TV REVIEW : HOMELESS PLIGHT: SOCIAL SERVICES IN DISARRAY

Programs about the plight of the homeless have become commonplace over the past year, but KCET Channel 28 takes a different approach to the subject in an hourlong documentary tonight, examining instead how they’re taxing the social service system.

In particular, “Crimes of Neglect,” airing at 9 p.m., looks at the demands these people have put on local law enforcement officials, to whom it has fallen primarily to deal with the teen-age runaways, the mentally ill and the alcoholics living on the streets.

Not all of the homeless fall into these categories, of course, but writer-producer Peter Graumann focuses on them because there was a time when many of them would have been off the streets in institutions of one sort or another. Laws were changed to give them more individual rights, but as Assemblyman Bruce Bronzan (D-Fresno) notes, the state “didn’t follow that policy with any resources to the cities or counties--where these people went--to care for them.”

The result, as documented in this “KCET Journal” production, is a social service system in disarray. Police arrest drunks, only to have them reappear on the streets the next day, with no prospect for prosecution. Young runaways are placed in foster homes that they are free to leave on a whim. A mental health worker has difficulty finding hospitals to take the troubled individuals she regularly encounters.

“We very much operate this county mental health system on the ‘least crazy’ basis,” says another official, “so that you’re not released necessarily because you’re well and able to be in the community; you’re released because the guy on the other end is crazier than you are and he needs the bed.”

If the program occasionally seems disjointed, as Graumann intercuts the working routines of several policemen, it nevertheless manages to suggest the system it is covering. What is perhaps most disturbing about “Crimes of Neglect” is that while there are people trying to help, they are doing so without adequate resources or, even worse, a uniform policy of how to apply them.

Indeed, the solutions offered on the program are contradictory and incomplete, suggesting that the problem is going to be with us for a long time.

Maybe that’s why KCET is following up the documentary at 10 p.m. with another program, “The Search for Solutions,” an in-studio discussion of the issues raised in the preceding broadcast and what might be done to deal with them.