POLICING AND MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES
Should police be replaced by mental health professionals on such calls? Not entirely. In Los Angeles the police made 6,000 mental health calls in 2019. Why so many? The budget for mental health was low. No hospital beds were available for psychotic patients. Psychiatrists were in short supply. This is true in states across the United States.
Budgets for mental health are now being increased yet some situations pose a high danger to civilian responders no matter how highly trained. Domestic violence calls are the most dangerous. In such cases, a police officer should accompany a civilian.
Yet on a call to a homeless schizophrenic or a threat of suicide could be handled more effectively by a licensed person with a Master’s degree in psychology.
Yet the demand for more thorough mental health care is huge. In 2019 a triage task force of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), received 20,758 mental health calls. Less than three percent of such calls involved the use of force by officers.
In Houston some 911 calls were diverted to a mental health hotline. Instead of a two-hour response by police, the caller was talking with someone within 12 minutes.
The statistics in this article are from the June 24th edition of the Los Angeles Times.
A recent resource to understand mental illness is “Mental Health: A New Understanding” published in a TIME special edition in June of 2020 available in the magazine section of stores.
