Ibarra added he thought the man was homeless when he walked past him with the leg. He’s unsure where the man came from, but he said police showed up and stopped the man after people from the station called dispatch.

https://kyma.com/news/california-news/2024/03/24/california-man-steals-and-eats-detached-leg-arrested-soon-after/

At this moment, investigators haven’t said who the leg belongs to, or who was hurt in the train crash, but sources said one person is dead.

https://www.tmz.com/2024/03/25/california-man-arrested-carrying-biting-eating-severed-human-leg/

Tellez was eventually intercepted by Sheriff’s deputies … and he was reportedly arrested without incident. He was booked on several charges – including outstanding warrants, possession of drug paraphernalia and for removal of human remains from a location other than a cemetery. If you’re curious … that’s considered a misdemeanor in California.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/05/truth-about-deinstitutionalization/618986/

Police departments around the country have adopted training programs to teach officers how to respond to people in psychiatric distress. The most common model, the Crisis Intervention Team program, is being used in more than 2,500 communities nationwide—though there’s little empirical evidence of its success, and it’s unclear whether a few hours of instruction can overcome entrenched use-of-force practices. And some jurisdictions have gone a step further, dispatching mental-health workers to respond to 911 calls. In St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, social workers accompany specially trained police officers on mental-health-related calls, assessing needs and directing people to resources like counseling or shelters. In Eugene, Oregon, unarmed outreach workers and medics respond to many mental-health emergencies instead of officers. And programs that offer alternatives to incarceration have been growing, too. In the more than 300 mental-health courts across the country, people who agree to certain conditions—usually treatment, including medication and regular check-ins with a judge—can avoid jail and prison time.

But America has gone without a real system of mental-health care for so long that mental illness is often seen as a permanent feature of the criminal-justice system. In many prisons and jails, the urgent question is not how to reduce this surging population but how to build larger and better psychiatric units and treatment facilities inside the walls. Rikers Island, for example, now has specialized therapeutic units for people who might need hospitalization or who have just returned from a psychiatric hospital. While people with mental illness who do end up in the criminal-justice system have a constitutional right to adequate mental-health care, it would be far better to disentangle psychiatric care from the criminal-justice system in the first place.

It’s easy to think that if people with mental illness could be housed and treated in asylums or similar institutions, they wouldn’t be policed and incarcerated at such high rates. But it’s important to remember that those hospitals had deteriorated to conditions shockingly similar to today’s worst correctional facilities. Instead, we need to face head-on the enormous problems of mass incarceration and a system of mental-health care that effectively does not exist. No nostalgic looking back will change that.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/07/california-tragically-mental-illness-treatment/

By 1994 nearly half a million former patients had been sent back to live with their families, who were often unable to care for them. A quarter million newly discharged patients ended up on the streets or behind bars.

“Deinstitutionalization,” as the movement to close these hospitals is known, began as a cost-saving measure. In 1965 the federal government abruptly withdrew its financial support for the state hospitals, as well as the small community hospitals providing psychiatric care.

But today that trend has been reversed. Once again, Americans with serious mental illness are being warehoused out of sight in our prisons. And many more are living unsheltered on our streets. A third of our homeless population today suffer from untreated severe mental illness, most commonly schizophrenia.

These two interventions would do more than anything else to help our mentally ill homeless citizens. It is not a simple lack of housing that leaves so many homeless. Like Robbie, our patient who ate out of garbage cans, they are unable to use available housing due to their mental illness.