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