The Need for Compassion in This World is Real

A man lost his life on the beltline trail in front of my office building on August 23, 2026.

I work at 725 Ponce in Atlanta. That building is where I go every week. The incident happened right outside, and it made the news because a man in severe mental health crisis was taken into custody after his death. I'm not here to speculate what happened. The media has covered it. What matters now is what comes next.

At the very next DeKalb County Board of Commissioners meeting, I could not believe what I was watching.

County leadership proposed Resolution 2026-0550. The title was clinical: "To Adopt an Ordinance to Amend the Code of DeKalb County to Address Public Safety, Drifting, Unauthorized Camping and Certain Public Nuisance Behaviors." What it actually said was simpler: make homelessness illegal.

This is the best we have to offer?

A man died in the heat of a mental health crisis, and the answer from leadership is to criminalize poverty. It's not a policy response. It's just avoiding the issue.

The timing is what got to me. I tuned in to the BOC meeting as I usually do and watching Commissioner Ted Terry was different because he was saying something different. He was talking about the actual resources the police department deals with when responding to homelessness and mental health calls. He was pointing out what should be obvious... you cannot arrest your way out of a mental health crisis... you cannot criminalize housing instability and expect people to suddenly have a place to live.

A housing crisis. A mental health crisis. Not a criminal justice issue.

Thousands of people living on the streets and in motels in Deklab County. That's not human. That's a policy failure that's been treated like it doesn't exist.

I've been volunteering with the Atlanta Community Food Bank and raising money through lacrosse. But this week changed how I think about where the work needs to happen. Feeding people is necessary, no doubt, but I started attending policy and committee meetings to hear firsthand what is happening in my local government. I started looking at what actual community reinvestment and housing initiatives look like on paper and why they move so slowly in practice. Watching elected officials propose criminalizing homelessness while communities desperately need housing and mental health support puts me in a headspace that is hard to describe. I guess melancholy and helplessness.

Ted Terry gets it. He's advocating for crisis intervention before law enforcement. He's pushing for actual mental health support. He's fighting for a response that matches the problem.

Some in the room didn't see it that way which was disheartening.

What I saw at that meeting was leadership fighting over photo opportunities at the podium. I watched them get called out for taking money from data center developers into their campaigns in shady back door deals. I watched them ignore public comment rules. There was a woman who had been in the backlog from the previous meeting who followed protocol and should have been able to speak since she didn't get time the last time. She was left off the agenda.

You can watch the full meeting yourself.

Terry spoke up. He fights for people to actually be heard.

I also saw Keyona Jones Moore stand up and speak about this issue clearly and with conviction.

This is what leadership should look like.

Georgia's accountability court programs, from what I am learning, are doing legitimate work. When cases reach the courts there are judges and systems trying to intervene with compassion instead of just punishment. In my opinion that is real progress, but I have a harder question:

Why should this reach a court at all?

If we arrest someone for homelessness, they sit in jail waiting for bail they can't pay. Our jails are already overcrowded. We criminalize poverty and then wonder why the system is broken. If we had actual mental health infrastructure upstream, these crises wouldn't land on the judicial system in the first place. If housing existed before the emergency room visit, before the police call, before the accountability court docket, we wouldn't be asking judges to clean up the failure.

That means the responsibility isn't just with the courts. It spreads across every branch and every level.

The executive has to budget for what people actually need, not just what's politically safe. The legislature has to pass housing policy that matches the crisis, not criminalization ordinances. The judiciary ends up managing the wreckage because the other two didn't act.

This is system failure end to end.

The sadness I felt this week was about the man who died and the events thereafter. It was about watching the people we elect choose the easiest response over the right one. Criminalization looks like action. It costs less than actually building housing. It costs less than actual mental health services. It costs less than crisis intervention teams.

So it's what gets proposed.

We know better. We know that people living on the street with untreated mental illness need housing and mental health support. We know that policing solves none of this. We know that criminalizing survival doesn't make communities safer. It makes them harder, more expensive, and more dangerous for everyone.

I support people like Ted Terry who are willing to say that out loud and fight for the actual response. And I'm starting to understand that supporting them means showing up in the harder places where policy actually gets made. I am looking forward to facilitating a relationship and sitting down with Director Darnell D. Fullum and Chief Greg Padrick to learn how their departments see this problem and understand what they need to build actual alternatives. I personally think it means understanding that investment in crisis intervention costs less than jail, and fighting for that trade.

Sadness doesn't move the needle. Action does.

I also know that one person meeting with public safety leaders, or one volunteer at a food bank, or one person paying attention, is not enough.

But it's where actual change starts.