This story was produced as part of a larger project led by Monica Vaughan, a participant in the 2019 California Fellowship....
People’s bags seized during encampment sweeps have been thrown out or gone missing, resulting in the permanent loss of medication, family heirlooms, and shelter.
"My neighborhood has too many candlelight vigils for victims of police brutality or from neglect or incompetence from law enforcement who were not around enough to prevent the situations in the first place."
What are the mental health effects of deadly encounters with police? Reporting out that difficult question led to a number of tough lessons along the way, as KVPR's Jeffrey Hess explains.
California’s jails were built to hold inmates for relatively short sentences — usually just a few months. But now local law enforcement is grappling with how to hold offenders for long periods of time, which is having an impact on mentally ill inmates.
Community groups in Merced County, where ongoing violence has taken a heavy toll, are pursuing a hands-on approach to building safer and healthier neighborhoods. Some host community workshops and resource fairs; others walk the streets late at night in a call for peace.
An estimated 400,000 people end up in one of the 250 detention centers across the United States annually -- the majority being Hispanic.
Hospitals around the country have been increasingly using homeless navigators to help place indigent men and women into treatments centers or housing after discharge, including this first-of-its-kind, two-year-old pilot program from Kaiser Permanente.
The public space in parts of Los Angeles can be violent and uncertain, particularly for young men of color. Time once spent sitting on the porch socializing is now spent inside, isolated, staring at the door. As a retaliatory attack can come at any time, everyone has to be on guard.
In 2003, Texas decided only to treat three mental health diagnoses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Everyone else—and everyone who suffered from these but was misdiagnosed or undiagnosed—became ineligible for community-based health services.
