Mentally Ill Turn to Crime in a Painful Call for Help : Health care: The courts are flooded with people who commit petty offenses in an effort to get police attention.

Every working day in Los Angeles County courtrooms, dozens of psychotic men and women await punishment for shoplifting, trespassing and other misdemeanors--crimes they are driven by their mental illnesses to commit.

Their acts often are a cry for help.

“They’ll spit at a police officer, throw a brick through a patrol car window and tell you later, ‘I did it because I wanted to come in for my medications,’ ” said Christopher Contreras, a county mental health worker assigned to the criminal courts. “These people are forced to commit crimes to come to the attention of the police and get help.”

Judges, prosecutors, public defenders and mental health officials say a record number of criminal cases involving mentally ill men and women are flooding the court system in Los Angeles County.

The only treatment these defendants usually receive is a brief stay in Central Jail, where they are given warm meals and psychotropic medications for a few days or weeks. Many commit new crimes after completing their sentences.

In the process, the courts have become a revolving door in the journey from the streets to the jail and back again.

“There are mentally ill people who come into my courtroom over and over again,” said Santa Monica Municipal Judge David B. Finkel. “We are like a pit stop along the way.”

On some days, the county’s municipal and arraignment courts are a theater of the absurd and pathetic.

In his first months on the bench, newly appointed Hollywood Municipal Judge Stephen A. Marcus has seen one mentally ill defendant throw up on a bailiff and seen another slump in his chair in a catatonic state, oblivious to the proceedings around him.

One man suffering from delusions was taken before Marcus after making more than 100 emergency 911 phone calls. “He swore to me that he was going to die and that inside his chest his heart was exploding,” Marcus said.

Yet another defendant, a homeless man, was arrested after failing to pay his check at the swank L’Ermitage restaurant on the Westside. After a few days in jail, the man returned to the equally ritzy Ma Maison and repeated his crime, explaining to the judge that he was hungry and it was the closest place to eat. Marcus said the defendant had no idea he had committed a crime.

“These people come in nominally on criminal charges, but that’s not the problem,” said Marcus, who is also a member of a State Bar committee formed to study the flood of mentally ill criminal defendants into the courts. “I question whether (the courts) are the best institution to deal with the mentally ill.”

The decline of public mental health services is detailed in countless court records and police reports. Even prosecuting attorneys agree that many of the cases never should have entered the criminal justice system.

Michael A. Love, 29, described in court records as homeless and psychotic, has been charged with five misdemeanors in the last two years, spending at least 110 days in jail for crimes including disturbing the peace and trespassing.

Love was most recently arrested after harassing the staff of a Santa Monica senior center.

On the morning of June 27, Love drifted into the offices of the Senior Health and Counseling Center. A large, physically intimidating man, he yelled at the center’s workers, waving his arms and demanding food, according to a police report.

The workers tried in vain to explain to Love that the center only serves senior citizens. Confused and disoriented, Love would not leave.

At 11:50 a.m., police arrived. The center staff didn’t want to press charges against Love--one would say later that Love wasn’t acting violently, he was just being loud and strange.

The officers drove Love to an outpatient mental clinic, where counselors checked records and found he had a long history of mental illness. They agreed that he was sick enough to be placed on a 72-hour hold for psychiatric evaluation.

While Officer William Bruce sat with Love in the lobby, the counselors began a futile, four-hour telephone search for a hospital bed. There were no psychiatric beds available anywhere in Los Angeles County. Nor would there be “any space available for him in the foreseeable future,” the police report said.

At about 3:30 p.m., Bruce released Love to the street.

Twenty minutes later, Love returned to the center, once again “ranting and raving” at the staff. This time, the center filed a criminal complaint. Bruce took Love to jail and booked him on a charge of trespassing.

“At the end, it was the only way we could find to protect him and the people around him,” said Marcia Rossman, a center official. “The police were wonderful and helpful. But the bottom line is that a judge can order him to a hospital bed only after he’s placed in jail.”

Arraigned on the trespassing charge a few days later, Love added yet another file to his already bulky criminal record. A Santa Monica Municipal Court judge later ordered Love to be evaluated by county mental health workers.

“This incident could have been dealt with in a clinical setting if the mental health system worked,” Santa Monica City Atty. Robert Myers said of Love’s arrest. “He doesn’t belong in jail. He needs mental health assistance.”

It is not uncommon for police officers to be frustrated in their attempts to find medical care for the mentally ill men people they encounter.

In recent years, the county’s psychiatric emergency rooms have become impossibly overcrowded as the result of cuts in public funding. At County-USC Medical Center, the psychiatric emergency room is closed to the public almost daily because too many people are already inside.

The worst problems date to the late 1980s, when cuts in state funding forced the closure of eight county outpatient clinics.

In fact, each time one of the outpatient mental health clinics closes, police and public defenders say they notice a corresponding increase in the number of mentally ill people arrested for crimes in the surrounding community.

“People will stay in the area where they used to get help,” said Detective Walter J. De Cuir, who runs the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit. “Until the population kind of spreads out, you’ll see more (criminal) activity.”

Police officers are unwittingly thrust into the role of street-corner therapist.

The police once depended on the county’s psychiatric emergency response teams to step in and handle mentally disturbed suspects. But budget cuts have eliminated many of the teams.

