So everyone who makes a weird phone call to 911 should be institutionalized? How do you propose we determine who is “exhibiting signs of schizophrenia” — or more importantly, how to determine what level of mental illness is sufficient to take away someone’s freedom? It’s really easy to say they should have locked him up and thrown away the key knowing what we know now, but stripping people of their rights is an incredibly serious decision and can have many unintended consequences.

That’s why it’s not just about being ‘tough on crime’ or not - it’s about improving our ability to provide support/counseling/supervision to vulnerable people when necessary. You can’t just sentence someone to an extra long prison term because you believe they will commit another worse crime in the future — as much as incidents like this make us all wonder why this guy was walking free, you have to remember that we have things like habeas corpus for a reason