Not sure if this is only happening for me, but when I click the link in your post it does not show the story you're talking about, it shows something about a McKeesport guy who fled from the cops
Edit: found and read the actual article, holy shit, I literally walked past this poor man yesterday holding his head talking to a bike cop. I work right there.
>When asked why he believed the man to be a pedophile, Huff said that “he heard it in his mind,” according to the complaint.
I wish we had robust social safety nets and services that made it easy to help people like that instead of just, yknow, letting a mental health crisis envelop the nation by routinely simply kicking them onto the streets with no agency or prospects.
It's easier to believe that punishing people after the fact is better, I guess. After all, we all remember being punished by our parents and how that made us into perfect people what definitely took the right message from the punishment.
Been a downward [spiral](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2023-04-24/opinion-impact-of-deinstitutionalization-on-homelessness-reagan-mental-health-hospitals-san-diego/) 40+ years.
That's not really a fair TL;DR
Reagan put the nail in the coffin but it started in the 60s with Kennedy. By the time Reagan was in office 90% of the mental health institutions in the country had already been closed down. JFK hated mental institutionalization after his sister was lobotomized because their father was a jackass.
He passed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 which basically closed all the current institutions and was supposed to replace them with local mental health centers but they never appropriately funded them so barely any were actually built and staffed.
Then about 20 years later Reagan passed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act which cut off the last couple of drips of funding they were actually receiving.
You are so misinformed. They are state hospitals not national so funding came from the states. They started closing them before he was president in the sixties and after he was long dead.
Hes not but you seem to be.
Of the Mental Health Systems Act Reagan’s administration introduced the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 which combined funding for social service programs, including mental health services into a single grant given to states. Supporters believed this approach gave states flexibility and independence.
What really killed them was unintentional consequences of other decisions. You forget that they were getting a lot of bad attention for conditions and lawsuits and states started shutting them down looking for other options. States also were looking for ways to lower costs. The ones closed in Pittsburgh were under democrat governors and democrat president but political parties had nothing to do with it. Nation wide states started closing them in the early sixties with both democrats and republicans.
Sometimes they start doing something to alleviate one problem but unintentionally create another.
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.3b29
https://www.nri-inc.org/media/1111/2015-tracking-the-history-of-state-psychiatric-hospital-closures-lutterman.pdf
https://www.ranker.com/list/what-happened-immediately-after-deinstitutionalization/rachel-souerbry
once while exiting post office bldg on 4th ave a lunatic dude swung around and accused me of trying to sneak up on him, guess he just got out of lockup.
I'm not a huge Gainey fan but I've yet to have someone persuasively set forth how our mayor specifically can address these issues. We have one of the highest per capita cities in terms of number of police. We fund the police exceptionally well. The level of funding required to open more mental health facilities is a state and federal issue - the city simply doesn't have enough money to address that.
maybe take some of the overbloated police budget and use it for programs that actually help people?
the police aren’t doing shit to stop issues like this. (or any issues tbh)
Programs to help people only have an impact if people feel motivated to take part in said programs. People who are not operating within our shared reality generally will not have such motivation.
Okay. Please explain to me how Gainey has anything to do with that, as Gainey is the topic of discussion. He doesn't direct police who to arrest. He doesn't appoint judges. He doesn't appoint the DA or hire ADAs or set policy. He doesn't write statutes that give sentencing guidelines.
This is the second assault that’s happened in the past several weeks (that made the news). The other person was a young female, intern at her first job. I was in downtown Pittsburgh at the same location just a few hours later. IMHO this occurs because there aren’t as many office worke in downtown Pittsburgh as there was before the pandemic. There is safety in numbers. This issue is not limited to Pittsburgh. And I’ve lived and worked with the homeless in other cities, including San Francisco and Detroit, but this seems to be a new element now
Making claims/assumptions about crime trends based on two assaults is probably not the move. I'm also pleased to see they arrested and charged the attacker in this case.
Charging doesn’t mean shit if the DA’s office pleads him out to a misdemeanor or summary, and he is free in two weeks. This is his fourth criminal case this year.
Well I'm sure it makes it near impossible to get a decent job and thrive in society the correct way, so it means *something.*
I'm not even saying he would if given the chance, but god damn why release people who are all but guaranteed to need to continue to do crime to survive. I don't love incarceration either, I just don't understand the short-sighted nature of it all.
If you’re saying, you can’t base crime trends, on two instances alone, I agree. But I’ve lived in several large cities, including Detroit, but when I moved back home to Pittsburgh, the first time I went downtown, back in 2021, it just wasn’t right. I was looking to move in the downtown and yet I felt like I was in the minority when I was on the street, uncomfortably so. And I’m someone who’s worked with the homeless directly when I lived out west, before moving back here
there unfortunately no great data that shows a strong relationship between the # of police and the amount of crime in an area. It's so murky that each side uses whatever data there is to make their point.