Now, police officers often act without the teams’ professional guidance when they are summoned by a merchant or neighbor to confront the irrational and disturbing behavior of a psychotic man or woman.

If no psychiatric beds are available, officers might perform some “patrol-car therapy,” trying to calm the suspect on the drive to the station. Usually it doesn’t work.

“You could have a rant-and-raver, basically a nut in the back seat of your car,” said Sgt. Art Miller of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. “It’s uncomfortable to have someone yelling and screaming at you when you know that they’re not all there.”

If no crime has been committed, the suspect will be released. But police officers say it is common for a disturbed person to reappear a few minutes or hours later at the site of the original complaint.

The frustrated officers then might book the suspect for trespassing, loitering and other crimes that fall under Section 415 of the penal code--disturbing the peace.

“You arrest somebody for a crime because you know at least they’ll be put in some kind of facility were they’ll get food and shelter,” explained one LAPD captain who spoke on condition his name not be published. “You don’t invent a crime, but it’s a discretionary decision. You might not arrest everybody for it, but you know that way they’ll be safe and fed.”

Some mental health advocates are critical of police and prosecutors for being overzealous in arresting mentally ill suspects.

“Many times people are arrested not so much because they’re mentally disturbed, but because they’re disturbing,” said Ronald Schraiber of the LA Men’s Place, a Skid Row center for people with mental illnesses. “People just don’t know how to handle their behavior.”

Many mentally ill suspects are taken to the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit, a tiny room in the basement of Parker Center, the downtown police headquarters. Last year, the unit and its staff of 10 officers received a record 20,568 calls from police officers and others seeking help for people suspected of being mentally ill.

Detective De Cuir said much of the unit’s caseload involves repeaters, usually people with chronic illnesses. Of those seen by the unit last year, 65% had been referred to the unit at least once before and 31% had been seen by police 10 or more times.

In a crude measurement of the severity of their illnesses, De Cuir found that 12% of those referred to the unit did not know their own names, while 15% were unable to answer the question: Do you know where you are? And 15% were nude at the time of their arrest.

“I have no idea why 15% are unclothed,” De Cuir said.

The responsibility for guiding thousands of psychotics and schizophrenics on their journey through the criminal justice system falls on people like Clarisse Anderson, a deputy public defender in the Hollywood Municipal Court.

On most days, Anderson will make a few trips down to the court’s holding tank to see the deranged, disturbed or catatonic defendants assigned to her caseload.

“Many of these cases are a complete waste of the taxpayers’ money,” Anderson said. “Half the time the people are so out of it I have to spend an hour and a half to have them understand what they are being charged with. This is meaningless for them.”

Once in court, Anderson said, the odds are stacked against her clients.

“If we go to trial, I’m at a disadvantage because I have a client who can’t communicate with me,” she said. “And how does it appear to 12 people (in a jury) when you have someone who is dirty, who is acting inappropriately? That’s the kind of thing that loses trials.”

As a result, many of Anderson’s clients plead guilty or no contest even in cases in which the evidence against them is weak at best.

After being convicted, many of her clients almost inevitably miss their appointments with probation officers.

Others are given conditions of probation that they find difficult to meet. A person convicted of trespassing is told to stay away from the convenience store where he was arrested. But he returns repeatedly because of his obsessive illness. In the process, he earns a new trip to the county jail.

“You’re setting them up to fail,” Anderson said. “They (judges and prosecutors) will consider the defendant as a criminal, as someone who needs punishment and who can learn from his punishment. But that doesn’t work for people who are mentally ill.”

Mental health advocates say that chronically ill people will continue to enter the courts in record numbers until the community mental health system is rebuilt, and affordable care once again becomes widely available.

In Los Angeles, where funding for community mental health care is not expected to increase any time soon, county officials have established a program to divert the mentally ill convicted of misdemeanors out of jail and into treatment programs.

Alisa Dunn, director of the program, said she and her staff of seven court workers face numerous obstacles. In board-and-care homes and other facilities, space is limited.

“I want to place them somewhere, but I’ve already placed so many people that there aren’t any beds,” Dunn said. “They go back on the streets.”

Still, many are helped. County officials say these cases show that if more resources were available, hundreds of psychotics could be kept out of jail.

Lily, 47, was arrested twice earlier this year for shoplifting. Lily said she developed emotional problems after she was divorced. During one hospital stay, a doctor told her she had schizophrenia.

After losing a series of jobs, Lily became homeless. She lived in and around Santa Monica Place, an enclosed mall, where she panhandled to survive. A ubiquitous bag lady, she often ate the table scraps discarded by restaurant patrons.

One day, security guards told her she could no longer beg from mall shoppers. She turned to shoplifting earrings, selling the stolen jewelry on the streets for cash.

After two arrests at department stores and a two-week stay in the county jail, she appeared before Judge David B. Finkel. Sitting speechless in the courtroom, she did not respond to the judge’s questions. “Her mind was somewhere else,” Finkel said.

The judge sought a compassionate solution to the case. Clearly, justice would not be served by returning the frail, disturbed woman to county jail, he said.

Counselors with the mental health department’s court-diversion program found living quarters and medical treatment for Lily. Now, she pays daily visits to a Hollywood outpatient mental health center. Lily says it is the first time in years that someone has done something nice for her.

“I am hoping to get (Social Security payments) so I can be on my own again and get a job,” she said in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper.