Every now and then, over the years, in a masochistic frame of mind, I listen to Rush Limbaugh‘s radio program. There’s the legitimate “hearing the other point of view” thing, there’s the “what is my enemies’ latest bullshit lines and obsessions” thing, both of which I can get from any FOX program…. but getting it with Rush’s unparalleled obnoxious arrogance is bracing to me, like a blast of cold water. Call me crazy.
And I remember one time, years ago, I don’t know what liberal government plan he was ridiculing, but his point rightly or wrongly was that it was a non-solution to an imagined problem, and he ranted on in his comical falsetto “liberal” voice, “But there’s a PROBLEM, so we’ve GOT to do SOMETHING! ANYTHING! It doesn’t matter what! There’s a PROBLEM!” In the televised version, his arms were no doubt waving, his cheek and neck fat waggling.
But that stuck with me, cuz there was truth to it – not just liberals but conservatives too, not just government but business and maybe people in general – when you see a terrible problem and the real solution is either hard to figure or too difficult, it’s tempting to just do SOMETHING, ANYTHING … so as to feel that the problem was at least acknowledged properly. Even if it wasn’t.
It’s not so far from [and fasten your seatbelts here, we are traveling a light year in the intellectual and moral universe] anti-corporatist thinker Naomi Klein‘s famed “Shock Doctrine” whereby elites will either CREATE or quickly EXPLOIT a CRISIS … in order to enact a policy they already wanted, and may actually be totally unrelated to the crisis. (A classic recent example is George W Bush’s using the attacks of Sept 11 as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq.)
All of us who want to have seen the video of slight, homeless, confused, mentally feeble Kelly Thomas getting beaten and suffocated to death by six Fullerton cops. We all patiently or impatiently waited two and a half years for him and his family to get some justice in court. And then, last month, most of us reacted with shock and outrage when a jury of Kelly’s peers found the killer cops not guilty.
And as we sat in our stunned silence, having learned that Orange County cops can torture and kill any of us for no reason with impunity, and wondering what to do next, our Board of Supervisors – or at least the ambitious Supervisor John Moorlach – suggested what our next step should be, in the wake of the Kelly Thomas Travesty.
Was it anything to do with fostering civilian oversight committees in OC towns that desperately need them, or anything pushing legislative reform of POBR (the Peace Officer Bill of Rights which severely limits the public’s access to information about police misconduct?) No!
Was it anything to do with giving teams of cops in each city specialized training in dealing with the mentally ill, as in the wildly successful “Memphis Model” (which we’ll look at below?) Again, no!
How about getting serious about establishing a 365-day, 24-hour homeless shelter in each of the five supervisorial districts, as Supervisor Nelson tried last year till being stymied by Fullerton NIMBYs? For the third time, NO!
Supervisor Moorlach believes the proper response to the Kelly Thomas Murder and Acquittals is to bring Laura’s Law to Orange County. The termed-out, big-hearted but bumbling Supervisor, now running for Congress, wants that to be his legacy, his final big achievement at the County.
Okay. What Is Laura’s Law?
It’s a 2002 California law signed by Governor Gray Davis (but only in effect in the one county that has implemented it over all these years) – a law which would allow a local court, if they deemed you “a danger to yourself and others,” AND you refused the treatment they claim you need, to force “assisted outpatient services” and anti-psychotic medications on you. The law was named after Laura Wilcox (left), the 19-year old mental health worker who was shot fatally by the insane Scott Harlan Thorpe (below right) who by some accounts had stubbornly refused psychiatric treatment; or by other accounts had actually been begging for treatment but told there was nothing tiny Nevada County could do for him.
The law’s passionate Orange County advocates rushed, in the wake of the Kelly Thomas killing, to persuade our Supervisors that the fatal police beating somehow proved that we need Laura’s Law here, but I don’t see the connection. Do we really want to give the government more power than they already have to detain us, or to force drugs on us “for our own good?” (Drugs which often have terrible side effects?) And how many cases are like Thorpe’s tragic shooting of Laura – isn’t this another expensive solution in search of a problem? One of the law’s strongest advisers and defenders, Dr. Tom Burns, has changed his mind about it as well – read about that here.
Twelve years later, the Law has only been implemented in ONE of California’s 58 counties – faroff Nevada County where the Thorpe-Wilcox tragedy actually happened. (Nevada County is the little red sliver you see to the left.) The recalcitrance of the 57 other counties has been due not so much to any lack of do-gooder politicians wanting to protect us from ourselves, as to concerns over the funding. The Counties that WOULD have maybe adopted the expensive program wanted to fund it from Proposition 63, (a 2004 ballot proposition that raised money specifically for mental health treatment) and were legally unable to … until just recently. So the money’s there now, but still, in these tough times and with our miserly Supervisors, it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t be coming out of programs that are more important and impact more people.
