A minor story that I found at the Philadelphia Inquirer's web site provides yet another illustration of an increasingly hopeless problem. Police were forced to shoot a "homeless" man whose homelessness was a symptom of his chronic mental illness.

From a call box in the below-ground concourse of the Municipal Services Building, he kept calling - and hanging up.

Calling - and hanging up.

After the 40th time, a police officer was dispatched at 8:25 to see what was going on.

What started as a response to disorderly conduct ended with two police officers fatally shooting the homeless man - the 12th person killed by city police this year.

Police were withholding the identity of the 59-year-old man pending notification of his family, said Sgt. Ray Evers, a police spokesman.

Evers said the man had no identification on him and had to be identified using fingerprints.

Homicide and Internal Affairs units are investigating the shooting. Both officers, whose names were not released, have been on the force for more than 20 years.

After arriving on the scene, a foot-patrol officer was joined by a bike officer. Evers said that as the foot-patrol officer approached the man, he was again using the emergency call box.

"He confronted him, saying, 'What are you doing? You can't do that,' " Evers said.

A security guard inside the municipal building, who did not give her name, said she saw the officers chase the man through a tunnel leading to the concourse.

Once he was outside and near a bench where he often slept, the man pulled out a utility knife.

Evers said the knife was the type used to cut drywall or carpet. "The officer tells him over 50 times to drop the knife," Evers said.

Police said he lunged at the officers. They fired, hitting the man in the torso.

The victim was pronounced dead at Hahnemann University Hospital at 9:02 a.m.

Hallucinating in public is perfectly OK, and yelling at total strangers is, well, free speech or something. Try calling the cops if a crazed "homeless" man with fire in his eyes calls you Satan and threatens you. Even if you're not laughed at, nothing will be done. Because nothing can be done. They might ask him to move, but only normal people (college drunks and the like, who show up in court and actually pay their fines) are going to be arrested and booked on disorderly conduct charges. Not that I blame the cops. Putting myself in their position, I'd probably do the same thing. As I explained in another post about "homeless" "crime," I saw how the system worked firsthand:

When I served as a Berkeley Police Review Commissioner, I used to hear laments from officers who just didn't know what to do with crazy people when they were the subjects of complaints. Some -- not all -- were called "homeless," and this was reflected on police cititions with the word "NOMAD" appearing as the "address." The cops knew they'd never show up for court, and they didn't want them to. They didn't want crazy filthy homeless people urinating in their nice clean police cars either.

Do I blame them? Hardly.

One time, a homeless man broke into my car, tore open a bag of dog food I'd left inside, ate some dog food, washed it down with engine coolant I had in the back seat, then passed out. I know this because the next morning when I saw a man sitting in my car and angrily told him to get out, he promptly puked all over himself and the front seat -- and after he staggered away I saw the open coolant container and dog food bag along with the mess he'd made. I say this not to engage in mindless homeless-bashing, but to illustrate a simple fact of life: no one wants to deal with mentally ill, dysfunctional people. I'm not sure the problem is that they slip through the cracks so much as it is society's game to ignore them in the hope they'll just go away. Only when they finally do something really serious do they get attention. Until then, there really is no system.

Needless to say, the jailers don't want members of the hallucinatory class in jails, and the wardens don't want them in prisons. And obviously, the nice people who run mental hospitals don't want them there.

What should be done about the hallucinatory class? Go on ignoring them by calling them "homeless"? Most citizens -- you know, the decent normal people using the train stations to go to and from work and stuff like that -- pretend they're not there. They hope that if they just ignore them, they won't become targets of their hallucinations.

But what about not seeing something that is clearly there? Isn't that almost hallucinatory behavior? I said almost because the good citizens actually can see these people; they just deliberately avoid seeing them. I don't blame them one bit, as I do the same thing myself. Avert my eyes. I ignore them in the hope that they'll just go away. Not seeing them is a good, common sense way to get around when you have to wait in train and subway stations in the big city.

I realize that they don't belong anywhere -- and that they are not welcome in any of society's nice clean institutions. So they must wander the streets instead while ordinary people are forced to hallucinate them out of existence.

Hallucinating them out of existence may be fine for ordinary people, but is it good social policy?