Madness on the streets - the need to keep mentally disturbed drug addicts off city streets - Editorial

National Review, March 1, 1993

AS IF THEY don't have enough to put up with, city dwellers face a new plague: the assaults of madmen on drugs. For years, the Upper West Side of Manhattan has been terrorized by Larry Hogne, a demented bum addicted to crack. On drug-induced rampages, he has thrown cinder blocks through church windows, and hurled a 16-year-old girl in front of a truck (the truck swerved). He has been arrested nine times and sent to numerous mental institutions, from which he is quickly released; the judge who sprung him most recently explained that he only suffered from an "attitude problem." Last month, Christopher Battiste, another crazed druggie with an attitude problem, beat an 80-yearold retired hotel maid to death with a pipe outside her Bronx church.

The official explanations of the violent careers of Mr. Hogue and Mr. Battiste is that they are Jekylland-Hyde figures, whom the system is ill equipped to handle. The drugs wear off after their arrests; since they suffer from no delusions, they cannot be held; so they are returned to the streets.

Doctors and caseworkers who actually deal with such men tell a different story. An article by Heather Mac Donald in a recent issue of City Journal, an urban-affairs quarterly, explodes the official line. "Hogne is always discharged because he's a pain in the neck .... No one is using the available legal authority [to hold him] because no one wants Hogue on his ward..." Hogue, Battiste, and others like them landed on the streets in the first place because of the vogue for deinstitutionalizing mental patients, which swept state health bureaucracies in the Seventies. Outpatient care was expected to be less expensive than mental hospitals; cost-cutters were abetted by civil libertarians who argued that madness was in the eye of the beholder.

Madness is now in the neighborhoods of the taxpayers. If it takes a new attitude and more spending-to get the Hogues and the Battistes of the world off the streets, so be it.