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The Evolving Police Response to Individuals with Behavioral Health Challenges

Police are responsible for addressing a myriad of community problems, but none may be more challenging than responding to calls for service involving people with behavioral health challenges (e.g., mental illnesses and/or substance abuse disorders). Police are tasked with being frontline responders to a public health crisis (Steadman et al., 2000; Thompson, 2010) to which they are often ill-equipped to adequately respond. Unfortunately, these are hardly new concerns for the police. Indeed, in 1967, Egon Bittner described the expansive role of the police and the associated difficulties they experienced in responding to people living on skid row. Bittner (1967) noted that patrol officers “frequently help people to obtain meals, lodging, employment” and “direct them to welfare and health services” (p. 709) in an effort to solve these residents’ problems. Thus, interactions with vulnerable populations have long extended the responsibilities of the police far beyond traditional crime fighting, due to the high likelihood that they will interact with people with behavioral health challenges. These interactions require an immense amount of time (Bittner, 1967), and can frequently result in unsatisfactory conclusions for both the police and the community. Patrol officers recognize that helping these vulnerable people on their beats is preventative, as it can stave off problems at a later date for both the patrol officer and the community as a whole. Police frequently had and continue to have limited options for providing the needed support and developing creative solutions across much of the United States. Yet, asevidenced in this special issue, police responses to people with behavioral health challenges have evolved. Beginning with the development of the Crisis Intervention Team approach in Memphis, Tennessee, in the late 1980s, there has been a movement to provide police with these necessary resources to adequately respond to residents with behavioral challenges. Not surprisingly, because these are police-based interventions, they have historically been evaluated based solely on quantifiable police outcomes, such as reductions in the use of force, arrest, and police time spent in the emergency room. This approach is problematic for a number of reasons. First, there are times when the use of force or arrest is a necessary and appropriate outcome. Coercive control is a crucial component to the police role (Klockars, 1985). Accordingly, there will likely never be a time when the police use of these coercive tactics will (or should) be altogether eliminated. Rather, it may make sense to track these outcomes to be sure that police are using force and making arrests of people with behavioral health challenges only when necessary. The second problem is that the focus on these easily quantifiable outcomes means that evaluations do not take into account that the police work as part of a larger system in the community. If a program offers a cost savings or benefits to police, but increases costs to