Criminalization without Criminal Sanctions: Police and the Management of Mental Illness in the Emergency Department

• In Event: 30668 - New Boundaries and Jurisdictions

Abstract

This study elaborates and expands on the concept of the criminalization of mental illness by examining the roles and responsibilities of the police in the process of administering mental illness treatment in the emergency department. Analyzing incident interviews focused on 51 treatment cases and 32 in-depth interviews with staff members at a midwestern hospital, we find that police fulfill four roles: initiating the treatment of adults with potential mental illness, facilitating patient compliance with the treatment procedure, managing the treated individual’s agitated behavior, and assessing whether an individual is a harm to themselves or others due to mental illness. While police officers rarely enforced criminal sanctions while fulfilling these roles, we found evidence that they used coercive measures to initiate and facilitate the treatment process. Moreover, some patients displayed escalated reactions to police involvement. These findings suggest there is situational invocation of both police roles in medical treatment and police relationships to medicine, including a variety of non-criminal sanctions that may generate patients’ resistance to medical treatment. For each of the identified police tasks, we explore alternatives to police involvement.

Authors

• Jungmyung Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Ryan E. Tsuchida, University of Wisconsin-Madison