Mental Health Policing: An Examination of Current Practices

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3: Criminal Justice System Actors (1)

Abstract

People undergoing a mental health crisis are increasingly coming into contact with police officers as a part of daily police patrols or as they respond to calls for assistance with detrimental effect. In response, important improvements are underway to change policing practices and connect those in crisis with needed mental health services. One important innovation is the adoption of various types of mental health policing (teams within police departments, external contracts with mental health organizations, or collaborative with police officers and mental professionals). Specialized co-responder models such as Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) garner the most attention. CIT’s are increasing being adopted across the U.S. but the prevalence of other models is less well-known. This study relies on the LEMAS 2020 data on police agencies supplemented with additional city-level contextual data. The analysis plan of the paper is threefold. First, document the proliferation of different types of mental health policing models across the U.S. based on the sample of police agencies in the 2020 LEMAS dataset. Second, describe the national spatial variation of mental health policing models. Third, identify key factors (police factors and city characteristics) that are associated with each model type (nothing, internal, collaborative, external) using both logistic and multinomial regression estimation methods. The enriched dataset and associated analysis will fill an important void in the research and policy literature on the role that different models of mental health policing, including CIT’s, are playing in current policing practices.

Author

• Karen A. Snedker, Chapman University