By CHRIS POWELL
How easily President Trump can send Connecticut’s Democratic elected officials and its social-service industry into sanctimonious indignation and hysteria just by proclaiming the obvious.
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It happened the other day when the president issued another executive order, this one striking a pose about crime and mental illness. “Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” Trump wrote. He endorsed “civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”
Trump’s “order” doesn’t require anyone to do anything about homelessness and mental illness, since the president has no such authority.
But at a press conference at the state Capitol last week leading Democrats and social-service officials shrieked that Trump was “criminalizing homelessness” and that state government has lots of policies and programs to cure homelessness and mental illness.
Contrary to the shrieking, Trump endorsed confining only those homeless or mentally ill who “pose risks to themselves or the public,” not all the homeless or mentally ill — and, of course, state government hasn’t come close to curing homelessness and mental illness.
Even a few Democrats at the press conference lamented that Governor Lamont, who had convened the event, had vetoed major housing legislation passed in the recent session of the General Assembly. But the legislation would have addressed homelessness and mental illness only indirectly by encouraging housing construction in the long term. It would not have provided more “supportive housing” and other help for the homeless and mentally ill.
Connecticut could use much more of those things but they will have to wait far behind the $100 million the Democrats have appropriated for raises for unionized state employees. There’s always plenty of money for that.
Connecticut also could use a few government mental institutions for the civil commitments Trump advocates. Until Trump made it politically incorrect for Democrats to acknowledge the obvious, decent people were still wondering aloud if Connecticut had been mistaken in closing its public mental hospitals decades ago and de-institutionalizing their residents without making better arrangements for them.
Until Trump issued his executive order, decent people in Connecticut also were acknowledging that homelessness has been increasing lately, a function of inflation, municipal zoning’s obstruction of simple housing, and the long decline of public education under social-promotion policy that has left the less-parented without work skills.
People living in Hamden particularly might be wondering if Trump is right about the need for more involuntary commitments of the homeless mentally ill. That’s because a few days before the press conference at the Capitol, two enclosed bus shelters adjacent to shopping centers in Hamden had been removed by city government because they had been taken over by homeless people who were obstructing and scaring people waiting for buses.
Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett — a liberal Democrat, not a MAGA Republican — explained that social workers had made daily visits to the “unhoused individuals” at the bus shelters and offered them health care and housing but were repeatedly refused. So the town will replace the enclosed bus shelters with shelters that have roofs but no walls to shield passengers from the cold wind, in the hope that the “unhoused individuals” will move along to frighten people elsewhere.
This brilliant policy is just like Connecticut’s brilliant policy on troublesome bears — shoo them out of your yard and into your neighbor’s yard. Problem solved!
Even as the shrieking at the press conference at the Capitol got underway, police in Waterbury announced an arrest in the fatal shooting last month of 17-year-old Carizma Fox as she sought to break up a fight on Willow Street in the city. The suspect is a homeless and unemployed man with a long criminal record involving drugs and assault.
Will anyone in Waterbury be politically incorrect enough to wonder aloud whether the girl might still be alive if Connecticut had more involuntary commitments?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 
“So the town will replace the enclosed bus shelters with shelters that have roofs but no walls to shield passengers from the cold wind, in the hope that the ‘unhoused individuals’ will move along to frighten people elsewhere.”
Sounds like another form of social promotion. Instead of shooing them along to the next grade level, transportation shoes them along to parks and recreation.
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