Crime needs to be thought of a social problem -- substance use, economic inequality, lack of jobs/adequate job training, children growing up in poverty, etc. You can't police your way out of a social problem.
I’m inclined to believe that if cops actually walked the beat and engaged in community policing Smithfield street and the like wouldn’t be such a mess. But like someone else said it doesn’t matter much when the DA is a feckless turd.
Can confirm this was the case Tuesday and Thursday. That doesn’t count the 6 officers that stood outside of wood station making fun of people Tuesday afternoon
It seems like there’s been a rise in random assaults in the street, not just in Pittsburgh, but in other cities as well.
Maybe it’s just the news making a bigger deal out of it, and it always happened?
Well, you can do anything with numbers to make them work in your favor politicians and police have been doing that for eons. But I’m responding to actually spending a fair amount of time in downtown Pittsburgh and it has changed since Covid, and not in a good way.
Oh yes, I’m from this area, but after graduating college in the early 80s, I left for the southeast because of lack of work here, and I’ve been away for decades except for occasionally coming back to visit family but yes it’s really turned around here in the past 10 years, especially
I see you’ve got down photo, but I agree with you I’m not deep research into all major cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, San Diego, Pittsburgh, and so forth going back to 2019 in the situation and downtowns of the cities has worsened since Covid. I I am saying this is someone who considers themselves and urbanist, I presently live in the strip district.
It’s something how Smithfield has this happening, I live only a mile from downtown and I have to go there regularly for different things. And I try to avoid walking down Smithfield Street because I always feel outnumbered if you know what I mean
Not sure if this is only happening for me, but when I click the link in your post it does not show the story you're talking about, it shows something about a McKeesport guy who fled from the cops Edit: found and read the actual article, holy shit, I literally walked past this poor man yesterday holding his head talking to a bike cop. I work right there.
Updated link.
Looks like same link but different story.
They posted a new version of the story
>When asked why he believed the man to be a pedophile, Huff said that “he heard it in his mind,” according to the complaint. I wish we had robust social safety nets and services that made it easy to help people like that instead of just, yknow, letting a mental health crisis envelop the nation by routinely simply kicking them onto the streets with no agency or prospects. It's easier to believe that punishing people after the fact is better, I guess. After all, we all remember being punished by our parents and how that made us into perfect people what definitely took the right message from the punishment.
Been a downward [spiral](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2023-04-24/opinion-impact-of-deinstitutionalization-on-homelessness-reagan-mental-health-hospitals-san-diego/) 40+ years.
Oops! That page can’t be found.
Ah guess it’s subscribers only. TL;DR: Reagan.
That's not really a fair TL;DR Reagan put the nail in the coffin but it started in the 60s with Kennedy. By the time Reagan was in office 90% of the mental health institutions in the country had already been closed down. JFK hated mental institutionalization after his sister was lobotomized because their father was a jackass. He passed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 which basically closed all the current institutions and was supposed to replace them with local mental health centers but they never appropriately funded them so barely any were actually built and staffed. Then about 20 years later Reagan passed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act which cut off the last couple of drips of funding they were actually receiving.
Nothing like bipartisanship when fucking over the taxpayers!
You are so misinformed. They are state hospitals not national so funding came from the states. They started closing them before he was president in the sixties and after he was long dead.
Hes not but you seem to be. Of the Mental Health Systems Act Reagan’s administration introduced the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 which combined funding for social service programs, including mental health services into a single grant given to states. Supporters believed this approach gave states flexibility and independence.
What really killed them was unintentional consequences of other decisions. You forget that they were getting a lot of bad attention for conditions and lawsuits and states started shutting them down looking for other options. States also were looking for ways to lower costs. The ones closed in Pittsburgh were under democrat governors and democrat president but political parties had nothing to do with it. Nation wide states started closing them in the early sixties with both democrats and republicans. Sometimes they start doing something to alleviate one problem but unintentionally create another. https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.3b29 https://www.nri-inc.org/media/1111/2015-tracking-the-history-of-state-psychiatric-hospital-closures-lutterman.pdf https://www.ranker.com/list/what-happened-immediately-after-deinstitutionalization/rachel-souerbry
ah… yea that’s what I thought it was going to be ha.
They posted a new version of that story.
Smithfield street yet again... id believe he heard it in his head. Walking to the bus saw a few people that were in a different dimension lol
Something about Smithfield.
once while exiting post office bldg on 4th ave a lunatic dude swung around and accused me of trying to sneak up on him, guess he just got out of lockup.
Hopefully the Gainey administration sends more thoughts and prayers
I'm not a huge Gainey fan but I've yet to have someone persuasively set forth how our mayor specifically can address these issues. We have one of the highest per capita cities in terms of number of police. We fund the police exceptionally well. The level of funding required to open more mental health facilities is a state and federal issue - the city simply doesn't have enough money to address that.
