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Yes absolutely, so many patients end up dumped in the ED who aren't really medical or psychiatric, they are just difficult enough that the cop figures it must be a healthcare problem.
Then we are left discharging this massive liability as soon as they sober up or whatever.
What options do the cops actually have otherwise?
Kinda sounds like buck-passing all around. How can society deal with low-grade socially corrosive people? Without offending the bleeding heart types who do nothing to help but condemn anything that might?
You need us to make sure they don't die from intoxication or withdrawal? Fine. Cut themselves on a window breaking in, or got hypothermia? Fine. Need us to psychiatrically clear? Fine.
You'll see presentations that start this way though: "Patient brought in by police for threatening to push people onto the subway tracks while clearly high on a serious drug, two other incidents this week, and was brought to the hospital 14 times in the last 2 months for similar presentations but the police decline to press charges."
Probably not actually the police fault there but that's what the docs like to blame, but we see tons of dump jobs where we are just waiting for the guy to do something bad enough to not be caught and released and its an actuarial game. Seldom anything medical or psychiatric to do.
Big scandal in NYC recently after a state hospital cut someone loose and they immediately went and stabbed someone in a Macys. Doctor scuttlebutt is that the patient wasn't psychiatric - pure personality. Should have been a criminal matter front to back and now somebody is quite likely going to get sued out of the profession for something no physician has any control over.
Yeah, I would guess this is a blue city soft on crime prosecutor problem. A crazy/drug-addled person threatening to kill people should actually not be left free to be a violent random encounter for the citizenry.
Most of my work has been in blue locations but I'd wager that even red ones aren't great about this, I'd love to hear anecdotes or data to the contrary though.
You'd be shocked at how soft the legal system can be, even in red areas. You see this in stalking and DV cases - threats and implications are often not enough to do anything useful and things end up being too late.
The key word that twigged me there was "subway". Are there any places with both subways and Republican mayors? That actually seems like a good question for an LLM.
The Bing default search AI summary completely shit the bed:
Richard Riordan is real, but Pittsburg has not had a Republican mayor since 1934. Mike Mergner Bloomfield seems to have been entirely hallucinated (hilariously so - "Yeah, the last Republican mayor was old Johnny CityName). Jean Stothert was the Republican mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Corey O'Connor is the mayor of Pittsburgh, but he took office last week, not 2021, and is a Democrat. David Bronson is real. 3/5 fake answers.
Copilot did better, listing
All of whom seem to be real.
Michael Bloomberg is real but a Republican in name only; he switched to the Democratic party partway through his mayorship and his most distinguishing feature was that he was all-in on government paternalism. Bloomfield, NJ is also real but lacks a subway, unless you mean the fast food chain, and has had only Democratic mayors in recent years.
I tried to look that up, and it seems like they might have a stop on one of the Newark feeder lines. I don't really think that counts, but my experience with north Jersey public transit is pretty limited, so I wasn't willing to definitively count it out.
Also, a township of 50k is a bit weak to be calling a "city" anyway.
Don't read too much into that word, since New Jersey's townships are incorporated municipalities, not merely the unincorporated divisions of country administration that the word signifies in some other states.
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