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Essay / Law Enforcement and Mental Health Services: A Vital Partnership policy makers and academic researchers is the disproportionate rate and incarceration of people with mental illness (PwMI). Although mental health-related police encounters vary, PwMIs make up at least 16 percent of the jail and prison population in the United States. Law enforcement officials are the first responders to any situation, including situations related to mental illness. The police are supposed to protect the public by removing dangerous people from the community, but they are also supposed to protect vulnerable citizens. When responding to mental crisis calls, the police generally have three options: they can make a formal arrest, they can detain the person and transport them to a mental health facility, or they can resolve the situation informal. This places police officers in a situation where they are seen as “street psychiatrists,” which can place officers in situations for which they are not fully trained. In Benton County, Oregon officers began coming into contact with more suspects showing signs of mental illness. Law enforcement contacted researchers at Oregon State University, who in turn created a collaboration between OSU, the Corvallis Police Department and the Benton County Sheriff's Office . This research team was then tasked with generating new policy recommendations based on the data shared by Benton County law enforcement. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayMental Illness and PolicingResearch based on the subset of justice-involved PwMI focuses on offenders who come into repetitive and frequent contact with the police because of their mental illness. This subset of offenders is also known as “frequent travelers.” They are known as frequent travelers because they often cycle between prison, halfway houses, hospital emergency rooms and back to the streets. A study in Honolulu was conducted on police contacts with PwMIs: 63.5% of police contacts with PwMIs were individuals known by sight to the police, showing the extent to which some of these contacts are repetitive. These types of contacts with police and people with mental illness pose problems for police officers. Officers are seen spending more time on scene with these types of individuals, and many of them require detention and mental health evaluations. Another example of repetitive police contact is a study done with the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD identified 67 PwMIs involved in a total of 536 calls for service over an eight-month period in 2004. Although the population of frequent travelers is relatively small, they generate high frequencies of contact with law enforcement . The high frequency of contacts with the police generates significant costs in terms of police working hours. These many contacts with agents at such a high cost require policy recommendations on this problem. Method and data from the Benton County-OSU collaboration. Benton County, Oregon, contacted the researchersfrom Oregon State University and discussed a collaborative investigation into the amount of contact between suspects with symptoms of mental illness and local law enforcement. The collaboration between the two began in September 2012. Benton County police officers can resolve issues with PwMI in one of three ways: resolve the issue informally, arrest the person if they have committed a crime, or place in custody by a peace officer. Guard (POC). Peace officer custody is a type of arrest that occurs because a person is considered a danger to themselves or others due to mental illness. Once officers complete a POC, they are asked to take the person to the nearest hospital or mental health facility approved by the Oregon Health Authority. Police officers should not be the ones dealing with the mentally ill, so promoting this collaboration would help develop solutions to help manage this situation. Benton County and Corvallis have multiple characteristics that contribute to the expected population of people with mental illness. In Corvallis, there is a regional medical center where patients suffering from mental illnesses are treated. Persons detained in the custody of a peace officer are brought to this location. Researchers began pulling official police data and interviews with people working in local law enforcement and the mental health field. After collecting all the data, the researchers were able to produce a final report that "recommends the creation of a mental health court, better sharing of health information, an explicit framework for future collaboration between health agencies criminal justice and health concerns and a specialized mental health response. The data collected is based on two distinct sets: arrests and informally resolved incidents. Data runs from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2012. Arrest data represents all arrests made by the Benton County Sheriff's Office and the Corvallis Police Department. Arrest data collected shows 13,650 unique suspects with 22,875 arrests and 33,064 charges; among all these arrests, 914 POC charges were applied to 6,971 people. In this study, we find that there is very little time between mental health-related contacts with the police. For example: Nearly half of all repeat POC arrests (an indicator of police-PwMI contact) occurred within 60 days of the initial POC arrest and more than a quarter of repeat POC arrests took place within just 14 days of POC's initial arrest. The results further showed that the 93 individuals with multiple POCs in a year (365-day bandwidth) represented 285 POCs. By reducing the bandwidth used to define frequent travelers, the 38 individuals with multiple POCs over a two-week period (14-day bandwidth) accounted for 140 POC arrests. Therefore, these alarming numbers give us an idea of how this small subset of justice-involved PwMIs are having an undue impact on the justice system.My PerspectiveIn my opinion, I personally think this collaboration was an excellent one. idea. This was one of the first steps in the right direction for the criminal justice system. In the article, nothing was mentioned about the cost or financial matters needed for the collaboration, so it was essentially free for both the university and the forcesof order involved. The development of new policies for the situations mentioned throughout this document has exposed one of the many major flaws in the current justice system. I've noticed that universities across the country are doing so much research and publishing all these journals that aren't read, where they could change so many things in our entire system. Research on our criminal justice system tends to have a recurring theme related to issues related to mentally ill officers and offenders. If this collaboration were better known throughout our country, it could provide opportunities for PwMIs. Of course, nothing in this world is free, so a concern would be what the cost would be of providing systems such as POC. But I personally believe that if it avoids keeping repeat offenders out of jail and prisons with mental illnesses, it would offset the current cost of keeping them in those jails or prisons. It is important to understand that if this type of collaboration were established across the country, it could trigger a wave of transformation of the justice system. With change, many questions arise, and these questions will lead to problems and defects within a new system. After reading and reviewing this journal, I began to question many things that concern me about our criminal justice system. Some of my questions are about how the justice system works and if it changed, would it work more smoothly if it followed collaboration. In particular, one of my questions was about people with mental illnesses and what happens if they are considered “incurable”? Would they be sent to prison or would they stay in a mental institution? The idea of constantly sending mentally ill offenders to prison to repeat the cycle over and over again doesn't seem right to me. Again, there is no answer to this question, some may consider this person a lost cause and a waste of money at this point. But personally, I think at this point, leaving them in a mental prison would be the best opportunity for them. Aside from this Journal article, earlier this semester I watched a video about a man who suffers from two mental illnesses, one of them being post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This gentleman served in the United States Army for many years and, to his friends and family, was a great guy. While on one of his many tours, he experienced several situations that began to develop his PTSD. One day he called his loved ones and he was showing signs of paranoia and his PTSD was getting worse. One day while at home he had one of his manic episodes, grabbed all his guns and ran away. This gentleman even went to an Alliance store and asked someone if they wanted to die today. He led police on a chase and a two-hour standoff. One of the officers, a woman, was talking to him as he paced with his gun. This officer looked at all of this man's files and saw his war history and it was clear to her that he suffered from mental illness. Keeping the situation calm, they eventually arrested the individual and he was placed in a psychiatric hospital. He is now in good health, lives alone and even has a dog. This situation I just explained is a great example of how officers can come into contact with PwMIs. One thing that struck me in the newspaper article was when Burkhardt talked about the police's failure to respond appropriately to people in.
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