Anyway, the debate over the merits of the Law will be happening in this county soon, so all I ask is:
Just don’t connect Laura’s Law to Kelly Thomas!
There are at least two reasons why using the murder of Kelly Thomas to drum up support for Laura’s Law, or pretending that bringing the Law to Orange County would constitute a good response to the Kelly Thomas murder and acquittal, is OFFENSIVE:
1. Blaming the Victim. It’s like responding to a woman getting beat to death by her husband, by starting a school to teach women to be better, more submissive wives. Kelly didn’t die because he was a danger to anyone; he didn’t die because it was legally impossible to force-feed him medications; he died because six big brutal cops suffocated and beat him to death for no reason. Kelly liked to walk the summer night streets of Fullerton shirtless; to listen to reggae for hours at Baxter’s house; to bum cigarettes, search for butts, and scrounge through trash cans for interesting-looking items. Isn’t it every Americans’ God-given right to do ALL those things, without getting murdered OR forcibly medicated?
2. Laura’s Law wouldn’t have saved him, or even applied to him. The list of criteria for someone to be forcibly treated and medicated under the Law includes:
- must be a serious risk of harm to himself or herself or others
- must have a history of non-compliance with treatment that has either:
- Been a significant factor in his or her being in a hospital, prison or jail at least twice within the last thirty-six months; or
- Resulted in one or more acts, attempts or threats of serious violent behavior toward self or others within the last forty-eight months.
None of these criteria applied to the gentle Kelly, so even if Laura’s Law had been in place here in July 2011, a roving team of force-medicators could still not have legally shoved a needle of neuroleptics into Kelly. AND it’s hard to see how he still wouldn’t have gotten beat to death by Fullerton cops before they got there.
Diane Goldstein says: Bring the “MEMPHIS MODEL” to OC instead!
My colleague, retired cop and reformer Diane Goldstein, and others, say, “More training, better training for the cops! THAT would have prevented this tragedy.” Many of us react with bafflement – really, better training would have stopped these thug cops from doing what they wanted to do? Most of us who watched the video saw two or three sadistic psychopaths and three or four useless oafs doing what they felt like, feeling encouraged and enabled by an unwritten Fullerton policy of scaring all homeless out of the downtown area.
But Diane, with her twenty years beat experience, believes that Ramos, Cicinelli, and the rest were really convinced (wrongly) that little Kelly was a drug-addled menace who could actually HURT them. (!) And that having them (or other, nearby, less-retarded officers) trained in the growingly popular and successful “Memphis Model” of Crisis Intervention COULD have made all the difference. (Or at least, it seems to me, have made acquittal and impunity less likely.) And that for the Supervisors to allocate the funds planned for Kelly’s Law to the Memphis Model instead would be much more appropriate and effective.
Diane will be writing about the Memphis Model on this blog within the week SOON; until then, John, Shawn, Todd, Pat and Janet, you can find out all about it here. And in this Democracy Now piece as well.
*********************
Barring that, if Moorlach wants to do something appropriate in memory of Kelly, perhaps a 365-day, 24-hour shelter in his town of Costa Mesa, like Shawn tried to do in Fullerton? Costa Mesa really needs that. And/or he could use his bully pulpit to push for police reform in this county. But neither of those moves would help him in his Congressional run, given all the homeless-phobic NIMBYs and the omnipotent police unions.
Or maybe nothing will happen at all, as the Kelly Thomas travesty slowly sinks into the dimness of our memories….
The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979
Like everything government does it mucks things up. Despite the good intentions of Prop 63 and the 11 billion in tax revenues raised and spent most of it has been misspent on things like yoga in some counties. From an article that I read last year.
“Of the $10 billion raised since 2004, $2 billion was diverted to social service programs that do not serve people with mental illness; $2.5 billion was spent without any oversight; $23 million went to organizations associated with oversight commissioners; regulators prevented funds from helping the mentally ill; politicians enacted ‘clarifying’ amendments that diverted funds elsewhere; and the most seriously mentally ill continue to be offloaded to jails, shelters, prisons and morgues.”
Situation normal all f..ked. Now if I were queen, but you’ll have to read my spin in about a week according to my taskmaster Vern!
How can those funds be diverted like that with such impunity? That’s insane.
