The Bazelon Center has taken a strong position against IOC for a lot of reasons. In New York, where Kendra's Law was sold based on the notion that there are 10,000 New Yorkers who need to be forced into outpatient treatment, we now only have a handful of people committed under Kendra's Law. Kendra's Law has polluted the system by introducing the very coercion that characterized the psychiatric institutions of the past into the community, where it was not supposed to be part of the picture. Michael Allen has been spearheading the effort at Bazelon to build consensus among consumers and various organizations in Washington about IOC and the way media deal with reports of violence, which they attribute to untreated mental illness. There are people in this room involved in a discussion group that talks about the impact of IOC and how they too are concerned about violence.
Nobody wants people, with or without mental illness, to be walking the streets and harming others.
Our work is not about having killers on the loose, it's about being able to accord people the rights and privileges they ought to have. We're finding that many organizations look at the statements and say, We can buy into that. We're doing this so that, as the push for coercion and IOC laws continues, we're able to rely on a broad array of allies in Washington and locally to combat it. Some laws are like a Catch-22, where it's unclear what you're supposed to do to reverse that order, if you're admitted as an inpatient because you're a danger to self or others. We fought valiantly, but we're not happy with the outcome.