Through the center of Albuquerque runs Route 66, and many businesses celebrate the historic road with neon signs and nostalgic menus.
66 Diner, owned by Summer Willis, is particularly proud of its handmade shakes made with scooped ice cream, never soft serve.
"It's dirty. It's messy. You get covered in ice cream when you're doing it, but they taste better," Willis said.
But this main drag, generally known just as Central, is not an easy place to run a business.
"We're shooing away people pretty consistently, whether it's from the back door, the side door, walking around the parking lot," said Willis.
Unhoused people make fires, break windows, use the parking lot as a toilet. One assaulted a staff member.
Willis sees the same faces over and over, and thinks most of them aren't well.
"I don't know that I've ever really spoken to somebody that I'm like, ‘oh, you're in your right mind completely,’" she said.
Homelessness has increased in Albuquerque, according to an annual Point in Time Count, and Mayor Tim Keller said last year that as many as 5,000 people are now on the streets. About 44% of those people suffer a severe mental illness, according to the NM Coalition to End Homelessness.
And when people cause criminal damage, or steal or assault someone, business owners like Willis are frustrated at the limits of what law enforcement and the courts can do.
When people with mental illness do end up in court, many of those cases are dismissed because a defendant who is evaluated and found mentally incompetent to stand trial cannot legally be tried.
These incompetency dismissals add up to hundreds every year in Bernalillo County alone. The Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court said 432 low level criminal cases were dismissed for reason of incompetency in 2024.
And in more serious cases, Karl Swanson, deputy district attorney in the Second Judicial District, told a legislative meeting last summer that every year in Bernalillo County, "we have about 8,000 to 10,000 felony cases coming into our office, and about 5% of them end up being competency cases. So you're talking about 500 to 600 cases."
Restoring competency
New Mexico is joining a growing number of states, many of them also dominated by the Democratic Party, in expanding the circumstances in which a person with severe mental illness can be involuntarily committed to a locked psychiatric facility.
The legislature passed a package of public safety bills last month, with support that was bipartisan if not unanimous, including a law that changes the way courts deal with people evaluated as incompetent to stand trial.
One aspect of that is competency restoration, an education program designed not as treatment but to bring defendants to a point where they understand the court process and can stand trial.
As things stand, annually, about 120 people a year are sent to a secure psychiatric facility to have competency restored after being deemed dangerous. That happens when the court decides they present a threat of inflicting great bodily harm or committing sex offenses, including against children.
The new law expands the criteria for dangerousness, and by extension involuntary commitment, by lengthening that list of crimes to include child abuse, human trafficking, committing a felony involving a firearm, and arson.
The law also allows people found incompetent to stand trial but not found dangerous to be ordered into outpatient competency restoration.
If these defendants' competency is successfully restored, they then stand trial.
There is also a track whereby people found incompetent can receive actual treatment for their mental health problems, with prosecutors now empowered to seek a court order for involuntary outpatient treatment.
State Supreme Court Justice Briana Zamora said the changes are much-needed. She was a trial court judge for 10 years, and saw many defendants who were declared incompetent.
"I got there frustrated with that process, and I left the trial courts frustrated with that process," she said.
She had to dismiss nearly all such competency cases and thinks it was bad for defendants as well as plaintiffs.
"One of the things I saw in the trial court was families begging me to help their child," she said.
Much of the state's behavioral health system was shut down more than a decade ago after allegations of fraud by then-Gov. Susanna Martinez that were never proven. Treatment is hard to come by, even for families with resources.
"Sure enough, I'd see them a few weeks later, their family, and eventually you see them a few months later or a few years later, and they no longer have the family support," Zamora said.
For years, people like Zamora have called for change. Among those pushing more hardline policies was Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who attributed New Mexico's high rates of violent crime in part to untreated mental illness. She wanted to be able to try and jail more people.
Zamora was part of the process of writing the new law and particularly supported the outpatient elements.
