Mayor London Breed of San Francisco advocated for mental health authorities to take conservatorship of people with consistent and long term mental health problems when she originally took office a few years ago. Probably not a legally precise description but hopefully you know what I mean. Since then, there has been no progress on this front as far as I can tell.

Obviously, forcing somebody into mental health care is full of legal issues.

Unfortunately, this is one of several central issues to the homeless.

Until we are able to interview, evaluate, and route homeless to the type of help they need, little progress will be made. And of course, some people will freak out over the aforementioned sentence. But if you've been around the homeless for anytime, you will recognize they have a diverse set of problems that need to be solves. Ranging from families for which the breadwinner lost their job, the individuals who lost their jobs. Through no fault of their own. But then there are the mentally ill with nowhere to go but stay on the streets. Or the drug addicts. Each individual needs to be evaluated and routed to the resources needed for their particular problem.

I hope this initiative is more successful than Mayor London Breed's well intentioned efforts to get at the core issue.

This is good (deep) reporting - but 'a hard read'. It took me almost a week "to get around to it".

We as a larger (county-wide) community just do not want to admit - WE are part of this problem. When California chose (public policy) to close down the last of our regional state mental health residential units (Agnews) in favor of 'local programs' WE did not follow through. We - the People. We failed.

I fully support Simidian's 'lean' toward a full blown Laura's Law implementation in Santa Clara County. Please write the Other Santa Clara County Supervisors. All it needs - is a Majority Vote of the Board of Supervisors, to change Public Policy.