If you want to stop crime, stop abusing patients with Federal mandates that are killing them.
Guv Brown needs to tell Obama and his friends that the safety of people is more important than radical ideology.
“But a Times investigation found that the plan has failed to achieve the Justice Department’s main objective: to raise the level of care so patients could control their violent tendencies and would not be institutionalized any longer than necessary.
Under the plan, the use of restraints and certain medications declined. But by the end of last year, the rate of patient assaults on other patients and staff members had doubled at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk and Atascadero State Hospital in San Luis Obispo County, according to an analysis of state data.
The assault rate at Napa more than tripled over two years, dropping only after the killing of the psychiatric worker triggered a lockdown.
Only at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino did assaults decrease — by 15%.”
Thanks to Washington, 4,000 sick people are in daily fear of rape, assault and murder—thanks to government refusal to protect them.
It is time for the people of California to tell the Guv that safety is more important than ideology. What do you think? Should mentally ill people be free game from vicious criminals?
California state mental hospitals plagued by peril
A costly federal effort to reduce heavy drugging and improper restraining fails to improve care and help patients control violent impulses. Instead, assaults by patients mount and confinements grow longer.
By Lee Romney and John Hoeffel, Los Angeles Times, 4/15/12
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“Meanwhile, the state Department of Mental Health — under new leadership — has begun dismantling many of the changes instituted at the hospitals.
“It was a huge, very expensive, very idiotic experiment that failed badly,” Dr. Mubashir Farooqi, a psychiatrist at Patton, said of the reform effort.
Under pressure from higher-ups to place the fewest possible restrictions on patients, hospital staff members grew reluctant to take assertive action against violent or unruly ones, according to state records and interviews with hospital officials, employees, patients a
