“It’s not reform. It’s removal with a clipboard.”
There is precedent. In 1987, Joyce Brown—known as Billie Boggs—was forcibly hospitalized under New York’s Project HELP. She won in court. A judge ruled she wasn’t a danger. Her case showed how psychiatric authority can be used to erase social discomfort.
In 2011, Kelly Thomas, a homeless man with schizophrenia, was beaten into a coma by six Fullerton police officers. His last words—“I’m sorry,” “Dad, help me”—were recorded. He died five days later. The officers were acquitted.
These aren’t exceptions. They’re signals.
The order discourages harm-reduction entirely. It encourages shelters to separate by sex—code for excluding transgender people—and reward those deemed “compliant.” LGBTQ+ individuals, long subject to psychiatric pathologization, face disproportionate risk in the very institutions meant to protect them.
Compassion, when weaponized, becomes camouflage for control.
Some officials speak frankly: they’re overwhelmed. Emergency rooms clogged with behavioral health crises. Police pressured to clear sidewalks. News cameras fixated on tents. The political cost of visible inaction is higher than the moral cost of questionable action.
But urgency without infrastructure becomes force.
And history has seen it before.
In 1963, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act to replace institutions with neighborhood clinics. The asylums emptied. The funding never came. Reagan-era cuts severed what fragile systems remained. The idea of care wasn’t wrong. The execution was absent.
“Public order doesn’t begin with removal. It begins with presence.”
There are better models. Salt Lake City’s housing-first approach reduced chronic homelessness by 91% over a decade. In Vermont, mobile crisis teams now respond to mental health calls instead of police. These strategies work—but they require patience, dollars, and sustained leadership. None are offered in the current order.
Back on Western Avenue, someone locked the gate behind Derek’s plywood shrine. The candles are gone. The chessboard is still there. Two bishops and a pawn remain—an unfinished game no one’s coming back to finish.
He was barefoot when they took him.
We still don’t know where he is.