COMMENTARY:
Neal Garcia is a problem: he repeatedly gets arrested for allegedly doing bad things to other people, including physical attacks, but keeps on keeping on because he’s reportedly not sharp enough mentally to help his defense attorney, as a fair trial would require.
Now the FBI has him in jail. He didn’t rob a bank or threaten the president or anything. Federal prosecutors saw a public video by LCPD Chief Story about this, and arrested him, using a federal statute against extorting interstate businesses. A court will decide whether that law applies.
That’s troubling, when the current administration is illegally and dishonestly expanding its control over state administration of justice, while using the courts as weapons for personal vengeance.
Some are celebrating Chief Story for a creative solution to a difficult problem. Others are roasting him for it at city council and on social media. I sympathize with Chief Story. Victims of alleged wrongdoing (some by police) approach me too. It’s heartbreaking when I can’t help.
Garcia and others slip through the cracks. But don’t roast Chief Story. Roast all of us, for failing to solve a tough problem: how can we protect citizens from people who repeatedly harm others but can’t fairly be tried in court? (We’ll postpone discussing the root cause, that our post-capitalist society fails many, particularly as economic inequality turns from unfair to absurdly so.)
This problem is reaching crisis proportions in all states. New Mexico’s Legislature has responded more than in some states, but could do more.
We have an Assisted Outpatient Treatment AOT law, which allows for civil commitment for people with severe mental illnesses who refuse treatment) but standards are high and it’s underused. We have reforms that suspend criminal proceedings and incentivize treatment, and are running pilot programs. We’re moving toward a system that allows courts, at any point after an incompetency finding (on non-serious charges), to suspend prosecution and order a time-limited, court-supervised community treatment plan. Successful completion of that gets the charges dismissed. Quitting or failing lets the state re-file or move for civil commitment. (With Garcia, a judge refused to use such procedures.)
New Mexico has many of the pieces, but the coverage is fragmented. The fastest way to harmonize civil liberties and public safety is a statutory competency-diversion pathway plus time-limited civil outpatient restoration authority, statewide AOT roll-out tied to housing, funding, mandatory mobile crisis/CIT capacity, and strong procedural safeguards (counsel, review, reporting). A pilot Competency Diversion Program has worked out well in Cruces.
“Forensic Assertive Community Treatment” (FACT) is one of the most effective steps. A specialized team works only with justice-involved mentally ill individuals, meeting with them in the community to help ensure medication gets taken, housing is stable, and crises trigger intervention. New Mexico has ACT teams helping people with serious mental illness but not criminal-justice problems. Creating FACT teams could help. FACT programs cut arrests in half.
However: while the local FBI guys are probably decent law-enforcement folks, their top bosses are not. The present U.S. Administration disrespects free speech and other rights, executes Latin Americans without trial for non-capital crimes, may lie to grand juries to con them into indicting perceived political “enemies,” and sends folks to prisons where they’ll likely be tortured. Give ‘em more years to appoint captive judges, and handing “presumed innocent” people to the feds will be wholly wrong.
But I’ll say nothing – they’ll have me in prison.
Peter Goodman's opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.