Category: Mental illness and substance abuse
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How Childhood Traumas Are Driving Special-Needs Funding
by James A. Bacon More than 17,000 Virginia school children were categorized by the Virginia Department of Education as being disabled by autism or severe emotional issues in the 2018-19 school year. If these students get too unruly for schools to handle, they often wind up getting transferred to private special-education day schools. The cost…
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Would a Mobile Crisis Team Have Saved Marcus-David Peters?
by James A. Bacon Marcus-David Peters, fatally shot in 2018 by a Richmond police officer while in the midst of a mental health crisis, has become an icon for criminal justice reform in Virginia. Protesters occupying the area around the Lee statue on Monument Avenue erected a sign (since removed) designating Lee Circle as Marcus-David…
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Hey, What Happened to All the School Shootings?
by James A. Bacon Anyone notice how we don’t hear about school shootings anymore? Ever since the nation became fixated on the COVID-19 epidemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, school shootings have dropped out of the headlines. According to an ongoing list compiled by Wikipedia, there have been eight school shootings (four in Texas, two…
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Police and People in a Mental Health Crisis
By Dick Hall-Sizemore The Senate Judiciary Committee reported many of the Democrats’ criminal justice reform bills at its meeting last week. I will discuss the most important ones, in some depth, in installments, rather than all at once. This first installment is on the interaction between police and mentally ill folks. For many years, police…
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Do Summer Camps Warrant Bail-out Funds?
by James A. Bacon A philosophical question to ponder: If the Commonwealth of Virginia shuts down an entire industry by executive order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, what moral obligation does it have to help the businesses survive the epidemic? Literally no industry in Virginia has been more impacted by the emergency…
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A Better Alternative to Police Force
By Dick Hall-Sizemore I have been thinking a lot about a Washington Post article and accompanying police body camera footage. In that footage, a black man is pacing around and around in the middle of a street talking loudly, mostly incoherently. He is not being confrontational, but he is not cooperating, either. Several white Fairfax…
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Gunning Up Virginia’s Cops
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in Business and Economy, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Corruption and Scandals, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Defense, National Security, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Federal issues, Government Finance, Gun rights, Mental illness and substance abuse, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race RelationsBy Peter Galuszka In 2014, the Sheriff’s Department of York County and Poquoson got their very own tank-like vehicle, called a “Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP).” Fully armored and tan in color with steep sides, it looks like something out television footage of the war in Iraq where U.S. troops needed to get through mine-infested…
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Northam’s Indefensible Philosophical Premise
by James A. Bacon Virginia tax revenue fell $700 million in April compared to the same month a year ago, a 26.2% drop. That decline, of course, reflects the nose dive in the economy that generates tax revenues. In response to this news, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Governor Ralph Northam made a telling comment…
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And Now For Something Completely Different
By Peter Galuszka Dear Baconauts, As you know, people like me have been described by a B.R. commenter as those who submit “scorch and burn, mock and smear writings encased in scornful, supercilious, opinionated, and shallow rhetoric.” I freely admit this and am damned proud of it. But instead of dishing out the usual sarcastic…
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Earmarks are Back
The capital projects section of the budget bill is often overlooked by the media. That has been especially the case this year, with all the major initiatives brought forth by the Democrats. I am working on one or more submissions dealing with capital development, but, in the meantime, there is one item that deserves a…
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Speaking of Mental Health–Virginia has a Crisis
The Commonwealth is experiencing a crisis in its mental health system. The situation is the result of some positive initiatives of the General Assembly, coupled with the legislature’s reluctance to provide the funding needed to deal with the results of those initiatives. The crisis is an acute shortage of mental health treatment beds. Around the…
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Bacon Bits: Keeping the Political Class on its Toes
Cranky strikes again. John Butcher does another deep dive into Richmond Public School statistics, comparing the capital city’s school system with the schools in peer cities of Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News. Richmond spends $2,887 more per student than the state average, and it spends $1,659 more on instructional expenses. Yet somehow, the district supports…
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Contracting Out MH Transportation Not Best Choice
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a front-page article today that raises many questions. It reports that the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) has entered into a two-year, $7 million contract with a private company to transport persons, who have been temporarily detained, to hospitals or mental health facilities for evaluation of being involuntarily…