When Gavin Newsom launched CARE Court with great fanfare, he promised help for people with severe mental illness who go back and forth between homelessness, jail, and emergency rooms. The California Governor boasted that CARE Court would be a ‘completely new paradigm’ that would compassionately force people’s mentally ill loved ones off the streets and into treatment via a judge’s order – and estimated that up to 12,000 people could be helped.
A State Assembly analysis said up to 50,000 people might be eligible. However after spending $236 million in taxpayer dollars on CARE Court since the March 2022 announcement, the Daily Mail can reveal that the program has flopped, with some critics even saying it’s fraud. Only 22 people have been court-ordered into treatment so far.Out of roughly 3000 petitions filed by October statewide, 706 were approved but of those, 684 were voluntary agreements that were never the intended point of the program.
