After yet another murder committed by a mentally ill person with a history of police contact, it has become undeniable that our country has an issue with letting mentally damaged people roam the streets until they violently snap.
Police said Erin Piancetti, a new mother, was recently murdered in New York City, apparently stabbed to death by Pamela Cisneros. Another man was also stabbed by Cisneros and hospitalized with serious injuries, police said. Cisneros was then shot and killed by police, an obviously justified police shooting, after police said she charged at them while armed with two large knives and ranted about how she would kill them.
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According to the New York Post, Cisneros has a documented history of mental illness, with her brother believing she was bipolar and explaining that she was receiving monthly injections for something. She tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train in March 2019. A “belligerent, intoxicated and screaming Cisneros” drew a police response in December 2018, while the New York Post‘s “sources also said Cisneros had criminal run-ins with police in Arizona, California and Florida.” She also has a history of rambling social media posts.
This case is not as clear-cut as the typical one, where the mentally ill murderer has a criminal history that is ignored by the criminal justice system until he or she finally snaps, but it does raise several questions.
Did Cisneros truly have “criminal run-ins with police in Arizona, California and Florida?” If so, what did those run-ins entail, and why did nothing come of them, or her encounter with NYPD in 2018? And, most importantly, if Cisneros tried to kill herself in 2019 and needed regular medical treatments to keep her sanity, what supervision did she have from her family, medical professionals, or anyone else?
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If the answer is anything other than “extensive supervision,” it is part of a problem that we have had decades to rectify. The widespread closures of long-term mental health facilities going back to the 1950s and 1960s have left far too many mentally ill people on the streets. Someone like Cisneros appears to have shown every sign that she is incapable of taking care of herself long-term. And yet, she was evidently left to fend for herself. As a result, Piancetti is dead, and so is Cisneros.
Our approach to crime must be entirely reshaped, and that includes a focus on ensuring that mentally ill people incapable of caring for themselves get the treatment they need and aren’t loosed on the public like ticking time bombs. The focus on depopulating mental institutions is cut from the same cloth as the criminal justice reform movement’s focus on depopulating prisons, with neither evaluating cases on the merits, and both making walking outside in a large city increasingly unsafe.