The Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc. ("AHCA, Inc") has a variety of public functions. Aside from their twice-yearly meetings and general support of such things as the "Friends of the Library" efforts and the annual "Aspen Hill Day", they also publish and circulate very helpful leaflets that have a list of "who to call" in county and state government if you have certain specific problems, and these pamphlets also cover the basics of county code as it pertains to living here in Aspen Hill, Maryland.
So far as anyone knows, AHCA, Inc does not, and has not within the last seven or eight years, operate a "welcome wagon" and "neighborhood tour". In particular, so far as I know, none of their leadership and none of the members would seek out newcomers to the neighborhood and give them a walking tour of the neighborhood and give them detailed alleged case histories on people living in group homes funded in whole or in part by the taxpayer.
One has to wonder who exactly would do such a thing. But it does happen.
It's extremely hard for most reasonable people to understand the motivations of anyone doing that, unless they are a naturally suspicious typer of person -- one who has had past dealings with sociopaths -- and questions the motivations of everyone, especially the motivations of strangers pretending to be friendly.
What could anyone gain by alerting new neighbors to the purported foibles of people who were already living in the community when the newcomers arrived?
Well, leaving raw sociopathy out of the discussion for the moment, there are people who might think that they can -- however slightly -- raise the resale values of their own nearby properties.
There might be people who honestly fear or revile people who have psychiatric disabilities.
There might be people who object -- on ideological grounds -- to taxpayer funding of decent safe and healthy living conditions for people suffering from non-physical disability.
There might be people venting grudges, or settling scores.
There might also be people trying to influence others, to bring them under their sway. It's this last group that borders on, and may easily cross into, the territory of the antisocial, of the sociopath. Indeed, sociopaths are generally extremely alert to the activities of other sociopaths; they recognize the foul stench of their own sort of game-playing. As they say, "set a thief to catch a thief". Such people have been known to cooperate quite well with each other so long as each provides a benefit to the other. See also, for example, the lootings of a variety of governments, and see also for example the basis of the present economic crisis: irresponsible people seeking ways around regulation for their own immediate short-term gains, leaving everyone else holding the bag amid the wreckage.
I have been living, mostly uninterrupted, in the same family house since 1963; I grew up here and have seen quite a lot of things. Ordinarily I like to keep my own counsel; other people have enough problems of their own without me adding myself into the stew of drama that many people seem to prefer their lives to be. That I seldom add myself to the drama is not to say that I am not observant.
I've seen a fair number of homeless people around here over the last decade or so, and I have seen many of them stop hanging out at the usual haunts of the homeless and the mendicant, and I have started to see them in particular neighborhoods. I infer that this means that after long months or years of being on a waiting list, they finally got admitted to one of the scattered-site group homes in the neighborhood. For a usually brief time, they become something of a neighborhood fixture. Then they suddenly vanish, and usually I never see them again. And after years of this, I have to wonder, "where did they go?" -and sometimes I wonder if maybe they ran afoul of some newcomer to the neighborhood, some newcomer who had been given the "walking tour" by the "welcome wagon" that definitely isn't a part of the official activities of the official government-recognized Civic Association.
Montgomery County has a variety of direct services provided by the Mental Health Association of Montgomery County ("MHAMC"). There are other funding vehicles and oversight agencies such as the Core Services Agency of the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services.
One of these services is the Assertive Community Treatment ("ACT") team:
The Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team
uses a mobile mental health treatment model to
provide comprehensive services to vulnerable adults
with severe and persistent mental illness.
Potential ACT clients have demonstrated a
limited ability to comply with recommended medication regimes
and office-based mental health treatment.
To address these difficulties, the ACT
multidisciplinary staff provides treatment,
case management, and support services to clients
to assist them in successful community living.
ACT services delivery take place in community locations,
including but not limited to the client's residence,
neighborhood, place of employment or recreation,
a shelter, jail, hospital or other location
as deemed appropriate.
This group, it would seem, may have the exact opposite mission to the people providing the walking-tour of the local group homes for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
As we noted in a recent posting, "[i]n the timeframe of 1996 or so, there had been a facility housing [addicts in recovery], located at 14111 Georgia Avenue, immediately behind 7-11 store number 11713 which fronts the street at 14101 Georgia Avenue." We believe that this facility may have been operated by a contractor which was the predecessor to the current contractors to Core Services and/or MHAMC. When the Federal goverment dropped from disability rolls (and disability checks) those persons whose disability was addiction/substance-abuse, there went a lot of funding and all profitability. We're not sure where all of those people went, but we suspect they went back to the street, or perhaps to jail or other inpatient facilities. We expect they probably caused some problems in the neighborhoods nearby; it's a certain fact that local crime rates earned Georgia Avenue -- between the Wheaton Central Business District ("Wheaton CBD") and Leisure World -- the name of "mid-County Crime Corridor" and a variety of programs were spawned to deal with this.
Increased police activity combined with various outreach efforts, all seeking to involve the community and reduce the crime rate. To what degree the crime problem was addressed by seeking out and locking up people who were clearly suffering from various psychiatric disabilities, we do not know.
We do know that some few individuals -- affiliated with each other or not is unknown -- seemed to set for themselves a task almost exactly opposite of what one would expect of any legitimate governmental agency supporting scattered-site placement of people with psychiatric disabilities. As a cynic, I have to consider that possibly some such supervisory agency decided to suppliment an understaffing by telling horror stories to the already-disgruntled neighbors of taxpayer-funded group homes, and then giving them a number to call at the slightest sign of anything or of nothing, effectively turning an entire neighborhood to snitching out every last real or imagined weirdness of "mental cases". Yet even though it's well known that about one in 25 of the population at large is a sociopath, I find it incredible -- literally almost unimaginable -- that any taxpayer funded organization with the task of assisting disabled persons would point out, and place at unsupportable risk and place under unending and intolerable observation, their clients.
Profit, as a motive, makes more sense.
If you were a landlord getting a subsidy, such as payments from Section 8, for housing people with psychiatric disabilities, the recent housing shortage and consequent run-up in property values and rents might make it a lot more lucrative to throw out the "mental folks" and illegally subdivide the house and illegally renting out rooms without licenses, permits, or inspections. Aspen Hill is indeed notorious for overcrowded housing and massive code violations, in particular by persons of foreign birth and questionable immigration status.
If you were a speculator in the housing bubble, you might even be interested in finding, or making, a way to get rid of the "mental folks" so that the landlord who had been collecting a mildly-profitable steady income under Section 8 would become more interested in collecting a massive windfall by selling the property to someone who would, as above, subdivide and sublet at far above legal crowding levels, outside of the permits and licensing process.
Follow the money, and the incentive is there. People who cannot understand why harmless disabled people would be harassed out of subsidized housing and back into homelessness would be much edified if they were to consider the historical practice of Blockbusting.
Now you have motive: profit. The opportunity is all day every day, those "mental folks" are sleeping at home every night. Now you need only the means, and we have mentioned the folks giving new residents the "walking tour" and probably all that investigators would need to do would be to talk to such people as were given the walking tour, and ask them "so what were you told, and by whom, exactly". And unless the people giving the "welcome wagon walking tour of weirdos and wackos" managed to draw the newcomers into committing crimes -- which would be typical of ideologues or sociopaths seeking partners in crime -- the newcomers might very well be willing to spill the beans. And that would tell you at least part of the means.
Means, motive, and opportunity. That's all you need for some serious crime, that and criminal intent, and/or "moral incapacity".
MORE TO COME...
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