Acute Mental Health Issues, Police Contact, and Consequences for Treatment and Criminal Legal Pathways

• In Event: Mental Health Consequences of Criminal Legal System Contact Over the Life Course

Abstract

Police are increasingly handling situations with people suffering from acute mental health issues. But despite police not being medically trained, we know next to nothing about the consequences of this trend. With this paper, we ask a simple but consequential question: Which treatment patterns and pathways through the criminal legal system arise from people encountering police while in acute need of mental health assistance? To answer this question, we rely on extraordinarily detailed administrative data from Denmark which hold information on 3.2 million encounters between police and citizens of Denmark during 2008-2022, and contain an indicator of mental health issues. Importantly, these data also contain encounters that did not lead to formal charges, arrest, and the like. Merging these data with several other variables from the Danish population registries allows us to observe how treatment and criminal legal pathways develop both before and after police contact, and do so by the mental health indicator.

Authors

• Lars H. Andersen, ROCKWOOL Foundation

• Camilla Hvidtfeldt, ROCKWOOL Foundation