"My goal for the judiciary is, what can we do out in the community for these individuals?" she said.
But the fact remains: more people with mental illness are likely to be detained, involuntarily, before being convicted of anything.
Civil rights advocates have raised concerns about the return of institutionalizing people. Legislative analysis of the bill points out that capacity is already limited in the state's main inpatient psychiatric facility.
For families of defendants, though, the matter is far from clear cut.
Begging for help
On a recent, gloomy morning at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court, a judge heard felony cases where competency was in question. The defendants, in orange, looked confused or twitchy. Their families in the hallway outside spilled stories of years trying to help spiralling loved ones.
One was Odilia, whose grandson Nicholas is charged with breaking and entering. Later she talked with KUNM about his childhood, quieter than his rambunctious siblings, going to Catholic school, studying to become a hairdresser and stylist.
KUNM is just using their first names, for privacy.
Nicholas was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 18.
"He started removing all the electrical outlets in the house, everything, everything electrical, flushing the light bulbs down the toilet," said Odilia.
He was also using drugs. Family members took him in, but after destructive, psychotic episodes, he ended up on the streets.
"He was shoplifting," said Odilia. "He was looking for places to stay warm, he was trespassing into people's businesses, warming up."
He also broke into people's homes. Odilia got him into treatment, took him to his appointments, but he just got worse, stopped taking his medications. He's been arrested many times, found incompetent, let go. He is nearly 30 now.
"I don't want him to die in the streets," she said.
She is petitioning the court to commit him to a psychiatric institution, and says there's nothing inhumane about that.
"Life on the streets is inhumane and unfair, life on the streets as a severely mentally ill person," she said.
The court could, however, order Nicholas or someone like him to undergo competency restoration and stand trial. And that process has its critics.
Healing to punish
"These competency restoration services, it's really stupid," said Alex Barnard, a sociology professor at New York University. "We're healing people just enough so we can punish them."
Barnard is working on a paper about a nationwide trend of states passing laws around involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill.
"The most prominent examples are all blue states," he said. "It's Oregon, it's Washington, it's California, it's New York."
In Oregon, the legislature is considering whether to expand the circumstances for civil, or non-criminal, involuntary commitment. Washington state allows people to be committed if they are a danger to themselves or others. It also made it easier to commit people with substance use disorder, and officials have discussed going further.
New York's Democratic mayor Eric Adams directed emergency workers and police to transport people to hospitals if they appeared mentally ill and behaving in a way that could harm themselves or others. The state's Democratic governor Kathy Hochul recently proposed strengthening involuntary commitment laws, and in 2022, California's Democratic governor Gavin Newsom signed a law making inpatient treatment compulsory for some homeless people.
But one thing no state can do is legislate good behavioral health care into existence. And Barnard thinks that is key.
"My research has me pretty convinced that the laws on the books don't matter that much, and what matters is the resources that are available," he said.
New Mexico is severely lacking in resources. The sponsors of the new law, Rep. Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos) and Rep. Marianna Anaya (D-Albuquerque), freely admit it calls for services that don't yet exist, such as outpatient competency restoration, though they hope they will after a new behavioral health trust fund is set up.
Meantime, there is a pilot program that gives a glimpse of what treatment could look like.
"It's designed to off-ramp people from having to go into the whole competency evaluation," said Christian Montaño, a magistrate court judge in Las Vegas, leading one of one of a handful of pilots statewide.
"These individuals, sometimes they just need a little help, a little support in all different ways," he said.
People are eligible for this competency diversion program, funded during an otherwise inglorious special legislative session last summer, if they are arrested for misdemeanors except DWIs, and have a history of mental illness or competency concerns. They are connected with health care and other services and if they complete the program they don't go to trial.
The numbers so far are small. The resources are scant. But Montaño, a former police chief, thinks it's the right track and that even prosecutors will support it.
"They ultimately want justice," he said. "And sometimes justice isn't the normal criminal track."
