We applaud the united efforts the city and county of Albany, working with court and state leaders as well as charitable institutions, are making to address the triple scourges of mental illness, drug addiction, and homelessness.

The leaders literally stood as one at a press conference last week to tout the various programs — a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms — that would both help those in need while improving the quality of life for everyone in Albany.

We’ve devoted two pages of this edition to explain those programs; we’ve covered the roots of some of them for decades. And, as we wrote on this page last week, they represent a sea change in dealing with social problems.

Law enforcement alone — “lock ’em up,” as our county sheriff once said — isn’t enough.

At last week’s press conference, he proudly announced, “We have the only homeless shelter in the country run at the county jail.”

Sheriff Craig Apple also described a call that could have gone bad if it had been handled by police officers rather than medics — a new approach started as a pilot program in the Hilltowns and now being expanded.

A man was “terrorizing his neighborhood” for weeks on end, eventually “barricading himself in his house, threatening to do violence to police who came,” said Apple. “He basically wanted suicide by cop.”

The team that answered the call saw that the man got the treatment he needed. “He had onset dementia,” Apple said, “and he needed medication.” The man is now “living in the community,” he said, “and happy as can be.”

“They’re us …,” Apple said. “These are our neighbors, our families, our friends, our coworkers, our loved ones. And they deserve that care,” he said, commending the “shift in law enforcement.”

We covered a Hilltown death in 2016 that the Albany County medical examiner had ruled “suicide by police.” The 51-year-old Berne man was shot to death by two state troopers after he came at them, on a deserted country road, with a knife in each hand.

We wrote an editorial on this page in 2016, “Can police be spared the pain of becoming a suicide weapon?” We wrote then of research by Harvard Medical School colleagues Deirdre Anglin and H. Range Hutson, published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, that found that one in 10 shootings by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies were suicides by cop, and that 98 percent were provoked by men — many with drug or alcohol dependencies.

If police are called to a deserted country road with no one in sight but a knife-wielding man, we asked in that 2016 editorial, why not stay in the car and radio for help, or simply drive away, perhaps returning with a mental-health expert who could diffuse the situation?

“Mind you,” we wrote in 2016, “we’re not saying the troopers on the scene that night were equipped to do this; they were following their training. But what if the training were changed?”

And now that training has changed, giving us hope for the future. 

Along with that, more services are being put in place to prevent getting to such a point in the first place. After the Berne man died, we knocked on neighbors’ doors and found few who knew him. 

“We keep to ourselves up here,” one neighbor told us.

The last post on the dead man’s Facebook page was: “Anyone feel alone even with others are around?”

We finally found a person, a retired Long Island engineer-turned-Hilltown farmer, who knew the dead man. The engineer had bought the man’s ancestral farm and had hired him for odd jobs. We learned the dead man had been an alcoholic with physical and learning disabilities who was largely deserted by his family. We had seen the dead man’s crude camp in the woods with big jars of homemade hooch.

As we listened last week to the hope-filled descriptions of new or expanded programs being offered by the city and county, we wondered, if such programs had been started earlier, might the Berne man be alive today, at age 58?

What struck us then were words spoken by Wanda Willingham, who has represented Albany’s Arbor Hill, District 3, since 1999 and is the county legislature’s deputy chair.

She told those who had gathered for the press conference of the suffering and isolation that had been made worse by the pandemic.

“People were left at home, people were being found dead in their homes,” said Willingham. “People were honestly and truly suffering …. And they don’t always look like me. They might look like you.”

So, yes, isolation can hurt city dwellers as much as rural residents.

We were reminded of a conversation we had with Willingham during the depth of the pandemic, in the fall of 2020. At the time, she was chairing a task force hearing testimony to understand the impact of the pandemic on local businesses.

She told us then that the pandemic had brought into stark relief the inequity in communities across the county.

In her community, she said, “A lot of people are found dead at home.” Even before the pandemic, they were unable to get the health care they needed. People already suffering from illnesses like diabetes or asthma are then more prone to succumb to COVID-19.