Great read and great article… Always look forward to hearin from Diane!!
i was disgusted by the kelly thomas murder,but i am prepared to be vilified for the following:this article was in error.Thomas had a huge incident log with police authorities.He had been violent with random strangers and relatives, and his lifestyle WAS a danger to himself.forced commitment was abandoned because the state wanted to save money and the popular misconceptions about hospitalization surrounding the book “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest by ken kesey.there are many who need attention,even forced attention by mental health authorities.accompanied by patient protection measures of course,enforcing the law as it is written would suffice however.
You didn’t read it right. L’s law has a timeline for violent offences that would not apply to Thomas.
Considering law enforcement is the last and often only line of support for the homeless and or mentally ill, it’s not surprising that Thomas had encounters with police. Even a lot of them. Painting them with a broad brush stroke as all evidence that he was a danger to himself and society is not, at all, accurate.
Vern you bring up some very good points. The first point though was the best one. You correctly indicate that as soon as a tragedy hits, many people (mostly the ones that still have faith in our government and government representatives), want a quick and easy government solution. As you rightly point out, complex problems rarely if ever have boilerplate, simple solutions. However, on my Facebook page, and at Fullerton City Council meetings, I have raised a similar problem not being addressed by our Fullerton council members and our police chief. You can not expect to fix a problem when that problem has never been identified by our so called government leaders. I would argue that the primary problem we have to deal with and correct is too much police abuse, and then the public relations response drivel to make the so-called problem go away, not fixed but as broken as ever. This response by our so-called leaders is worse than no response because some of our citizens believe the Public Relations “reforms” have indeed made a difference. These citizens mostly then want to go back to business as usual. Problem solved.
We have heard our Police Chief, our City Attorney and others explain that we can not see the police officers complaint and reprimand files because of POBOR. But has anyone of these gentleman spoken out that POBOR needs to be amended so that bad cops can not continue to be protected by the law. The answer is simply no. Why? Maybe, they love the fact that they are not governed by the same rules and laws that you and I are governed by. We had an Independent Police Oversight Review Board Committee that I was a part of, that barely got the time of day in front of our Fullerton city council before they dismissed the idea.
Yes homelessness is a very big problem throughout the country and it does need to be addressed and those homeless people deserve real solutions. It just has little to do with the violent murder of Kelly Thomas. I viewed that tape and although Kelly Thomas was a mentally ill man, his behavior that night was more normal, more rational than that of the 6 establishment police officers who caused him to die from the brutal and indefensible injuries rained down on him that night!
My question as well. How does responding to the tragedy of Kelly Thomas with forced mental health targeting” that guy” when we could take this opportunity to create a law or laws to ferret out the MENTALLY ILL BASTARDS WHO HOLD POSITIONS OF PUBLIC SERVICE AS A MEANS TO CARRY OUT THEIR SOCIOPATHIC TENDANCIES ON THE HELPLESS AND HOMELESS!!??
You are essentially making a law to FORCE depressed women after being raped into “mental health” care instead of making laws to aid in capturing and containing rapists!!! It makes very little sense!
What HAS been successful with the mentally ill homeless population/culture? Time Banks, Free Market exchanges, engaging them in community gardens, beach and park clean ups, recycling endeavors, providing free shower and laundry facilities, providing a means for their creativity with music, art, and literature outreaches. We really can’t see what we are doing by focusing on the INNOCENT instead of the PREDATORS!??
I hear very little conversation about real transparency…not these twisted little infiltrated puppet clubs, but like – hard core vetting of public service officials, multiple and rigorous psychological testing, strict and severe and swift consequences for the slightest unprofessional behaviour, mandatory certified and. Continuing education…..come on! We are cracking the proverbial whip at the wrong people!!!
From John Moorlach’s coddling of the criminally lost Orange County Sheriff’s department to former Garden Grove police Chief Stan Knee acting like a domestic terrorist in the 1990’s – many people are culpable for what has become of this Counties’ police community. Good luck Mr. Moorlach if you think that you are going to hand a tool to this police community that would serve to cover up and obstruct justice.
As for the Fullerton police department – since your cops are so cowardly that 6 huge police officers were afraid of one mentally ill homeless skinny man, may I suggest a change in policy that you have to call in 10-15 officers before you proceed to engage in that scenario. It might even increase the probability that at least one of your cops actually steps in and does the right thing.
Good one German (second paragraph)
What Barry said.
The problem was not that the cops didn’t know how to deal with the homeless or the mentally ill. The problem was the cops were cowardly, lazy and out of control – at best.
Some people in Fullerton still think that there was a conspiracy between the first cops on the scene and a bar to teach Kelly a lesson; hence the phony phone call and the completely unnecessary physical intimidation.
