This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

Dion Joseph is a law enforcement consultant, author and active senior lead officer

in the downtown Los Angeles Skid Row community.

He's here to share another story with us.

Here's Deion.

The one thing that I was never able to really get a handle on.

We were able to reduce crime 40%, reduced death, 33%. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful achievements

that we all engaged in. But the one thing we couldn't fix was mental illness.

Mental illness will forever be the challenge of our lifetime, in my opinion.

As a matter of fact, I think it's about the third or maybe a half of the homeless problem.

If you're thinking about it realistically, we all know that in America, our solution to, quote, unquote, helping the mentally ill was to close down the

asylums and then they sued so nothing like it even a better version of it could ever come

back so now you kick people out into the streets in the name of civil liberties yeah you're free

you sprinkle pills on them and tell them bye okay come check on me every two weeks. Come check in every two weeks. Never happened.

Some of these individuals fell into the loving arms of family members, loved ones, you know,

who tried to help them. Others, too many of the others, ended up in places like Skid Row.

And when they came to Skid Row, they were throw away their prescribed medication because it made

them feel down. It made them feel lethargic. And in Skid Row, you've got to be ready for everything.

So they threw that away or sell it to make enough money to buy the hard stuff, the crack, the

...