“It’s a domino effect because of the way Black people or people of color were living,” she said. The pandemic, Willingham said, should “show people we can’t continue to live like this … Albany County will not survive unless we look at the poorest first.”

Willingham described food drives run by churches in her community that had cars lined up around the block and said she had never seen anything like it in her lifetime.

“It’s rougher than you think,” she said.

Asked if she thought the stresses from lack of jobs and health care, coupled with the ravages of the pandemic, were related to the spike in gun violence in Albany, Willingham hesitated a long time.

Finally, she told us, “The condition people find themselves in, some of it might be hopelessness.” She also said, “A lot of mental-health issues are coming to the forefront now.”

A key to turning back that hopelessness, to economic recovery, is as Willingham repeated three times to us: Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.

Hopelessness does not reside just in inner cities or rural areas — it’s in suburbia too.

Because recent Census data shows that food insecurity is rising across our nation — the number of Americans who did not have enough to eat over a seven-day period rose from over 18 million in August 2021 to over 26 million in August 2023, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey; a stunning rise of 45 percent in two years — we checked in this week with John “Mac” McDonnell.

He became director of the Guilderland Food Pantry just before the pandemic hit in March 2021. One in nine people in suburban Guilderland remain food insecure, McDonnell told us this week.

The number of clients using the Guilderland Food Pantry continues to grow. He estimates about 30 percent are seniors while the largest group is families with kids — some being raised by single parents, others by two parents.

“We are past the point of blaming it on the pandemic,” said McDonnell. “Now it’s just politics.”

Congress did not renew the pandemic-era expansion of the child tax credit last year. Nor did Congress continue the federal pandemic-era program that gave free school lunches to all public school students.

McDonnell started a backpack program where food is given to students at Guilderland’s five elementary schools and at its middle school in backpacks to take home over the weekends. He said 18 percent of the students in Guilderland schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Last year, 80 public-school students participated in his backpack program. The numbers haven’t been finalized yet for this school year as social workers make the recommendations but, McDonnell said, one school he’s heard from had 16 students participate last year and has 22 participants signed up for this school year.

In March, benefits for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, once called food stamps but now known as SNAP, that had been increased for the pandemic ended as inflation was at a 40-year high.

“You can’t fix food insecurity by cutting SNAP and free lunches in schools,” said McDonnell. “These people were struggling before COVID.”

Another less publicized change that has had an effect on pantry patrons, he said, is the lifting of the eviction moratorium and allowing rent increases.

“That hurt a lot of my seniors,” said McDonnell. “They were hit hard with landlords raising rent as much as $200 a month.”

To stay in their homes, those people now don’t have enough to pay for food.

While McDonnell stressed that Guilderland is not dealing with the sudden massive influx of migrants that some neighboring communities are, he said a half-dozen to a dozen immigrant families are among the new clients using the pantry’s services this year.

“They need jobs,” he said.

So Wanda Willingham’s call for “jobs, jobs, jobs” is echoed in Guilderland as well.

“Some people are not able to go back to work or they’re losing their jobs or their jobs don’t pay enough,” said McDonnell of why Guilderland residents are food insecure. Others, who can’t find or afford child care, are staying home with their children, decreasing their family resources.

Food pantries, like the one McDonnell runs with all his heart, backed by mostly elderly volunteers — now 75 strong — are a needed stopgap. But they aren’t a long-term solution.

We need ongoing measures like the tax credit that briefly lifted children out of poverty or gave them free school lunches to build stronger and more productive future generations.

We’re pleased, too, that the Biden administration this past week, pushed by Governor Kathy Hochul and others, has decided to expand Temporary Protected Status to 472,000 more Venezuelans in the United States. These asylum seekers have fled a humanitarian crisis in their homeland and now will be able to apply for work here.

This means they can legally earn money and so will no longer be a financial burden to either the city or state of New York. Rather, they will become contributing members of our communities.

A job is a ticket to society.

And people with jobs, part of a long line of immigrants enriching our nation over centuries, rather than relying on a social safety net, help to make it stronger — they contribute, which in turn protects others who need it.