Policing Mental Health

SpringerBriefs in Criminology SpringerBriefs in Policing Series Editor M. R. Haberfeld City University of New York John Jay College of Criminal Justice New York, NY, USA SpringerBriefs in Policing presents concise summaries of cutting edge research in Police Science, across the fields of Criminology, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Forensic Science, and Corrections with implications for the study of police and police work. It publishes small but impactful volumes of between 50–125 pages, with a clearly defined focus. The series covers a broad range of Policing research: from experimental design and methods, to brief reports and regional case studies, to policy-related applications. The scope of the series spans the subfield of Policing, with an aim to be on the leading edge and continue to advance research. The series is international and crossdisciplinary, including a broad array of topics. The main goal of the series is to present innovations in Policing, in order to further the field as a research and evidence-based profession rather than a vocational occupation. It will showcase how Policing confronts problems and challenges that transcend cultures and borders and can be addressed from a global rather than local perspective. SpringerBriefs in Policing is aimed at a broad range of researchers and practitioners working in Criminology and Criminal Justice Research and in related academic fields such as Public Policy, Sociology, Psychology, Public Health, Economics, Policy Analysis, Terrorism and Political Science. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/11179 Laura Huey • Jennifer L. Schulenberg Jacek Koziarski Policing Mental Health Public safety and crime prevention in Canada Laura Huey Department of Sociology University of Western Ontario London, ON, Canada Jennifer L. Schulenberg Department of Sociology and Legal Studies University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada Jacek Koziarski Department of Sociology University of Western Ontario London, ON, Canada ISSN 2192-8533 SpringerBriefs in Criminology ISSN 2194-6213 SpringerBriefs in Policing ISSN 2192-8541 (electronic) ISSN 2194-6221 (electronic) ISBN 978-3-030-94312-7 ISBN 978-3-030-94313-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94313-4 (eBook) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface In the spring of 2020, the Royal Society of Canada conceived a unique program idea: in response to the Covid-19 virus and its health, social, economic, and other impacts, they would commission a multidisciplinary task force of experts to review evidence and provide information to the public on issues that potentially affect the well-being of Canadians. Taskforce members were asked to convene working groups to produce policy briefs on subjects ranging from economic recovery and vaccine acceptance to health impacts for Indigenous and other racialized communities. In the fall of 2020, I was asked to join the Taskforce to head up a working group on mental health and policing.1 Although I was not privy to the discussions that lead to the idea to create this group, undoubtedly media coverage of local protests in the early summer of 2000 in response to police-involved deaths of individuals with mental illness played a role. Since at least the 1960s, researchers have been documenting the role that police have come to play in the lives of many individuals with mental illness (PMI). Early ethnographies of frontline policing—often conducted in extremely marginalized communities—reveal a complex portrait of these interactions, with police officers frequently acting in what has been termed a form of ‘social work’ capacity. Under this umbrella of ‘social work’, we see officers acting as unofficial gatekeepers to mental health resources and/or arresting PMI without stable housing as a means of providing a safe place to stay. In the 1970s and 1980s, much of the research literature in this area became more critical, documenting increasing rates of PMI involvement with the criminal justice system. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this critical focus remained; however the work was gradually supplemented with a growing body of research aimed at evaluating programs, policies, and practices aimed at improving police response to the various challenges of responding to the needs of PMI. It was this latter body of evidence which the new working group was tasked 1 The working group is comprised of some of the best Canadian scholars in this area, including Professors Judith Andersen, Craig Bennell, Mary Ann Campbell, and Adam Vaughan. Our efforts were supplemented by those of two amazing early career researchers, Jacek Koziarski and Lorna Ferguson. v vi Preface with assessing in order to construct what we hoped would be a set of useful policy recommendations. No policy exercise is completely isolated from the politics of the day. At the time the Policing and Mental Health working group was being formed, a series of calls to ‘defund the police’ were being heard by groups across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and elsewhere. As we document in Chapter 1, in Canada the rationale behind these calls was ostensibly that money spent on policing services would be better allocated to ‘upstream’ preventative solutions or to ‘downstream’ diversion programs run by mental health and/or social workers. One significant implication of such approaches being that prevention and/or diversion would reduce the volume of police calls for service. As a researcher I never accept something at face value. In part, my skepticism in this instance was based on working experience of police RMS (record management system) and CAD (computer-aided dispatch) data. Poring over thousands of missing persons records had demonstrated to me that many of these ‘misspers’ calls involve a mental health component that was not captured in how the call codes. If we were to reduce the footprint of policing in relation to calls involving PMI, then we needed to get a better understanding of the data and its limitations. The result was a report, ‘The Limits of Our Knowledge: Tracking the Size and Scope of Police Involvement with Persons with Mental Illness’, which laid out just how little we know about this subject.2 The release of ‘The Limits’ report, although it shed much needed attention on an important policy issue, was not wholly satisfying. Unanswered questions remained. Among them: how can we better account for the volume and scope of interactions involving police and individuals with mental illness? This book is an attempt to answer that question by drawing on a unique data source: qualitative field notes from two different projects using systematic social observation of frontline policing conducted by my colleague and co-author, Jennifer Schulenberg. With unprecedented access to two different police services, Jenn spent the better part of almost 4 years in and out of patrol cars, observing officers responding to calls for service. In that time, she collected data on approximately 400 encounters between police and citizens. Our intention in the pages that follow is to sketch out the diverse—and often hidden—ways in which the lives of PMI intersect with policing. We also address the important underlying question of why mental illness has become ‘police property’—that is, why policing has too often become the de facto response to a health and social problem, the roots of which lie far outside their ability to prevent or control. As we argue throughout, it is answers to these two inter-related questions that will help inform future policy efforts. London, ON, Canada September 3, 2021 2 Laura Huey These problems with police data are hardly unique to Canada; discussions with policing researchers and crime analysts in the U.S. point to similar problems with relying on police data in many parts of this country. Contents 1 Calling the Cops: What Do We Know About the Policing of Individuals with Mental Illness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Concept of ‘Police Property’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Police Mobilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Disordered and the Disorderly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2 The Public Safety Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mental Health Apprehensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Missing Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wellness Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suicide. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Follow-up Calls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Hidden’ PMI Calls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 15 18 19 20 23 23 24 25 3 Crime Prevention and Response Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Victim-Complainants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PMI as Suspects or Potential Suspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 28 31 36 36 4 Police Attitudes Towards Their Roles in Dealing with Mental Health Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is Mental Health a Significant Policing Issue? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Should Mental Health Be ‘Police Property’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Impact of These Calls on Officers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 39 40 43 45 46 vii viii 5 Contents At the Crossroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Upstream Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Downstream Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Need for Continuous Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 50 53 54 56 56 Appendix: The Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 59 59 60 61 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63