There's also the consequences of putting violent or unstable homeless people in with the general prison population. Which is what pushed them into mental facilities in the first place, who had people better trained to deal with mental illness.

Both of those solutions have downsides and as the NPR story mentioned a lot of those mental health institutions were shut down in the 1980s.

Having beat cops and other locals or street people deal with the problem is also non ideal.

So its going to be lessers of evils and attempting to minimize the evil as much as possible.