Gov. Gavin Newsom made mental health a priority since he took office five years ago. The ballot initiative voters approved this month will provide billions of dollars to fund housing and treatment facilities for mentally ill Californians.

Santa Clara County prosecutors will seek treatment, rehabilitation and accountability for repeat non-violent offenders.

Houseless people and those of us who advocate for them have been told, “wait for permanent supportive housing.” We have waited and waited.

In the recently launched SV411 Podcast, we speak with San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia about police shootings and mental illness.

District Attorney Jeff Rosen declined to file charges against a county sheriff deputy who shot and killed a 61-year-old woman described as "crazy, evil, pissed, possessed" the night of the fatal encounter.

Deadly encounters between police and citizens have increased in recent years. And while officer-involved shootings are nearly always ruled justified, mistakes are costly—both in lives and in the millions that the public pays to victims and their heirs.

A convicted serial rapist may get released in Santa Clara County, should a judge agree to a writ objecting to his relocation to Los Angeles County, where he was born and raised. SoCal native Christopher Evans Hubbart, 62, has admitted to raping 40 women in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties between 1971 and 1982, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Due to more lenient laws in the past, Hubbart likely avoided prison terms that would have kept him incarcerated for life.

People like Frederick Law Olmstead and Henry David Thoreau claimed that direct access to natural surroundings, such as parks, has psychological benefits for people. Noth based these claims more on opinion than fact, but recent studies show both men were on the right track.

A schizophrenic man bused with a one-way ticket, no cash and a few-days-supply of meds from Las Vegas to Sacramento earlier this year has filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state agencies he says abandoned him and at least 1,500 other mentally ill patients. Those patients were bused to nearly every state in the nation, many to major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose.

A number of local elected officials have recently shown signs of unstable and unacceptable behavior in public life. All of these extreme actions indicate people dealing with mental-health related issues. That does not mean they are all mentally ill. Then again, the absence of a diagnosis is not the same as being “not sick.”

At least five mentally ill patients from a Nevada psychiatric hospital took a one-way ticket to San Jose, arriving homeless and un-medicated at the Greyhound Bus Station in downtown. That’s according to a series of disturbing reports this week by the Sacramento Bee, which investigated Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital’s apparent practice of “patient dumping.” The state-run mental health hospital in Nevada reportedly bused out more than 1,500 patients to various major cities across the country during the past five years, according to records of Greyhound bus ticket purchases reviewed by the newspaper.

The Newtown tragedy is more about the resources we need as a nation to care for our fellow citizens who are mentally ill than gun control. And yet, we will not advance the cause of decreasing violent incidents until we discuss both issues openly and honestly with a subsequent call to action.

The facts are still coming in from the terrible tragedy today in Newtown, Connecticut, where more than two dozen children and adults at an elementary school were shot and killed. If now is not the time to have an honest discussion about gun control, then what should we talk about?