Police Response to Mental Health Calls for Service: Gatekeepers and Street Corner Psychiatrists

(Paperback)

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Police Response to Mental Health Calls for Service: Gatekeepers and Street Corner Psychiatrists focuses on closing the gap in literature surrounding police responses to mental health calls for service, with an emphasis on the effect of training and relationships with mental health agencies, in order to better understand the interaction between police officers and individuals with mental health diagnoses. Kayla G. Jachimowski and Jonathon A. Cooper pay close attention to Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) and its impact on how police officers would respond to these calls for service, also examining how the relationships between police, the community, and mental health service providers impact police response. Jachimowski and Cooper argue for the importance of police training about mental health disorders and explore the likelihood of diverting individuals with mental illness from the criminal justice system. Scholars of criminology, sociology, and psychology will find this book particularly useful.

Reviews

Divided into two parts, this book looks at how crisis intervention training (CIT) affects police officers responses to mental health calls for service. Part 1 provides a historical overview of mental health in the US, explaining how psychiatric deinstitutionalization and, concomitantly, the criminalization of people with mental illness became a policing problem.... Part 2 focuses on how, in their research, the authors found that CIT did not significantly affect how duly sworn law enforcement officers and police academy cadets hypothetically responded to mental health calls for service. Undeterred by their findings, the authors conclude that CIT can nonetheless have an idiosyncratic impact on individual officers, and they encourage future research in this direction. Recommended.

Author Bio

Kayla G. Jachimowski is assistant professor of criminology, law, and society at Saint Vincent College.

Jonathon A. Cooper is associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.