Once upon a time, you could be pretty much as strange as you wanted to be in public and people generally left you alone. Police might accost you to move along, but you never had to fear for your life from the police just for being homeless, weird, or acting erratically. Sure, they might take you in and lock you up for a day or two, but inevitably they’d either release you back to the streets, or to a psychiatric facility for an evaluation.
You worried about where your next meal was going to come from. You worried about what you’d do at night when the freezing temperatures set in. You worried whether you’d have enough will to survive yet another day.
The one thing you generally did not worry about was being shot by the police because of your odd behavior.
The times, they have changed. Now, more than half of police shootings, according to one recent investigation, involve people who are mentally ill.
Worse yet — no one seems to care.