> "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.

And there are definitely insane people who are a threat to themselves and others who wander around, making the streets and public transit systems unsafe and unpleasant, who need to be put into something like a psychiatric hold by something like the police.

And if you don't have police and a criminal justice system that are willing and able to impose psychiatric holds, you wind up with a bunch of incidents where a crazy mentally-ill vagrant kills someone in a public (the Iryna Zarutska murder, or any of the various cases where a homeless person randomly shoves someone into the path of an oncoming train at a public transit station); or incidents where someone else gets railroaded by the criminal justice system for intervening in a crazy mentally-ill person threatening people around them (the Daniel Penny incident - many people, even nominal anti-carceralists, are upset that he was not successfully convicted and incarcerated for murder). Not to mention all the less-newsworthy incidents where insane people walking the streets and public transit systems systematically ruin them for everyone else, either through vandalism or theft or simply screaming incoherently at people as they try to use the public commons.

It's certainly possible for the police to abuse psychiatric holds if they don't like you; on the other hand, the existence of large numbers of people who should be in some kind of psychiatric hold but aren't disrupting and vandalizing the public commons is one of the biggest quality of life and physical safety problems in my region and in many other American urban areas.