A bill aimed that attempts to improve the state’s process for evaluating criminal suspects for mental health problems passed the state House of Representatives on Wednesday. It heads next to the state Senate.
The legislature is seeking to shift some mental evaluations out of emergency departments and expand the number of people who can conduct them — steps to boost a broader goal of having more criminal suspects be processed for potential involuntary commitment in mental hospitals. However, hospital and law enforcement officials have sparred over who should be in charge of handling the new processes.
“This is just the beginning,” said Rep. Carla Cunningham, an unaffiliated Charlotte lawmaker. “There’s a significant amount of work that is so complex, it would have to take years to address all of the issues. So this is just a start.”
The House began debating the changes last year, after the stabbing death of a woman on Charlotte’s commuter train made national news. DeCarlos Brown, the man charged in Iryna Zarutska’s death in that case, was recently deemed mentally incapable of proceeding to trial following a psychological evaluation.
“Recent tragedies like the preventable murder of Iryna Zarutska have exposed serious failures in our mental health and public safety systems that put all North Carolinians at risk,” House Speaker Destin Hall wrote in a statement after the bill passed. “… These changes will make our state safer by keeping dangerous criminals with mental illnesses off the streets and getting them the care they need before they can harm others.”
But the bill the House passed Wednesday doesn’t propose many specific changes to state law, eliciting frustration from one Democratic lawmaker who urged her colleagues to address the issue more urgently. In the end House Bill 1104 passed in a 100-10 vote.
Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, was part of the committee that put together the bill’s recommendations. During debate Wednesday she pointed to the presentations that committee members received from nurses, doctors, hospital leaders and state officials. She questioned why the final product of all of that was a bill that mostly just requests state agencies or other groups to give the legislature more reports in the future.
“I don’t think this is doing enough of what we should be doing to improve our [involuntary commitments] and, therefore, public safety,” Morey said. “This bill does almost nothing, except continue studies.”
Morey pointed to a provision of the bill that requires the Department of Health and Human Services — which runs the state’s mental hospitals — to study why it has staffing shortages. Morey said she can answer that question right now without wasting months on a study.
“We know why they have staffing shortages,” she said. “We’re not paying them. The majority of public comments of people working in the system said, ‘I’d make more in the private sector, or at Target, than I am working for DHHS.’”
State employees didn’t receive any across-the-board raises this year, due to the lack of a new state budget. Republican legislative leaders have proposed giving many state workers a 3% raise — lower than the current 3.8% rate of inflation — for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.
She and other Democrats have proposed their own plans to ramp up mental health services and public safety efforts, with a price tag reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Republicans have not allowed any of those bills a hearing. On Wednesday Morey questioned why the legislature wasn’t willing to commit more money and attention to the goal of dealing with mental health and public safety issues.
“A lot of this requires funding, and a lot of this requires immediate attention,” she said.
GOP leaders put one of the few doctors in the legislature, Rep. Tim Reeder, R-Pitt, in charge of the effort to boost involuntary commitments that led to this bill. As it was moving through committee on Tuesday, Reeder acknowledged it wouldn’t accomplish everything that advocates want to see. But he noted doing so would have been an impossible task.
“This bill is not the fix of the entirety of the mental health system,” Reeder said, but he defended the bill as “improving the system to make sure that our citizens are safe.”