure, NY will pay some of that money back but at the expense of the very people they exploited in the first place.