Policing the Mentally Ill in Los Angeles

• In Event: Criminalization and Medicalization

Abstract

Our criminal justice system is responding to mental health crisis for which its de facto strategies are particularly ill-suited, revealed, in part, by the particular risk of violence the mentally ill face in their encounters with police who frequently have insufficient mental health training. As this becomes increasingly untenable, there has been a proliferation of specialized criminal justice policies seeking to improve the system’s management of the mentally ill. In Los Angeles, for example, LAPD guidelines require all officers responding to situations involving the mentally ill to call the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit (MEU) for guidance. These policies promise to alleviate this crisis, yet little is known about how they unfold in practice such that their meaning for reforming the system is unclear.

The MEU serves as an empirical window to analyze if and how specialized justice policies practically function to reform the system. I draw from observational and interview data collected from LAPD officers to examine the deployment of MEU resources and the constructions and understandings of mental illness during patrol shifts. I use this analysis as a lens to examine whether, in practice, strategies like specialized justice alleviate or merely reconfigure the crisis of the mentally ill.

Author

• Natalie A. Pifer, University of California, Irvine