Bee Opinionated: Scrutinizing the amount of care in Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court proposal
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Hello, friends. It’s Robin Epley once more, with The Bee Editorial Board.
With the end of California’s legislative session on the horizon, one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s most controversial proposals, CARE Court, appears to be an almost sure thing. It’s faced minimal resistance from legislators but fierce opposition from mental health experts, homeless advocates and human, civil and disability rights groups.
The Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Court is intended to help people with severe mental illnesses, including unhoused residents who need treatment but don’t qualify. Ultimately, it’s a way to involuntarily treat some of the state’s most mentally ill patients, who cannot help themselves. Newsom and many legislators see it as a way to help people that the psychiatric system has left behind.
The Editorial Board wanted to weigh in before the final Assembly vote, and it was a heated debate. The argument we were having — which I believe is echoed in many homes across the state — was both if it goes far enough, and if it goes too far.
There’s a distinct lack of funding for housing, which is the most desperate need. It also means involving the criminal justice system in cases that may be better off without that particular approach. And ultimately, the 12,000 people Newsom claims the program would assist is a drop in the bucket compared to the 161,000 estimated unhoused people currently living in California.
But, as we wound up writing in our editorial, we felt it deserves support “as do efforts to make it better, and as do all efforts to help unhoused people suffering on California’s streets.”
Take Two
A few members of the board had serious reservations, but ultimately we couldn’t turn away from a potential solution just because it’s not perfect. So many families need this policy right now, as Columnist Melinda Henneberger has documented in recent weeks. California needs it to be successful.
After our board discussions, Henneberger authored a separate column, taking a more hopeful approach to CARE Court:
“Right now, those who require this kind of intervention are dying on our streets as we watch, somehow convinced that it’s more righteous to protect their civil rights than to even try to save their lives. Doing nothing also costs us nothing and that’s nice, too.”
Opinion of the Week
“It feels like it’s personal and private because you’re alone, but that’s not how data works.” — Electronic Frontier Foundation Director of Federal Affairs, India McKinney, speaking to me about Facebook’s decision to hand over data to investigators, who used private messages between a Nebraska mother and her teen daughter to prosecute the women for seeking an abortion.
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Stay cool out there,
Robin Epley
