They aren’t meant to solve mental illness, they’re meant to keep the non-mentally ill and everyone else safe. “Solv[ing]” mental illness, such as it can be, is not relevant to the immediate question of safety.

So then, all of the people suffering from mental illness and drug abuse should just be rounded up and arrested? That seems to be the solution a lot of people on HN are proposing. You know what the real problem is? Not caring for these people and getting the help they need. Arrest isn't going to change a thing. They'll get out of jail and go right back to it. Unfortunately a certain segment of the population would rather put money into a police force than anything else. End of the day, no one really seems to care what happens to the _people_ having trouble, just that they're not visible.

Your own statement implies mentally ill people are a danger to everyone. That's just sickening.

My statement implies that the police exist to triage safety problems. I did not say anything about rounding people up and arresting them. Your response is par for the course in how this debate goes. Someone points out that, gee gosh golly, things feel unsafe for law abiding normal people just going about their lives. They request that laws on the books are actually enforced - not more complicated than that. And you jump in and say that we're advocating for a "sickening" solution to this problem. Call me a Nazi if you want, I suppose.

The real problem is that you don't have any solutions other than "do the same thing but more louder". And, yes, mentally ill people are in fact a danger - to themselves and quite often to others. Completely bizarre that there's ostensibly smart people who don't get that.

>They'll get out of jail and go right back to it.

Many of these people should not be allowed out of jail. You are imagining that everyone in that situation is a benign hippie that is just down on their luck.

>End of the day, no one really seems to care what happens to the _people_ having trouble, just that they're not visible.

This is a totally dystopian way to frame this. People like me, who have a problem with these policies, are pointing out that the infatuation with homelessness some progressives have is making things worse.