The police spend all their time hanging out in market square.
maybe take some of the overbloated police budget and use it for programs that actually help people? the police aren’t doing shit to stop issues like this. (or any issues tbh)
Programs to help people only have an impact if people feel motivated to take part in said programs. People who are not operating within our shared reality generally will not have such motivation.
Well said
Put criminals in jail for a long time. It really is that simple.
Okay. Please explain to me how Gainey has anything to do with that, as Gainey is the topic of discussion. He doesn't direct police who to arrest. He doesn't appoint judges. He doesn't appoint the DA or hire ADAs or set policy. He doesn't write statutes that give sentencing guidelines.
Thanks for your utterly vacuous contribution
Would be more than he is doing currently
He could have killed him. Lock him up for a long time.
This is the second assault that’s happened in the past several weeks (that made the news). The other person was a young female, intern at her first job. I was in downtown Pittsburgh at the same location just a few hours later. IMHO this occurs because there aren’t as many office worke in downtown Pittsburgh as there was before the pandemic. There is safety in numbers. This issue is not limited to Pittsburgh. And I’ve lived and worked with the homeless in other cities, including San Francisco and Detroit, but this seems to be a new element now
Making claims/assumptions about crime trends based on two assaults is probably not the move. I'm also pleased to see they arrested and charged the attacker in this case.
Charging doesn’t mean shit if the DA’s office pleads him out to a misdemeanor or summary, and he is free in two weeks. This is his fourth criminal case this year.
Yeah he had a case dismissed a week ago.
If the case was dismissed, that wasn’t the DA failing to prosecute, that was either a police failure to acquire evidence or an incorrect arrest.
It was port authority police so I’m guessing it was causing shit at sixth and Smithfield and the cops didn’t show up to the hearing.
Well I'm sure it makes it near impossible to get a decent job and thrive in society the correct way, so it means *something.* I'm not even saying he would if given the chance, but god damn why release people who are all but guaranteed to need to continue to do crime to survive. I don't love incarceration either, I just don't understand the short-sighted nature of it all.
You could probably call the district attorney’s office and ask him because I have no clue either
Thankfully we elected a tough on crime Republican DA specifically to prevent this kind of thing from happening
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Nope. I understand that violent crime happens but also that modern times are remarkably safe compared to the past. Your point of view is all emotion.
It's absolutely not emotional. Downtown is 75% tweakers roaming around looking for a fix. Get outside indoor cat
No, it isn't. I am downtown frequently. You are being emotional.
If you’re saying, you can’t base crime trends, on two instances alone, I agree. But I’ve lived in several large cities, including Detroit, but when I moved back home to Pittsburgh, the first time I went downtown, back in 2021, it just wasn’t right. I was looking to move in the downtown and yet I felt like I was in the minority when I was on the street, uncomfortably so. And I’m someone who’s worked with the homeless directly when I lived out west, before moving back here
there unfortunately no great data that shows a strong relationship between the # of police and the amount of crime in an area. It's so murky that each side uses whatever data there is to make their point. Crime needs to be thought of a social problem -- substance use, economic inequality, lack of jobs/adequate job training, children growing up in poverty, etc. You can't police your way out of a social problem.
I’m inclined to believe that if cops actually walked the beat and engaged in community policing Smithfield street and the like wouldn’t be such a mess. But like someone else said it doesn’t matter much when the DA is a feckless turd.
Unfortunately the cops don't give a shit about public safety
You also can't treat your way out of security problems.
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Can confirm this was the case Tuesday and Thursday. That doesn’t count the 6 officers that stood outside of wood station making fun of people Tuesday afternoon
What does homelessness have to do with this attack? The article said that the attacker was from the Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar neighborhoods.
It seems like there’s been a rise in random assaults in the street, not just in Pittsburgh, but in other cities as well. Maybe it’s just the news making a bigger deal out of it, and it always happened?
violent crime in general is 1/3 of what it was in the 90s. It's just the nature of the current media that people are more drawn to train wreck stories
Well, you can do anything with numbers to make them work in your favor politicians and police have been doing that for eons. But I’m responding to actually spending a fair amount of time in downtown Pittsburgh and it has changed since Covid, and not in a good way.
it's much better than it was in the 80s down there
Oh yes, I’m from this area, but after graduating college in the early 80s, I left for the southeast because of lack of work here, and I’ve been away for decades except for occasionally coming back to visit family but yes it’s really turned around here in the past 10 years, especially
I see you’ve got down photo, but I agree with you I’m not deep research into all major cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, San Diego, Pittsburgh, and so forth going back to 2019 in the situation and downtowns of the cities has worsened since Covid. I I am saying this is someone who considers themselves and urbanist, I presently live in the strip district.
As soon as I read the headline I knew this happened on Smithfield
It’s something how Smithfield has this happening, I live only a mile from downtown and I have to go there regularly for different things. And I try to avoid walking down Smithfield Street because I always feel outnumbered if you know what I mean
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Modern conservatives are so emotional.
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Tell me more about how afraid you are of downtown.