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Cops and the Mentally Ill
Pressured by media coverage about mentally ill people committing serious crimes, New York city and state officials recently acknowledged major failings in mental-health care and oversight and in the exchange of information between mental-health providers and law enforcement. A task force recommended training New York Police Department dispatchers, who handle roughly 90,000 calls annually regarding the emotionally disturbed, to ask better questions so that the officers responding have more information.
The task force also called for the creation of a location database with call histories involving the mentally ill so that specially trained emergency-service officers can be dispatched more expeditiously. Another proposal: to establish Mental Health Care Monitoring Teams in New York City, which would help coordinate and track the care of high-need clients. According to the New York Daily News, $13 million will be spent to create a sophisticated tracking system that will improve the continuity of mental-health care, identify when individuals requiring care cease treatment and speed up interventions for high-risk people when, for example, they stop taking anti-psychotic medications.
And New York plans to expand its use of mental-health courts and to share information from the tracking system with criminal-justice agencies to improve treatment of mentally ill individuals who are arrested. Civil-liberties groups are watching warily to make sure that the information collected by the database does not end up being used against mentally ill defendants.
The New York report cited the "struggle" that facilities are faced with in treating tens of thousands of mentally ill persons under correctional supervision. Thomas Faust, the former executive director of the National Sheriffs' Association, has said that the large growth in many correctional facilities is due to a lack of mental-health resources. The three largest de facto mental-health facilities in the country, he wrote in 2003, are actually jails: "Riker's Island (in New York City), Los Angeles County and Cook County [in Chicago]." An estimated one in five prisoners in these facilities receive or require daily mental-health attention—treatment they would likely be denied in the outside world.
According to a 2000 report by the federal government's National Institute of Justice, once a mentally ill person is arrested for disorderliness, that person is labeled a "criminal" and will likely continue to be arrested when acting out in the future, rather than receive treatment.
In a presidential-election year featuring a Republican candidate who prides himself on straight talk and a Democrat who suggests the nation adopt a new can-do ethos, perhaps there is a glimmer of promise that the dialogue on criminal justice this fall can extend past the archetypical embrace of blame and "toughness" and examine the 50-state crisis in mental-health care. On the streets, there is hard work to be done.
O’Donnell is a professor of police studies and law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
© 2008
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Member Comments
Posted By: SharedThought @ 08/29/2008 1:05:44 PM
Comment: It's ironic that mentally ill persons are so often urged of the importance of taking their medications, keeping appointments with professional counsellors, etc. ...So, when government, at various levels, cuts back on sources of these things for the mentally ill, a mixed message is unintentionally conveyed, i.e., "Just HOW important can co-operating with these things REALLY be, if the sources where I used to get the have been eliminated, have been treated by society as DISPENSIBLE?"
Posted By: decoyscounsel @ 08/21/2008 2:26:59 PM
Comment: It matters for whom you vote! We can thank Ronald Reagan who saw a savings in closing down mental hospitals to send patients to community -based care. Problem was, no funds followed. Throughout the country mental health workers sent the patients for whom they could provide no service onto the next venue. Thus the term:bus therapy. The situation has gotten only worse. Families have no support services, case managers have no support, and patients have no care. But we have saved so much money in tax cuts. The American public has become so detached from its responsibility, so addicted to shallow political viewpoints, and so seduced by its own self-absorption that we may have deserved what we have now received. We will certainly be remembered for what we have not had the will to do.
Posted By: flawedexistence @ 08/06/2008 10:05:04 PM
Comment: You have my deepest sympathy. What you live every day is beyond my imagining.
I am the parent of a mentally ill 19 year old who is 6'2"/175, and not terribly stable. He will not acknowledge having a mental illness. More than once I have called 911 after being threatened by my son, who has firearms and knows how to use them. I fear for the police who answer my call as much as I do myself. I am not the only parent I know living in fear of what their mentally ill adult child is going to do next. There is no help for us. My sister has very seriously suggested I move and leave no forwarding address. I deeply believe in our fundamental human right to be free from forced medical care, but my son CANNOT make a reasoned decision on his own behalf regarding medication and treatment. Consequently, he cannot hold a job, attend school, keep friends...such a terrible waste of an extremely intelligent and wonderful young man. If I could compel him to accept treatment, who knows what he could accomplish in his life?