In any case, the issues are the ridiculous POBR and lax hiring of goons. Bad combination.
Homeless shelters and Laura’s Law are useful distractions from the integral events surrounding Thomas’s killing.
Why do the police need a Bill of Rights different from the one the rest of us get by with?
What Zenger said.
Except the homeless shelter – a more benign distraction than Laura’s Law.
The fact that a homeless shelter may be an intrinsically worthwhile project ought not to be confused with benignity in the context of the Kelly Thomas killing or the gross injustice of the verdict.
Fullerton’s old guard statists like Rusty Kennedy immediately jumped on the issue as a distraction from the well-documented serial malfeasances of the FPD documented by Bushala and Kiger. That in itself is really quite sinister in the usual banal way.
I almost think the POBR is a red herring of sorts, when we have POS’s profiting from public facilities (vending machines, parades, farmers market events ect..) and other POA’s tailing, framing and tracking elected officials. I would say there is something FUNDALMENTALLY wrong with a governmental system that cedes this much power to a specific group of EMPLOYEES. This is an incredibly dangerous trend and perhaps indicative of the mainstream publics fear of powerful public employee unions. It could be, should be, argued within the left that the California police unions RUINED it for most everyone else who holds a menial public sector job.
Police unions are notoriously insular and sketchy. POBR is the disease, POA’S are the germs/infections (or bad habits) that cause it.
Unfortunately,
No police in this county are trained to deal with mentally ill persons they come in contact with. And most officers are not naturally wired to handle the situations that come up properly. Its just not part of the LEO culture. Society must re-think the views we have on mental illness and the coupled issue of drug addiction that is so tethered to mental illness and vice versa.
Paul your comments are well taken that police may not be the best equipped to deal with the mentally ill. However, we must demand that all police officers are capable of dealing with a routine encounter with any member of the public and not turn it into a death sentence for an innocent man whether mentally ill or not. I have no police training but I know I could have handled that encounter that night without resorting to violence. The FPD should be training officers to deescalate the situation not provoke it like they certainly did with Kelly Thomas.
Again too much cause and effect has been placed at the altar of mental illness. Clearly, the issue that night was a group of 6 police officers either poorly trained or not equipped with the skills to be capable police officers resorting to taunts, physical threats that were too quickly carried out against Kelly Thomas. This is classic police abuse and brutality on steroids, period.
Vern, you have made a few incorrect assumptions.
It was parents of children that have mental illness that approached me about Laura’s Law. I don’t see it as the answer to Kelly Thomas, but I do see it as another tool in the chest for relatives to utilize when necessary.
I established the Office of Independent Review here at the County. I have done what I can within my jurisdiction and I’m proud of this new initiative at the County. I don’t know why you think I can impose something similar within incorporated jurisdictions.
As to a year-round homeless shelter in Costa Mesa, I have extended the offer to do so to the City Council and will provide funding, if needed.
I could bore you with stories of frustration with the push back we’ve received when proposing this very necessary public service. There really is no or minimal unincorporated area in my District that would accommodate such a facility. If there were, then I could be criticized. But, I’ve taken my lumps in this area for trying too hard.
I don’t know if I would call myself “ambitious,” as I’m just enjoying the journey as it unfolds. And you’ll have to enlighten me as to how I’m bumbling…
By “ambitious,” I didn’t mean politically ambitious, or mean it as an insult. (Most politicians have SOME ambition.) I kinda meant that you try to do big things. Maybe I need to check a thesaurus.
Maybe you need not to be such a suck-up.
Vern’s basically just a nice guy, skally. I understand that you may find this confusing.
I didn’t soften the “bumbling” did I? And who can deny that The Moorlach tries to do big things?
Yes, but is there photographic evidence or just footprints.
Supervisor Moorlach talks about the tremendous pushback he has received for trying to place a county homeless shelter in Costa Mesa.
As far as the pushback the county received with regard to the Fullerton location it unilaterally selected without communicating first with our city council or the public at large he can expect the following. Whenever the county strong-arms their unilateral locations without any effort to communicate with the public, he can expect more of the same. When the county tries to ram something down the public’s throat as did Supervisor Nelson with the apparent support from Supervisor Moorlach, generally good things do not result from such heavy handed, behind the scene maneuvers.
I for one was for a shelter but not next door to an elementary school and not on a street (State College) that was about to be shut down to public transportation for the next 3 years. Good government takes everyone working together to find a common solution. It is something that some of our supervisor’s would be wise to remember the next time they try to push their weight around.